Shaw's "The Emperor and the Little Girl" and the Saint Joan Epilogue

Toward the close of the bleak war year of 1915 in the Great War, a charity to aid Belgian refugee children, the Vestiare Marie Josef, solicited contributions for a gift book from authors and artists with recognizable names to attract subscribers. It was titled King Albert's Book. In Shaw's contribution, a fantasy, "The Emperor and the Little Girl," the Kaiser encounters a little Belgian girl at night on a field in Flanders ravaged by shellfire. This article gives details and connects the 1916 tale, an intriguing and ironical anti-war story, to 1923, when Shaw would write Saint Joan, perhaps not recalling as he penned its epilogue that he had foreshadowed some of its crucial elements in a children's fantasy for a wartime Belgian charity.