I think I stirred back to life but fifteen minutes after it was over. The battle is done, and I am lying in a field of blood-soaked earth, lucky to be alive. My jaw is clenched in pain, and I cannot feel my left hand. I do not look down because I don’t want to see the blood. I do not close my eyes, because then I might remember what I fear the most.

A fellow captain comes rushing towards me. “I think he’s the last one,” he yells back to someone before he comes to help me up. I don’t ask what he means, because I already know.

“How many?” I try to ask, but my voice comes out as a croak. He gives me water, and I repeat my question.

He looks at me mournfully. “Fifty.”

“Oh, God.” I close my eyes in horror, and then it suddenly comes rushing back.

“Captain?” he murmurs, though he knows what I will ask next.

My eyes are still closed. “Please say he’s not dead.” I can hear the begging terror in my own voice. The captain is silent, and that is all I need to know.

He speaks again, and there is hesitation in his voice. “Captain, his wife—”

I am silent.

“I’m sorry. But you knew him best.” I cannot argue that. I did know him best.

He gives me a gentle push towards the tents.

There’s never a good time to do this. My hands are filthy and sweating, my stomach is churning like anything, and all I want to do go home, away from this war and this horrible task.

We should be celebrating, because we won the battle. We beat the enemy, wiped them out completely. Three hundred against five hundred, and we thought we were going to lose. We should be celebrating, but we barely have fifty men left.

I can see her tent. There’s a small fence around it, because she is—was—the general’s wife and the men love her, and to keep the only woman in the company safe. She walks out now, when she hears my footsteps. Her face is ashen, and her hands are holding bandages and ointments.

“We’ve won, haven’t we?” she asks, her pretty young face worried and her mouth taut.

I nod, dreading what I have to tell her. I open my mouth, but she’s already pushed path me and is hurrying down the path with her bandages. She wants to help. Gods, but she’s given up enough already, only she doesn’t know it.

The dead and the injured stretched from the edge of the tents to across the entire battlefield. She stopped dead for a moment, because this is clearly more than she was expecting.

“What on earth—” She turned to face me, and looked at me squarely. I looked away, afraid of what I would find in her eyes.

“How many of you are left?” she whispers. She knows there were three hundred of us to begin with. She can see almost that many of us lying lifeless before her.

Her voice wavers. “Where is my husband?”

The look on my face, I think, tells her all she needs to know.