A Garden of Peace: A Medley in QuietudeMoore, Frank Frankfort
General
A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude
Moore, Frank Frankfort
Gardens -- Fiction
I cannot imagine that much about these gardens has changed during
the changes of a thousand years, except perhaps their shape. When the
Anglo-Saxon epidemic of church-building was running its course, the
three-quarters-of-a-mile of the High Street did not escape. There was a
church every hundred yards or so, and some of them were spacious enough
to hold a congregation of fifty or sixty; and every church had its
church-yard--that is, as we have seen--its garden, equal to the
emergencies of a death-rate of perhaps two every five years; but when
the churches became dwelling-houses, as several did, the church-yard
became the back-yard in the American sense: fruit-trees were planted,
and beneath their boughs the burgesses discussed the merits of ale
and the passing away of the mead bowl, and shook their heads when some
simpleton suggested that the arrow that killed Rufus a few months before
was an accidental one. There are those gardens to-day, and the burgesses
smoke their pipes over the six-thirty edition of the evening paper that
left London at five-fifteen, and listen to stories of Dick, who lost a
foot at the ford of the Somme, or of Tom, who got the M.C. after Mons,
and went through the four years without a scratch, or of Bob, who had
his own opinion about the taking of Jerusalem, outside which two fingers
of his left hand are still lying, unless a thieving Arab appropriated
them.
There the chat goes on from century to century on the self-same
subject--War, war, war. It is certain that men left Yardley Parva for
the First Crusade; one of the streets that ran from the Roman road to
the Abbey which was founded by a Crusading Norman Earl, returns the name
that was given to it to commemorate the capture of Antioch when the news
reached England a year or so after the event; and it is equally certain
that Yardley men were at Bosworth Field, and Yardley men at Tournai in
1709 as well as in 1918--at the Nile in 1798 as well as in 1915; and it
is equally certain that such of them as came back talked of what they
had seen and of what their comrades had done. The tears that the mothers
proudly shed when they talked of those who had not come home in 1918
were shed where the mothers of the Crusaders of 1099 had knelt to pray
for the repose of the souls of their dear ones whose bones were picked
by the jackals of the Lebanon. On the site of one of the churches of
the market-place there is now built a hall of moving pictures--Moving
Pictures--that is the whole sum of the bustle of the thousand
years--Moving Pictures. The same old story. Life has not even got the
instinct of the film-maker: it does not take the trouble to change the
scenes of the exploits of a thousand--ten thousand--years ago, and those
of to-day. Egypt, the Nile, Gaza, Jerusalem, Damascus, Mesopotamia.
Moving pictures--walking shadows--walking about for a while but all
having the one goal--the Garden of Peace; those gardens that surrounded
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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