Love Among the Ruins by Warwick Deeping

So with Colgran and his rebels beating at the inner gate, Flavian of Gambrevault took Yeoland to wife, and was married that same eve by Father Julian in the castle chapel. There was pathetic cynicism in the service, celebrating as it did the temporal blending of two bodies who bade fair by their destinies to return speedily to dust. The chant might have served as a requiem, or a dirge for the fall of the mighty. It was a tragic scene, a solemn ceremony, attended by grim-faced men in plated steel, by frightened women and sickly children. Famine, disease, and death headed the procession, jigged with the torches, danced like skeletons about a bier. Trumpets and cannon gave an epithalamium; bones might have been scattered in lieu of flowers, and wounds espoused in place of favours. For a marriage pageant war pointed to the grinning corpses in the breach and the clotted ruins. It was such a ceremony that might have appealed to a Stoic, or to a Marius brooding amid the ruins of Carthage.

Peril chastens the brave, and death is as wine to the heart of the saint. Even as the sky seems of purer crystal before a storm, so the soul pinions to a more luminous heroism when the mortal tragedy of life nears the "explicit. " As the martyrs exulted in their spiritual triumph, or as Pico of Mirandola beheld transcendent visions on his bed of death, when the Golden Lilies of France waved into luckless Florence, so Flavian and Yeoland his wife took to their hearts a true bridal beauty.