GHAZNI, Afghanistan — As they march for peace through Afghan villages laced with roadside bombs and bottomless heartache, their numbers keep growing.

They come from all walks of life, ages 17 to 65. Among them is a high school student who went home to complete his final exams before rejoining the others; a poet who still carries in his chest one of the four bullets he was shot with; a bodybuilding champion who abandoned his gym and has lost 20 pounds of muscle on the journey. They are day laborers, farmers, retired army officers, a polio victim on crutches, a mechanic who was robbed of his sight by war.

Afghanistan’s most striking grass-roots movement for peace in recent years started with just eight people. I started watching their movement then, when it was a hunger strike born out of pain and outrage at a suicide bombing that killed and wounded dozens in Helmand Province. A group of young men pitched a protest tent next to the carnage. Their blood had become cheap — too cheap, they said. For too long, they had been dying in silence.

Then they began marching north toward the capital through some of the most devastated parts of southern Afghanistan. We joined them this past Sunday, 30 days and 300 miles into their journey, as they rested their blistered feet in the cool of a small mosque near the city of Ghazni.