Aldrath and Snowe jointly composed a dispatch to the Lord Marshal that night, the two generals writing by candlelight at the command post table while their armies rested and the Horde held the ground south of the depression with the quiet, organized permanence it brought to every piece of ground it had occupied in the campaign.
The dispatch was honest in the way that field reports had to be honest when the situation they described would be independently verified by the testimony of every officer who had been in the engagement and every soldier who was going to talk to their comrades about what they had seen.
There was no advantage to managing the narrative when the narrative was already circulating in every tent in the camp in the version that the soldiers who had been inside it were telling.
