Disclaimer: I own nothing anyone recognises. This includes not only the setting, but also any song lyrics that may have somehow found their way into this via osmosis, or something. The poetry is from Laurence Binyon's 1914 poem "For the Fallen" (or, more specifically, the Ode of Remembrance).
A/N: For Anzac Day, 2011.
The Fallen
[They went with songs to the battle, they were young.]
The vids showed them young and strong. Standing straight and tall in their new uniforms, proud and courageous. Ready to fight for something they believed in, aglow with the fervour of that belief. They were recruited, in twos and threes and fours, from families and towns and ranches, swayed by rhetoric and tales of glory and honour, and then enlisted.
And before not very long at all they were entrusted with weapons and uniforms and all the trappings of a life in the military. Regiments marched down the main street of their hometowns, and in the early days those streets were lined with people noisily supporting and encouraging. They were given training, and sent off to the battlefields to fight for the cause they were ordered to believe in.
But the training was not enough, too brief and too minimal. The raw recruits mostly survived only by luck and the skin of their teeth. And more recruits were needed, and the families that had remained behind dwindled as brothers and sisters and children left their homes. There were no longer any parades, the few volunteers skulking almost shamefacedly to the transport ships.
The streets were still lined with watching eyes, but they were eyes that betrayed weary, downtrodden hopelessness. They did not cheer their families to victorious battle against their oppressors. It was a silent farewell to those they never thought to see again.
The numbers of enlisted diminished as the Rim worlds turned away, unable to face the war that drained their spirit and stole away their loved ones. Conscription did nothing to improve morale, nothing to regain that initial glow of courageous belief.
The recruits, volunteers and conscripts alike, aged fast in the battlefields. They were shipped from world to world, from one bloodied fighting ground to another, from one barracks created out of the remnants of a desolated and abandoned town to the next. They lost their innocence and naivety and faith and often their lives.
But in the vids they are still young. They had been recorded by news outlets, and the propaganda machines, and families farewelling their children and spouses and siblings. And no matter what happens to the recruits themselves, their images remain unchanging and indelible, caught in those few handfuls of frames.
Enthusiastic. Passionate. Alive.
Mal thinks he might even still have a copy of one of those vids somewhere.