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236 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
hotel lobby at Marseilles; and it looked like the last gasp. In this respect as in others Britain tried to maintain “business as usual,” but before 1918 she gave up the struggle. Italy stayed with the game a little longer, and even in the heart of war made out of a gigantic actor who tossed oxen over the shoulder and carried a sixinch gun up the mountains with the Alpini, something of a star. But before the Armistice, she, too, was virtually out of the game. And this low curve of the European business coincided exactly with our greatest period of expansion.
Yet Europeans, even more than Americans, were gone mad for amusement — anything to make them laugh, make them forget, carry them out of themselves. The war blighted the spoken theatre, an unessential industry. The male actors and craftsmen were mostly of military age; they had rushed, or had been drafted, into the ranks. By 1917 the few anaemic reviews still showing in London got along with all-girl choruses and with crippled demobilized leading men. Into this vacuum poured the flood of American films. Mary Bickford’s sunny curls, Mae Marsh’s girlish innocence, and Theda Bara’s sinister allure sweetened the war for millions of young and impressionable soldiers. Charlie Chaplin threw all Europe into hysterical war-laughter. I saw companycomedians imitating him in the trenches. As with America, so with Europe; the moving picture came out of the back streets. “Cinema houses” thrust into the