The tranquil expanses of the valley, adorned with soft and smooth pastures and hamlets rosy as the rose, with the sable shadow-stains of the majestic mountains and the black lace and white of pines and eternal snow, become alive with the movements of men, whose multitudes swarm in distinct masses.  Attacks develop, wave by wave, across the fields and then stand still.  Houses are eviscerated like human beings and towns like houses.  Villages appear in crumpled whiteness as though fallen from heaven to earth.  The very shape of the plain is changed by the frightful heaps of wounded and slain.

Each country whose frontiers are consumed by carnage is seen tearing from its heart ever more warriors of full blood and force.  One’s eyes follow the flow of these living tributaries to the River of Death.  To north and south and west ajar there are battles on every side.  Turn where you will, there is war in every corner of that vastness.

One of the pale-faced clairvoyants lifts himself on his elbow, reckons and numbers the fighters present and to come—­thirty millions of soldiers.  Another stammers, his eyes full of slaughter, “Two armies at death-grips—­that is one great army committing suicide.”

“It should not have been,” says the deep and hollow voice of the first in the line.  But another says, “It is the French Revolution beginning again.”  “Let thrones beware!” says another’s undertone.

The third adds, “Perhaps it is the last war of all.”  A silence follows, then some heads are shaken in dissent whose faces have been blanched anew by the stale tragedy of sleepless night—­“Stop war?  Stop war?  Impossible!  There is no cure for the world’s disease.”

Some one coughs, and then the Vision is swallowed up in the huge sunlit peace of the lush meadows.  In the rich colors of the glowing kine, the black forests, the green fields and the blue distance, dies the reflection of the fire where the old world burns and breaks.  Infinite silence engulfs the uproar of hate and pain from the dark swarmings of mankind.  They who have spoken retire one by one within themselves, absorbed once more in their own mysterious malady.

But when evening is ready to descend within the valley, a storm breaks over the mass of Mont Blanc.  One may not go forth in such peril, for the last waves of the storm-wind roll even to the great veranda, to that harbor where they have taken refuge; and these victims of a great internal wound encompass with their gaze the elemental convulsion.

They watch how the explosions of thunder on the mountain upheave the level clouds like a stormy sea, how each one hurls a shaft of fire and a column of cloud together into the twilight; and they turn their wan and sunken faces to follow the flight of the eagles that wheel in the sky and look from their supreme height down through the wreathing mists, down to earth.

“Put an end to war?” say the watchers.—­“Forbid the Storm!”