Bethlehem was a small village. It had perhaps a thousand people, stone houses leaning against one another, a well, animal shelters cut into the hillside, and one road that climbed north to Jerusalem and ran south to the desert. Outside Judea, hardly anyone had heard of it. It was the kind of place where everybody knows everybody's name, and where the women, at the end of the afternoon, know each other by the voice they use to call their children in.

That winter, something strange had happened in Bethlehem. Men in expensive clothes, come from very far away, crossed the village looking for a child. Then they left as suddenly as they had arrived, and by an odd route, swinging out around the desert instead of taking the Jerusalem road. In a village that size, people talked about it for days. Then they stopped talking about it. Life went back to what it was.

And on one of those nights, telling nobody, a carpenter shouldered his tools, took his wife and their baby, and disappeared into the dark.

Six miles away, in Jerusalem, King Herod was waiting.

He had asked the visitors from the East to come back and tell him where the child was, and they had promised. Herod waited one day. He waited two. He sent men to ask at the inns, and set watchers on the city gates. The travellers did not return. They had gone home another way, and by now they were far beyond reach.

Herod was an old king, sick and frightened. He had ruled Judea for more than thirty years and had done magnificent things: he rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, raised a harbour out of the open sea, and set fortresses on the tops of impossible rocks. And through all those years he had done something else as well, every time he felt the throne shift under him. He had anyone who might take it killed. That is how his own wife died, and three of his own sons. Herod was not afraid of armies. He was afraid of successors.

And now they were telling him that in a village of shepherds a king had been born.

He did not know the child's name. He did not know the house, or the street, or the face. He knew only the village and, roughly, the age. And he ordered what a man with no limits orders when he does not know enough: that none be left.

The soldiers came down from Jerusalem on foot, setting out at dusk so as to arrive with the dark.

There was no warning. There was no time to hide anyone in the cisterns, or to run for the fields. Bethlehem had no wall, no guard, and nobody who could say no to a soldier of the king. In a few hours the soldiers did what they had been sent to do, house by house, and then they went back up the same road, and the sound of their sandals grew smaller in the night until it was gone.

When morning came, Bethlehem was still there. The stones, the well, the animal shelters, the smell of cold smoke. Only one thing was missing, and it was the one thing you always heard in a village like that from before sunrise: the small children. No boy's voice in the yard. No child calling. The doors stood open, and nobody went out to work that day.

We do not know how many there were. Bethlehem was tiny, and scholars reckon the boys under two would have been very few — twenty at the most, perhaps only half a dozen. It is not a large number. It was never a number at all. They were somebody's sons, each with his own name, and every one of those names had been chosen by someone with great care.

When Matthew wrote this page of his Gospel, he did not try to explain it. He did not say that everything would be fine, or that there was a reason. He did something else: he reached back into a book written six hundred years earlier, for the voice that had already wept that weeping.

Rachel was the beloved wife of Jacob, the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, one of the great mothers of Israel. She had died in childbirth on the road, and the book of Genesis says she was buried on the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem. Her tomb stood there, at the edge of that very road, a few steps from the houses.

The prophet Jeremiah had imagined Rachel waking inside her tomb, centuries later, to weep for her descendants as they were marched past in chains on the way to exile. Matthew picked the image up again. The ancient mother, buried beside the Bethlehem road, weeping once more for the children of Bethlehem. And the line the Gospel chose to keep is the hardest one of all: she would not be comforted. That day, nobody had any right to ask those women to stop crying.

But Jeremiah had not finished at the verse about weeping. In the very next verse, in the same chapter, it is written:

Matthew quoted only the verse about the weeping, verse fifteen. Anyone who knew the prophet knew what came next, and knew that the promise was still standing even when nobody could hear it.

Herod thought he had settled the matter.

He died not long afterwards, in his winter house at Jericho, ill and suspicious to the last day. The kingdom he had defended in that way was divided among the sons he had left, and within eighty years nothing of it remained: no throne in Jerusalem, not even the Temple he had rebuilt. His name survived. And his name is known all over the world for one reason only — a single night in Bethlehem.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the desert, in an Egyptian town the Bible does not even bother to name, a small boy was learning to walk.

Herod's power did not win. It did not come close.

Nobody wrote down the names of the children of Bethlehem. They were too poor and too little to enter any record of the empire, and the world had everything it needed to forget them within a generation.

Except that the Church did not forget. In the earliest centuries those boys were already honoured as martyrs — the first of them all, killed on account of Christ before they could even speak. Since their own names were lost, the Church gave them a name to share, and that is what they have been called ever since: the Holy Innocents. Their feast is 28 December, three days after Christmas, right in the middle of the gladness, because the Church decided not to celebrate the birth of Jesus by pretending this part never happened.

A Christian poet named Prudentius, born in the fourth century, wrote lines about them that the Church later gathered into a hymn still sung today, and in them he calls those children the flowers of the martyrs: the first blossoms of the Church, caught by the storm on the very morning they opened.

For more than a thousand years, at Mass on that day, the Church did something it almost never did on a feast. It left out the Gloria, and it left out the Alleluia. It was a deliberate silence, kept year after year for the mothers of Bethlehem.