Teacher.  Girls, you may be past your youth yourselves one day.

First Schoolgirl. (Airily.) But we’re well preserved so far, Miss Hadley.

Fourth Schoolgirl. (Has wandered away a few yards.  She bends and picks a flower from the ditch.  She speaks to herself.) The flag floated here.  There were shells bursting and guns thundering and groans and blood—­here.  American boys were dying where I stand safe.  That’s what they did.  They made me safe.  They kept America free.  They made the “world safe for freedom,” (She bends and speaks into the ditch.) Boy, you who lay just there in suffering and gave your good life away that long-ago summer day—­thank you.  You died for us.  America remembers.  Because of you there will be no more wars, and girls such as we are may wander across battle-fields, and nations are happy and well governed, and kings and masters are gone.  You did that, you boys.  You lost fifty years of life, but you gained our love forever.  Your deaths were not in rain.  Good-by, dear, dead boys.

Teacher. (Calls).  Child, come!  We must catch the train.

FOURTH ACT

The scene is the same trench in the year 2018.  It is three o’clock of the afternoon, of the same summer day.  A newly married couple have come to see the trench.  He is journeying as to a shrine; she has allowed impersonal interests, such as history, to lapse under the influence of love and a trousseau.  She is, however, amenable to patriotism, and, her husband applying the match, she takes fire—­she also, from the story of the trench.

He.  This must be the place.

She.  It is nothing but a ditch filled with flowers.

He.  The old trench. (Takes off his hat.)

She.  Was it—­it was—­in the Great War?

He.  My dear!

She.  You’re horrified.  But I really—­don’t know.

He.  Don’t know?  You must.

She.  You’ve gone and married a person who hasn’t a glimmer of history.  What will you do about it?

He.  I’ll be brave and stick to my bargain.  Do you mean that you’ve forgotten the charge of the Blank_th_ Americans against the Prussian Guard?  The charge that practically ended the war?

She.  Ended the war?  How could one charge end the war?

He.  There was fighting after.  But the last critical battle was here (looks about) in these meadows, and for miles along.  And it was just here that the Blank_th_ United States Regiment made its historic dash.  In that ditch—­filled with flowers—­a hundred of our lads were mown down in three minutes.  About two thousand more followed them to death.

She.  Oh—­I do know.  It was that charge.  I learned about it in school; it thrilled me always.