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 ^{(it's beta!)}

They were all just children.

And yet as we watched them struggle forward, pressing through the masses before them and fighting against ridiculous odds, nothing seemed more right.

Still, something in the back of my mind told me that this shouldn't just be up to them. We all knew what they were up against, but we never felt the need to help them. To support them. To fight alongside them.

Some would fall, and we would mourn them. We would gather about them and pray over their bodies, and give an offering of silk and ashes. Then we would simply wait and watch, only moving onward when we lost sight of the children. This is how it was always done, without questioning.

But if no one did anything, if this continued on in the way it has always been, nothing would be accomplished. We will eventually be held off, then conquered. A miserable defeat that we would have done nothing to prevent. And yet no one sees that as a waste.

My son is out there. I haven't seen him since he joined the throng of singing fighters, but when he left I felt something no one else ever told me about. I felt a pang of regret. Of guilt. An emotion that supposedly no one has felt in over half a century. But I felt it, and it was horrible.

And it has grown worse ever since. Why does no one go to help them? They are our children. Our blood and spirit. Our hope for the future. Are they no longer our responsibility?

The singing stops for a moment. A trumpet looses three short blasts, and the children move on ahead. We move forward to the battleground left in their wake. It is littered with the bodies of the enemy. Their hardened, rocky flesh cracked and punctured by our childrens' weapons. And then I see one of ours laid in an open area alone. His uniform is tarnished and torn, his flesh scarred and covered in blood. His eyes are only half closed.

We gather around him and no one says anything. They carry out the ceremony as usual, and only stop when a tear falls from my face onto the freshly burnt ash strewn across the boy's body. They stop and they stare. I feel their eyes and my heart is pounding as my body begins to tremble and the tears stream down my cheeks.

They continue to stare as I take up my son's weapon and run forward to join the children of our cause. None of them slow down or stop their singing as I join their ranks. They simply look up at my eyes and smile. I too manage a smile as I march along with them, the old anthem once again gracing my lips.