The year was 1863, and Sergeant Elias Crowe had seen enough of war to move through it like a ghost.
He commanded a small detachment of Union soldiers tasked with securing a burned farmhouse at the edge of a Virginia wood. Most of his men were young, quick to flinch at shadows. Elias had long since stopped flinching.
The farmhouse held one survivor — a Confederate officer named Beaumont, delirious with fever, his leg wrapped in soiled cloth. Elias knelt beside him and uncovered the wound. It was bad, the skin cracked and weeping.
"There's ointment in my saddlebag," Beaumont rasped. "My wife packed it. Calendula and beeswax."
Elias retrieved it without a word and worked it carefully into the ruined flesh.
Private Dunleavy watched from the doorway. "Why bother, Sergeant? He'd shoot you dead come morning."
"Then I suppose the slim chance I give him tonight is more than he'd otherwise have."
Dunleavy spat. "Man's a fiend for the Southern cause. Killed three of Harmon's boys at the crossing last April."
Elias said nothing. He had learned that assigning such labels could invalidate the plain human thing before him — a man breathing, suffering, clinging to the thought of a wife who had packed him ointment.
He wrapped the leg clean and stood. His detachment would move on at dawn, leaving Beaumont to whoever came next. Elias felt no particular warmth toward the man. He felt very little toward anyone now.
But he had done the work, and in that moment, it was sufficient.