Pippin says that the guards were too afraid to disobey, that my father was pushed past the edge of sanity.

Men I had known since I was a child, men I trained with or helped train – all but one would have let me burn. Without a word of protest, they helped to build the pyre that would have been my deathbed. Only Beregond had the courage to defy Denethor’s madness. Mindless, the others obeyed, uncaring that I yet lived.

“We were just following orders,” they have said, as if these words make their inaction forgivable. “We did not dare argue.”