A man’s heart must be dead within him if, under the summer sun, he can look on the desolated ground of the Western battle-front without feeling emotions of joy and hope. In the winter-time the clumps of blasted trees looked like groups of forsaken cripples. Their broken branches stood out against the gray sky in utter nakedness, as if appealing to heaven against the inhumanity of man. In a way, it was more depressing to pass a ruined wood than a destroyed village. Some of the trees had all their limbs shattered; others, thicker than a man’s body, were cut clean through the middle; others, again, were torn clean up by the roots and lay sprawling on the ground. It seemed impossible that spring could ever again clothe them in her garments of gladdening green. We imagined the trees would appear amid the sunshine of the summer black, gaunt and irreconcilable; pointing their mangled stumps towards those who had done them such irreparable wrong and, as the wind whistled through them, calling on all decent men to rise up and avenge them of their enemies. But, suddenly, we found that the reconciling spring was back in the woods exercising all her oldtime witchery. Each broken limb was covered with fresh foliage and each scarred stump put out sprouts of green. The broken but blossoming woods grew into a picture of Hope, infinitely more sublime and touching than the one to which Watts gave the name. It was a picture drawn and colored by the finger of God, and it made the fairest of man’s handiwork look weak and incomplete. Uprooted trees lay on the ground in full blossom, and shell-lopped branches again took on the form of beauty. The transformation was wonderful to behold. And it all happened in a week. When our men went into the trenches the trees were black, bare and bruised, but when they came out of the front line into the support-trenches the wood behind them was a tender green and had grown curved and symmetrical. It seemed as if the fairies of our childhood had returned to the earth and were dwelling in the wood. Although two long-range naval guns lay hidden behind it, which, with deep imprecations opened their terrible mouths to hurl fiery thunderbolts at the enemy, the fairies seemed unafraid and daily continued to weave for the trees beautiful garments of leaf and blossom. I have seen nothing that brought such gladness to both officers and men. A new spirit seemed abroad. We were in a new atmosphere and a new world. The war seemed already won, and the work of renewal and reconstruction begun.