Who Do You Think You Are?

Whose name did you call outright when asked who whelped you? You dare claim heroes as your fathers and grandsires, Hercules and Odysseus and Atlas who in elder times upheld the world on bare shoulders? You see nothing and yet call yourselves sages, feel nothing and call yourselves worldly, hear nothing and call yourselves musicians. Stately thrones were yours but you did not run fingers through gold-enameled stone intricately carved by your ancestors. Green fields stretched before your eyes but you did not kneel and smell it, you did not thank the God that made you for your fortune. Your tongue forms witty words and lies you transfer to your responsibilities, your people. They follow you out of ignorance, but you lead them out of stupidity. Harvests came under your hands, fell out and rotted away, and you warred for more, greed all but consuming your sanity. Honest workers laid down their lives for you and still you asked for more.

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Of course, you were not there as I was. You did not see the bloodred sunrise streak across a tummulted sky like I did. You did not hear the sharp crack of metal sword and spears hit shields and break in a thousand places. You did not smell the bitter wind carrying the sweat- and blood-stained scent of bodies across coarse brown plains. You did not swoon in dizziness when two thousand horses thundered across the barren stretch of no-man’s-land. You did not taste salty blood when your head was split with an unwieldy branch of honed wood and you thought you’d never think straight again. You did not feel the sharp grass when you fell on your knees at the end of the day next to a fallen soldier. You did not know, could never know the pain you felt in your heart, a devastating pressure that left you breathless, when you looked into a familiar face, distorted and pale, which looked frantically for some last hope. You will never know these things, for times are long forgotten and deeds of men pass slowly out of memory.
And how do I know this, you ask? Who am I to be telling you what you cannot know? Alas, in this age men grow haughty and need more than an honest narration to sway them. Mere words spoken from a true heart prove nothing. Well, I was there. I saw good men fall down; not good men in the present-day context, of mere import, but strong, willful and intelligent men who could move a nation with a single word and who could sway the waves of the seas with a heartfelt shout. I saw these and many more – strong-willed women and fat, healthy children - cut down in the days of their youth, when the world needed them most. Yea, when the world longed for a leader there was none, and in the midst of darkness shadow overtook the land.
And in that fact, you and I are not so much unalike. For ever there are difficulties in leading a nation – not a nation of a race, mind, but a nation of men.

(That was based mostly from the point of view of Merlin, though the first could easily be similar.)