Mist rose from the battlefield, spiraling up through black leafless tree limbs and into the sky like the escaping souls of the recently dead. Had Doc the strength to feel anything but exhaustion the sight might have elicited, in this place, at this time, if not fear at least mild apprehension. As things stood he barely gave the eerie display a second glance.
The medic shivered, not in response to his surroundings, but to the damp, unrelenting cold that seeped into every joint, every muscle. Wiping a runny nose back across a filthy, blood-stained sleeve he settled in for a long night. Dawn remained several hours distant; an elusive goal the young southerner set his thoughts on reaching.
Dawn broke, bringing little cheer to those few left alive with its pale, half-hearted attempt at banishing the cold and damp and dark. Doc wanted to stretch his cramped muscles and work the blood back into legs gone leaden with inactivity and the weight of the man who lay, unmoving, across them. He wanted to, but couldn't bring himself to give up the friend he'd lost to the freezing ground – not yet.
A hand on his shoulder and movement as someone crouched down beside him; Doc was no longer alone. With effort he lifted his head from his breast and found himself gazing wearily into the red-rimmed eyes of Paul Lemay whose kindly, sympathetic expression made the medic feel the only bit of warmth to comfort him, body and soul, for what seemed, and probably was, days.
"Give him to me, Doc. You've done all you could." Caje reached out to ease the lifeless body from the medic's lap.
Doc clung to the man in his charge, still a man to him and not a body, a corpse. "No, not yet, Caje. Just a few minutes more…you understand."
Across the battlefield crept recovery teams – men sent out to retrieve the bodies of their fallen comrades and in the rare case discover a man, a soldier, alive among the dead. As they worked, the men's voices were subdued, respectful, as if in church, as if in prayer.
Doc smoothed the tousled blond hair back from Saunders' forehead and attempted to straighten the ragged, torn lapels of the sergeant's field jacket. Glancing at the patiently waiting Caje, Doc smiled; the gesture bittersweet at best. "It's a blessing," he murmured.
Caje looked confused. "A blessing, Doc? What are you talkin' about?"
"It's truly a blessing Sarge died the way he did. He didn't suffer. Death came quick and painless – a blessing."
The Cajun shook his head. "I don't see no blessing in Sarge dyin'. None at all."
Doc looked around. It wasn't like he hadn't seen these bodies before, these men. He'd seen them all right and heard the sounds of their death agonies. How many wounded soldiers had he himself tended; bodies torn and bleeding, pain too awful to comprehend.
"Sarge didn't suffer. His death was a blessing, Caje. Someday you'll see that. Someday…"