Earth and Ourselves Her First Christmas Tree

I HEARD yesterday that a friend who has been in Italy throughout the war may be home for Christmas with her small six-yearold daughter. The news, when it came, dropped like a pool of silence into a room full of chattering people. We could none of us quite take it in.
While my prosaic mind began slowly wondering how they were coming, whether they would have sufficient food for the journey, how the child would stand the cold in the condition we knew she was in, her grandmother, who had agonised through live long years of war about this little family. suddenly said: " We must try and get a Christmas tree for Lucy. She's never had one." And suddenly. in a world of horror and strife and unspeakable griefs, the acquisition of a little fir tree became a matter of importance.
I thought of the plantations I had so recently seen, where hundreds of saplings are already growing up to replace the dark, straight, lovely trees whose felling we mourned only a few years ago. Perhaps it will be one of those that will welcome this small girl, • half English, half Italian, whose whole life so far has been lived under the cloud of war and who, during the German occupation of Rome had been taught to go into a certain cupboard and stay there quietly whenever she heard the front door bell ring. If her father had to be taken away he wanted to make quite sure that the child saw nothing that might frighten her.
QWIFT on the heels of this L.' thought came the memory of my own first Christmas tree, cut from the Tannenberg forest that lies just outside the medieval town of Holdesheim. It was set up in a corner of the huge room whose windows looked straight on to the old cobbled street, and no one would have dreamt of drawing the curtains after it had been lighted up on Christmas Eve, for might not the Christ Child Himself pass down the street and wish to see the lights that were sparkling out their goodwill to men. . . ?
It seems so very long ago, that Christmas of peace and goodwill. But here in England fresh saplings have been planted. The scarred stumps of the trees that we loved qre being gradually covered with the. healing balm that Nature keeps to cover the wounds that man has made. And a little girl is coining here from Rome in time, we hope, to see her first Christmas tree.
Julian