Plea #53: Noble Knights The kingship thinks knighthood to be noble.
It seems 'most everyone shares that sentiment.
But what's noble about it?
Is there anything noble about fighting someone else's battle?
War is a cruel and harrowing affair.
The men who go in never come out.
Even those who survive die somewhere along the way, if not physically, mentally.
All notions of nobility are lost when the first man falls.
When it all becomes real.
Training can prepare you for the fight, but it can never ready you for the aftermath.
I've seen the old knights.
The looks in their eyes.
The glimmer that was lost.

War is a battle of ego.

The leaders know who's won before it starts, and long before it ends.
And yet they send their men to die by the others' blade regardless, never surrendering when they should.
Not because they have any hope of winning, but because the last thing they want is to lose.
So men are thrust into a fight they could never hope to win, and there, they're slaughtered.
Both sides give their all, but that's precisely what evens the effort.
When the blade finds its way into the seams of the armor and pierces the crimson vessel of its enemy, there's no triumph.
There's no celebration.
No fanfare.
Only the groans of a man.
A father desperate to come home to his daughter.
A husband who had a welcome party planned in advance.
A friend who had a drink waiting for him at the pub.
And now he doesn't.
And that's that.
Do you think they'll remember his name?
Do you think they'll honor his memory?
No. The losers rarely do.
It's the victors who log the battles.
The king decrees a victory, but there's no winning for the knights that remain. Only surviving.
They hold their arms up and smile by the King's request, mustering up all the joy they can within their tattered soul, but once they step back through their front door, the pit returns to their stomach.
They wonder what they're going to say to his wife.
How they're going to explain their return over his.
How the other barstool will never again be filled... not in the same way.
It's a brutal irony; There's no victory for those who fought the hardest for it.

So is knighthood noble?
Or is that just how they manipulate ambitious spirits to better fulfill the violent whims of an arbitrary leader?