"To Toul! You're going straight toward the Boche lines. Turn around.
You're the third truck that's got lost in this blizzard. Back that
opposite way is your direction."
The morning after it had cleared it was worth all the discomfort to see
the hills and fields of France. One group of hills which I had heard
were the most heavily fortified in all France, loomed like two huge
sentinels before the city. The Germans knew this also, and military
experts say that that is the reason why they did not try to reach Paris
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
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--
"Man proposes--God disposes;
Yet my hope in Him reposes,
Who in war-time still makes roses."
The white and crimson roses of that little cottage in Brittany, the
quiet and peace and promise and vision of a Jeanne d'Arc in the village
of Domremy; the blooming of a billion red poppies in the fields of
France; the blanketing of the earth with a covering of white snow
sufficient to hide the ugliness of war, even for a day, all give
promise of the God who, in the end, when he has given man every chance
to redeem himself, and who, even amid cruel wars "still makes roses,"
will finally bring to pass "peace on earth; good-will to men."
"_Somewhere in France_."