glint
of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good
flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to
fall, and then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of
Flanders were white.

There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all
the pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our
soldiers were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit from
Santa Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in soft, downy ridges
on the red-tiled roofs. It covered, with its purity, the rubbish heaps
in Flemish farmyards and the old oak beams of barns and sheds where
British soldiers made their beds of straw. Away over the lonely country
which led to the trenches, every furrow in the fields was a thin white
ridge, and the trees, which were just showing a shimmer of green, stood
ink-black against the drifting snow-clouds, with a long white streak
down each tall trunk on the side nearest to the wind. The old windmills
of Flanders which looked down upon the battlefields had been touched by
the softly falling flakes, so that each rib of their sails and each rung
of their ladders and each plank of their ancient timbers was outlined
like a frosty cobweb.

Along the roads of war our soldiers tramped through the blizzard with
ermine mantles over their mackintosh capes, and mounted men with their
heads bent to the storm were like white knights riding through a white
wilderness. The long columns of motor-lorries, the gun--limbers drawn up
by their batteries, the field ambulances by the clearing hospitals, were
all cloaked in snow, and the tramp and traffic of an army were hushed in
the great quietude.

In the trenches the snow fell thickly and made white pillows of the
piled sand-bags and snow-men of sentries standing in the shelter of the
traverses. The tarpaulin roofs and timbered doorways of dugouts were so
changed by the snowflakes that they seemed the dwelling-places of
fairy folks or, at least, of Pierrot and Columbine in a Christmas
hiding-place, and not of soldiers stamping their feet and blowing on
their fingers and keeping their rifles dry.

In its first glamour of white the snow gave a beauty even to No Man's
Land, making a lace-work pattern of barbed wire, and lying very softly
over the tumbled ground of mine-fields, so that all the ugliness of
destruction and death was hidden under this canopy. The snowflakes
fluttered upon stark bodi