“It was so much easier to knock down than build up: a city raised over millennia could be razed in a day; the life of a man ended in a second’s crack. In years to come, Edmund and his children would know the names of planes and tanks and battles and invasions and recall with facility the atrocities of the age, the names of those who committed them. But would any of them be able to name a single repairer of the breach or fixer of broken walls?”
