The battle at the Northern Ford had no official name for three months after it occurred, because the people who would have given it one were too busy surviving its consequences to concern themselves with historical nomenclature. The soldiers who had fought there called it the Ford, or the Crossing, or sometimes simply the Night the River Ran Red, which was the most accurate but also the most difficult to repeat in front of the families of the dead without a particular quality of hesitation that served neither the living nor the memory of those who were not.
It began with a supply column.
