by this route in the beginning of the war.

We were never permitted on these hills, but we had seen them belch fire
many a time as the German airplanes came over the city.

But on this morning, after three days of snow, those great black hills
were transformed, covered with a pure white blanket. The trees were
robed in white. Not a spot of black appeared. Even the great guns on
the top of the hill looked like white fingers pointing toward Berlin.
The roads and fields and hills of France had suddenly been transformed
as by a magic wand into things beautiful and white.

War is black. War is muddy. War is bloody. War is gray. War is full
of hate and hurt and wounds and blood and death and heartache and
heartbreak and homesickness and loneliness.

Thomas Tiplady, in "The Cross at the Front," was right when he
described war as symbolized by the great black cloud of smoke that
unrolled in the sky when a great Jack Johnson had exploded. Everything
that war touches it makes ugly, except the soul, and it cannot blacken
that.

It ruins the fields and makes them torn and cut; it tears the trees
into ragged stumps. It kills the grass and tramples it underfoot. It
takes the most beautiful architecture in the world and makes a pile of
dust and dirt of it. It takes a beautiful face and makes it horrible
with the scars of bayonet and burning gases.

But on this morning God seemed to be covering up all of that ugliness
and dirt and mud and blackness. Fields that the day before had been