I took the play home and read critical opinions and made notes, until I thought I had the right angle on how to handle the picture. It was not ‘a war play’; it was anti-war. The action revolved around combat conditions, but he idea projected by the characters was that war is a farce. This is contained in Captain Flagg’s dictum: ‘We are all dirt and we propose to die in order that corps headquarters may be decorated.’ Author Laurence Stallings, himself an ex-Marine who left a leg at Château-Thierry, intended the play as an illustration of how war is actually waged. Ruthlessly, he stripped it of all that ‘world safe for democracy’ slush. When Lieutenant Moore, on the edge of a breakdown from combat strain, comforted a brother officer with a shattered arm, asking, ‘What price glory now?’ I identified with him as though I had been there. – RW