Englishman.  The trenches were filled in all over the invaded territory within twenty-five years after the war.  Except a very few kept as a manner of monument.  Object-lessons, don’t you know, in what the thing meant.  Even those are getting obliterated.  They say this is quite the best specimen in all France.

American.  It doesn’t look warlike.  What a lot of flowers!

Englishman.  Yes.  The folk about here have a tradition, don’t you know, that poppies mark the places where blood flowed most.

American.  Ah! (Gazes into the ditch.) Poppies there.  A hundred of our soldiers died at once down there.  Mere lads mostly.  Their names and ages are on a tablet in the capitol at Washington, and underneath is a sentence from Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech:  “These dead shall not have died in vain, and government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Englishman.  Those are undying words.

American.  And undying names—­the lads’ names.

Englishman.  What they and the other Americans did can never die.  Not while the planet endures.  No nation at that time realized how vital was your country’s entrance into the war.  Three months later it would have been too late.  Your young, untried forces lifted worn-out France and England and swept us to-victory.  It was America’s victory at the last.  It is our glory to confess that, for from then on America has been our kin.

American. (Smiles.) England is our well-beloved elder sister for all time now.

Englishman.  The soldiers who died there (gestures to the ditch) and their like did that also.  They tied the nations together with a bond of common gratitude, common suffering, common glory.

American.  You say well that there was common gratitude.  England and France had fought our battle for three years at the time we entered the war.  We had nestled behind the English fleet.  Those grim gray ships of yours stood between us and the barbarians very literally.

Englishman.  Without doubt Germany would have been happy to invade the only country on earth rich enough to pay her war debt.  And you were astonishingly open to invasion.  It is one of the historical facts that a student of history of this twenty-first century finds difficult to realize.

American.  The Great War made revolutionary changes.  That condition of unpreparedness was one.  That there will never be another war is the belief of all governments.  But if all governments should be mistaken, not again would my country, or yours, be caught unprepared.  A general staff built of soldiers and free of civilians hampering is one advantage we have drawn from our ordeal of 1917.

Englishman.  Your army is magnificently efficient.

American.  And yours.  Heaven grant neither may ever be needed!  Our military efficiency is the pride of an unmilitary nation.  One Congress, since the Great War and its lessons, has vied with another to keep our high place.