He.  Certainly.  Every American child knows the story.  I memorized the list of the one hundred soldiers’ names of my own free will when I was ten.  I can say them now.  “Arnold—­Ashe—­Bennett—­Emmet—­Dragmore—­”

She.  Don’t say the rest, Ted—­tell me about it as it happened. (She slips her hand into his.) We two, standing here young and happy, looking forward to a, lifetime together, will do honor, that way, to those soldiers who gave up their happy youth and their lives for America.

He. (Puts his arm around her.) We will.  We’ll make a little memorial service and I’ll preach a sermon about how gloriously they fell and how, unknowingly, they won the war—­and so much more!

She.  Tell me.

He.  It was a hundred years ago about now—­summer.  A critical battle raged along a stretch of many miles.  About the centre of the line—­here—­the Prussian Imperial Guards, the crack soldiers of the German army, held the first trench—­this ditch.  American forces faced them, but in weeks of fighting had not been able to make much impression.  Then, on a day, the order came down the lines that the Blank_th_ United States Regiment, opposed to the Guard, was to charge and take the German front trench.  Of course the artillery was to prepare for their charge as usual, but there was some mistake.  There was no curtain of fire before them, no artillery preparation to help them.  And the order to charge came.  So, right into the German guns, in the face of those terrible Prussian Guards, our lads went “over the top” with a great shout, and poured like a flame, like a catapult, across the space between them—­No-Man’s Land, they called it then—­it was only thirty-five yards—­to the German trench.  So fast they rushed, and so unexpected was their coming, with no curtain of artillery to shield them, that the Germans were for a moment taken aback.  Not a shot was fired for a space of time almost long enough to let the Americans reach the trench, and then the rifles broke out and the brown uniforms fell like leaves in autumn.  But not all.  They rushed on pell-mell, cutting wire, pouring irresistibly into the German trench.  And the Guards, such as were not mown down, lost courage at the astounding impetus of the dash, and scrambled and ran from their trench.  They took it—­our boys took that trench—­this old ditch.  But then the big German guns opened a fire like hail and a machine gun at the end—­down there it must have been—­enfiladed the trench, and every man in it was killed.  But the charge ended the war.  Other Americans, mad with the glory of it, poured in a sea after their comrades and held the trench, and poured on and on, and wiped out that day the Prussian Guard.  The German morale was broken from then; within four months the war was over.