Читать книгу A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude - Frank Frankfort Moore - Страница 7

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I believe I interrupted myself in the midst of a visit to one of the gardens of the “better-class people” who live in the purely residential end of the High Street. These are the people whose fathers and grandfathers lived in the same houses and took a prominent part in preparing the beacons which were to spread far and wide the news that Bonaparte had succeeded in landing on their coast with that marvellous flotilla of his. And from these very gardens more than two hundred and fifty years earlier the still greater grandfathers had seen the blazing beacons that sent the news flying northward that the Invincible Armada of Spain was plunging and rolling up the Channel, which can be faintly seen by the eye of faith from the tower of the Church of St. Mary sub-Castro, at the highest part of the High Street. The Invincible Armada! If I should ever organise an aggressive enterprise, I certainly would not call it “Invincible.” It is a name of ill omen. I cannot for the life of me remember where I read the story of the monarch who was reviewing the troops that he had equipped very splendidly to go against the Romans. When his thousand horsemen went glittering by with polished steel cuirasses and plumed helmets—they must have been the Household Cavalry of the period—his heart was lifted up in pride, and he called out tauntingly to his Grand Vizier, who was a bit of a cynic—

“Ha, my friend, don't you think that these will be enough for the Romans?”

“Sure,” was the reply. “Oh, yes, they will be enough, avariciuus though the Romans undoubtedly are.”

This was the first of the Invincible enterprises. The next time I saw the word in history was in association with the Spanish Armada, and to-day, over a door in my house, I have hung the carved ebony ornament that belonged to a bedstead of one of the ships that went ashore at Spanish Point on the Irish coast. Later still, there was a gang of murderers who called themselves “Invincibles,” and I saw the lot of them crowded into a police-court dock whence they filed out to their doom. And what about the last of these ruffians that challenged Fate with that arrogant word? What of Hindenburg's Invincible Line that we heard so much about a few months ago? “Invincible!” cried the massacre-monger, and the word was repeated by the arch-liar of the mailed fist in half a dozen speeches. Within a few months the beaten mongrels were whimpering, not like hounds, but like hyenas out of whose teeth their prey is plucked. I dare say that Achilles, who made brag a speciality, talked through his helmet about that operation on the banks of the Styx, and actually believed himself to be invincible because invulnerable; but his mother, who had given him the bath that turned his head, would not have recognised him when Paris had done with him.