Off to the Wars

To Brooks Atkinson, amateur ornithologist, part-time farmer and dean of Manhattan's drama critics, it was the big show or nothing. Ever since Pearl Harbor he had been restless and unhappy. He got to the point where he could hardly write of Broadway's make-believe while there was real drama in the theaters of war. When he tried to enlist in the Navy his employers at the New York Times at last saw the light. All right, they said, if you must go somewhere, you might as well go for us.

So last week Justin Brooks Atkinson packed his pipes and tobacco, a few travel necessities and a copy of Hamlet ("for relaxation") total 56 lb.--and hopped off for Chungking. There he will be resident correspondent for the Times.

Startled were Broadway and millions of theatergoers, to whom Brooks Atkinson's drama reviews have for 16 years been gospel. It was difficult for them to imagine Brooks Atkinson as a war correspondent at all. He wrote his quiet, austere prose in a leisurely fashion, always followed a set routine which he once described: "First, put the program on the desk so that the title of the play and the names of the actors can be accurately copied. Then lay out a box of matches, light a pipe, take a pad of yellow paper and a dozen sharply pointed pencils from a drawer. . . . What will the first line be? That is the crucial factor in the whole night's work. It is the entrance into the story. . . . Praise God from whom first sentences flow!"

It may well be that foreign affairs will be covered for the Times more soberly and benignly than ever before.

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