Chastel was a vast white ruin, tinted with silver, and as such it had an uncanny beauty of its own.

But John, thankful that the snow was so deep, lay buried in it, where it had drifted against the wall.
The Germans in a town so near the French lines were not likely to make a diligent search for a single man, and he felt that he was safe if he did not freeze to death.
Peeping above the snow he saw about fifty German infantrymen walk down the road toward the river, their heavy boots crunching in the snow.

They were stalwart, ruddy fellows, boys of twenty-one or two--he knew now that boys did most of the world's fighting--and he liked their simple, honest faces.

He felt anew that he did not hate the German people; instead he felt friendship for them, but he did hate more intensely than ever the medieval emperors and the little group of madmen about them who, almost without warning, could devote millions to slaughter.

An intense democrat in the beginning and becoming more intense in the furnace of war, he believed that the young German peasants coming down the road would have much more chance before the Judgment Seat than the princes and generals who so lightly sent them there.
The soldiers went on a little distance beyond the edge of the town.