Chrom's Rally Speech

[Tactician Revan]

I decided to slightly edit Ronald Reagan's infamous "Peace and War" speech to incorporate elements of Fire Emblem, mostly with intention of making it sound like it were being read by Chrom before Endgame

Enjoy:

Let’s set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace and you can have it in the next second, “surrender.”

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender.

If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, then eventually we have to face the final demand “the ultimatum.” And what then?

What King Validar has told his Grimleal he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Ylisse-Grima War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically.

He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for peace at any price or better Red than dead, or as one commentator put it, he would rather live on his knees than die on his feet.

And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin just in the face of this enemy?

Or should Marth have told the people of Altea to live in slavery under Dolhr? Should Alm have refused the trek to Zofia? Should the Greil Mercenaries at The Moment of Fate have thrown down their blades and refused to fight the battle heard round the world?

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Valmese didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies. There is a price we will not pay. There is a point beyond which they must not advance.

Our tactician has said that the destiny of man is not measured by some kind of scripted fate. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are tied by the bonds we create. And he said, “There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man in Ylisse, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

Edited October 6, 2016 by Edge Lord

[Moblin Major General]

This is an interesting concept. Let me see if I can do one for Roy and Abraham Lincoln:

One and One Thousand years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent 8 new nations, conceived in peace, and dedicated to the idea that men are free from the terror of dragons.

Now we are engaged in an all-encompassing war, testing whether these nations, or any nations so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that these nations might live. It is fitting and proper that we do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men and women, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under Saint Elimine, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that those who fight for good shall ever be in her favor.