Robinson, as much a master of the press as of neighborhood open houses, fought obliquely: articles appeared in syndication about the astonishing results achieved by Dr. Lewis Coleman Hall, who rehabilitated soldiers. “We set up projectors to show films on the ceilings as many of our boys are too wounded to sit up. Nothing has got through to them for weeks but when I show a Chaplin movie to a poor fellow it may arrest his mind for a second. I may say, ‘Do you know Charlie?’ and then begins the first ray of hope that the boy’s mind can be saved.”

But in October 1917, standees began to vanish. These were life-sized cutouts of the Little Fellow, distributed to theaters to promote Easy Street and The Count. They featured Chaplin in costume, tipping his hat to patrons, a befuddled but solicitous expression on his face, as if he had been hired for an important job whose duties he couldn’t hope to equal. They were as familiar as cigar-store Indians, propped up at cinema entrances right next to the coming-attractions posters. And one by one, they all disappeared. By the time his last film from Mutual Studios, The Adventurer, was released in the winter of 1917, hardly a theater in America or Great Britain had one left.

On January 2, 1918, the 14th Battalion, Highland Light Infantry, were amassed in the trenches outside the piles of bricks and smoking tree stumps that were once the village of Sapigny, France. On the other side of No Man’s Land, with its heaped-up corpses and spools of cheveux d’ange razor wire, was an unknown number of German soldiers, huddling in a trench system whose geographic location had remained largely unchanged in the last three years. But there were rumors of an oncoming attack; balloon observers had seen reinforcements on the Allied side, and so tensions rode high.

At dawn, the first figure appeared atop the Highlanders’ trench, and it was immediately shredded by German rifle fire. Farther down the line, another figure appeared, and another, and each of them was cut down in turn before the command to cease fire was given. The Hauptmann in charge quietly observed, among the rising morning fog, a line of five dozen identical men atop the trenches, all of them with rectangular mustaches, all clutching canes and tipping derbies.

Chaplin’s films had never been released in Germany—the Kaiser’s men hadn’t a clue who this was or what he represented. The order was given, and five straight minutes of machine-gun fire turned the standees into a rain of powder and paper flakes, and all that was left was a few dozen two-dimensional pairs of size-sixteen feet.

The Scots began to roar with laughter. No one could ever explain what exactly had been so funny.

There was a popular ditty the Allied men sang all over France, to that tune of “Redwing,” once sung on a racetrack, long ago, by an ersatz soldier, to royalty: