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 sandbags and snowmen 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.