s 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 eloque