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Fulfillment of this promise finds Thornton transformed into a callous and ugly-tempered bully. Preparations are made for a beating to be administered at Thornton's direction, to a onetime friend of his who "failed to salute the War Dead" and was tattled on by a toady. An officer who might have intervened leaves the room with the admonition: "Be careful, fellows." The victim is then tied to a double-deck bed, burned with a cigarette, given 18 lashes with a whip, hospitalized. The outraged medical officer demands that Thornton be expelled, threatens to resign and expose the school if he is not. In the course of his tirade it appears that because the school heads wink at the manly dissipations of a soldier, six of the boys have contracted syphilis. The commandant retorts that if the medical officer resigns and talks he will be a pariah unable to earn a living for his family. At the following commencement it falls to the medical officer to deliver the address awarding highest honors to Cadet Thornton.
Bright Honor (by Henry R. Misrock; Jack Kirkland & Sam H. Grisman, producers) is another play about a boys' military school. This one, depicting a school called Newtown Military Academy, better administered and more sleekly appointed than Stone Ridge (see above), presents detailed cross-sections from the daily life of its tin-pot Napoleons and apprentice Casanovas. A kindly teacher of English who considers Browning sonnets more important than Browning machine guns is tormented by the boys until he loses his job, to the detriment of his love life. Bright Honor points out that education at Newtown is smothered under the pressure of military mumbo-jumbo, a fact of no importance to parents who send their boys there to get rid of them, or because they will not eat their spinach.