If, during the course of World War II, someone had been sitting on the rocky eminence several hundred feet above the village of Ciel des Montagnes, Vermont, he would never have guessed that the nations of the world were engaged in mortal combat. Only the most astute would have taken note of the few hints of it that were visible there in those sorry years. Early in 1942 one might have noticed the drab brown US Army bus that wound up the road from Montpelier, stopped in front of the schoolhouse to pick up half a load of young men drafted for military service, and then continued on to the next village. Or one might have observed the flag that flew at half-mast much more often than usual throughout the next four years. And, of course, one could hardly have missed the wild jubilation that rocked the town in the fall of 1945. But never could anyone have culled from the changeless calm of the old rolling mountains and the picturesque rock-strewn farms dotting the valley any hint of the blood and gore of Iwo Jima, the suicidal assault on Anzio, or the monstrous holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet, young men from Ciel des Montagnes and District were directly involved in all of these horrors.
No hint whatever would anyone have detected of the passions of racial hatred and blind patriotism that were driving presumably civilized men to acts of barbarous atrocity at the very moment the silent sun was sinking beneath these ancient undulations of rock, casting long lazy shadows and hazy shafts of light across their upper meadows. No notion would anyone have entertained of that new “conscience” which desperate circumstances were forging in the minds even of honorable and moral men that required them to invent horrors in the cause of safeguarding the world from the even worse horrors being disseminated by dishonorable and immoral men.
Such was the character of Ciel des Montagnes’ immutable face. In the wake of the war, there persisted here behind this face something of the older and more innocent conscience that had been irreparably shattered in many other parts of the world.