The Seven Streams by Warwick Deeping

Through the black and ruined land came Tristan and his men, marching where the rivers ran, that they might not tread ankle deep in ashes, nor be choked and blinded by the dust and smoke. Ruin was everywhere, black, saturnine, and solemn. A strange silence hung upon the world, where the charred trees still stood with their hands outstretched to the rainless sky. Many lay fallen like the dead upon a battlefield. The wind had passed, the storm blasts moaned no more.

As Tristan rode through the desolate woods, he bowed down his head, and was heavy of heart. He had loved these children of the forest, these scorched martyrs stricken in the rising of the sap. No more would their banners blow with the march of spring. And yet the dead trees were but outlined against the deeper gold of memory, a melancholy afterglow, weird yet tender. The savage in him was inert awhile. Childhood and youth came back, his mother's face and Rosamunde's sad eyes, the golden glimmer of his sister's hair. Rosamunde, Rosamunde! What of the red rose plucked from the snowy towers of Joyous Vale? For the moment he forgot the grim, grinding present, the ten thousand iron men who drove clouds of dust from the ashes under their horses' feet.