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 nothing but ugly blotches were white and beautiful.  Ammunition dumps, horrible in their suggestion of death, seemed now to have been covered over and hidden by some kindly hand of love.  The great brown-bronzed hills, the fortifications filled with death and horror were gleaming white in the morning sunlight.

I said to the other driver:  “Well, it’s too beautiful to be true, isn’t it?  It’s a shame to think that when we get back from the front it will all be gone, melted, and the old mud and dirt will be back again.”

“Yes, but it means something to me,” he said.

“What does it mean?”

“It means the future.”

“What are you talking about, man?”

“Why, it means that some day this land will be beautiful again.  It means that, impossible as that idea seems, the war will cease, that people will till these fields again, that grass will grow, that flowers will bloom in these fields again, that people will come back to their homes in peace.  It is symbolical of that great white peace that will come forever, when the ugly thing we call war will be buried so deeply underneath the white blanket of peace and brotherhood that the world will know war no more.  It’s like a rainbow to me.  It is a promise.”

I had never heard Tom grow so eloquent before, and what he said sounded Christian.  It sounded like man’s talk to me.  It was the dream of the Christ I knew.  It was the dream of the prophets of old.  It was Tennyson’s dream.  Such a dream will not die from the earth, and men will just keep on dreaming it until some day it will come true, for—­