contending that its ministers were following the war god Mars in thename of the Prince of Peace. InCommon SenseShaw attacked almost everyconceivable assumption that would justify a vindictive war, allowing onlythe pragmatic arguments for continuing the fight, now that it had begun.As his biographer, Michael Holroyd (1991), has written, “Shaw’s positioninCommon Sense about the Warwas that of the Irishman who, when askedfor directions, replies that he wouldn’t start from here” (p. 351).As previously mentioned, the public reactions to Shaw’s position onthe war were overwhelmingly negative. H. G. Wells’ (1914) attack wasespecially notable. Wells described Shaw as:One of those perpetual children who live in a dream world of make-believe . . . It is almost as if there was no pain in all the world. It is underthe inspiration of such delightful dreams that Mr. Shaw now flings him-self upon his typewriter and rattles out his broadsides. And nothingwill stop him. All through the war we shall have this Shavian accompa-niment going on, like an idiot child screaming in a hospital, distorting,discrediting, confusing. . . . He is at present . . . an almost unendurablenuisance (p. 6).Wells was not alone in publicly attacking Shaw’s positions on the war,and there were other consequences. The Dramatists’ Club informed Shawthat, due to his views on the war, he would not be invited to further meet-ings. Previously friendly newspapers refused to print Shaw’s work (Ervine,1956; Weintraub, 1971; Holroyd, 1991). Even Shaw’s old friends and Fabianallies, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, distanced themselves from his positionson the war. By 1916—only three years after the founding of the paper—Shaw felt that his policy disagreements with his old friends, the Webbs,left him no choice but to resign from theNew StatesmanBoard of Directors.In 1918, he wrote to fellow socialist Augustin Hamon: I have no ef-fective influence with the Labor Party. The Fabian Society is repre-sented on it by Sidney Webb...Icould not impose my views on theLabor Party, nor even place them effectively before it (March 9, 1918,in Laurence, 1985, pp. 536–537).In spite of the negative reactions, Shaw stuck to his conceptual guns.During the war, he continued to write essays, expanding on the wide rangeof themes he had addressed inCommon Sense. Those works included essaysabout British patriotism, compulsory conscription, military censorship andconscientious objectors, as well as reports from the front. He also wrote fourone-act plays on war themes:O’Flaherty,V.C.(1919f),The Inca of Perusalem(1919e),Augustus Does His Bit(1919b) andAnnajanska, the Bolshevik Empress(1919a)