The price of war.

In the end, it’s always the same. The silence. The wreckage. The broken bodies and haunted eyes left in the aftermath of war. It doesn’t matter where the bombs fall or whose flag flies above the ruins - the language of grief is universal. The sound of a mother’s wail cuts through the smoke and the rubble, echoing across borders and bloodlines. In war, there are no sides - only the living and the dead.

We have become fluent in the language of loss. Night after night, the news feeds are littered with the shattered faces of parents clutching lifeless children. A toddler pulled from the rubble, dust and blood coating their tiny limbs. A father collapsed over the body of his son, howling into the void. A grandmother kneeling in the ruins of her home, surrounded by the bones of a life that no longer exists. The geography changes, the uniforms differ - but the outcome remains painfully consistent: lives reduced to ashes.

A child’s shoe lies half-buried in the dust, a grim reminder of a life cut short before it had the chance to bloom. Hospitals overflow with the wounded, while mortuaries fill with the nameless dead - bodies wrapped in white sheets, only their toes peeking out, each one a reminder that someone, somewhere, will have to bear the weight of that loss forever.

Funerals have become routine. Young men and women - fresh-faced and full of promise - are lowered into the earth while their parents clutch at the air, searching for something to hold on to. The coffins blur together, until grief becomes indistinguishable from rage. The young are buried while the old are left behind, wondering how the natural order of life became so violently reversed.

Winter’s bite carries the stench of burning homes and fallen soldiers. Families shelter underground, huddled together not for warmth, but for survival. A soldier’s last letter home, stained with dirt and tears, rests in a pocket as his body lies unclaimed on a battlefield. A girl with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes stands at the edge of a mass grave, searching for her father’s face among the sea of the dead.

The rhetoric of war is loud, but the consequences are quiet. Politicians argue over borders and sovereignty while bodies are zipped into black bags. Leaders speak of “collateral damage” as if they are not speaking of human hearts, human souls, human futures. We count the dead like statistics - 5 dead, 12 injured, 1 missing - as though behind those numbers are not hands that once held other hands, voices that once called out names in the dark, lips that once kissed away tears.

But the heart knows what the mind tries to forget: every number is a life. A child who will never grow old. A father who will never walk his daughter down the aisle. A mother who will sit with one empty chair at the dinner table for the rest of her days.

And yet, the bombs continue to fall. The bullets keep tearing through flesh. The cycle of violence feeds on itself, consuming generation after generation. Hatred breeds more hatred. Revenge fuels more revenge. And in the end, it is not the powerful who suffer - not the men in suits and polished shoes. It is the ordinary people. The ones who wake to the sound of sirens and mortar fire. The ones who lose their homes, their limbs, their children. The ones whose names will never make the headlines.

We are drowning in grief, but the world barely pauses. We scroll past images of broken bodies with a flick of the thumb, conditioned to see suffering as just another news cycle. But these are not stories. These are lives - extinguished too soon, buried too deep, mourned too briefly.

How much blood must be spilt before we understand that no land, no ideology, no political victory is worth the life of a single child? When will we understand that peace is not the absence of war - it is the presence of compassion, of justice, of humanity?

Because war does not end when the last bomb drops or the final treaty is signed. It lives on in the hearts of the broken. In the empty beds and the vacant chairs. In the photographs that will never be updated. In the eyes of the living, forever shadowed by the ghosts of the dead.

And if we are to salvage what remains of our humanity, we must remember that beneath the rubble and beneath the uniforms, there are hearts that beat like ours, hands that once held other hands, eyes that once crinkled with laughter. We must learn to see the faces behind the numbers. To mourn the dead on all sides. To fight not for land, but for life.

Because the greatest tragedy is not just the loss of human life - it is the loss of human mercy.