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.
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