The early summer morning was chilly, but the sun rose warm and orange over the low eastern hills of the small New Hampshire town. Pvt. Elliott Libby, the town’s school master, stepped out on his front porch to begin his long journey: initially to join his comrades-in-arms in the 14th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry, to go and fight for The Union against the pernicious institution of slavery over which some states had recently succeeded in order to maintain.

The front door behind him opened and his wife, Hanna, and their small son, Telemachus, came out. They all stood silent for a few moments, and then, he grabbed his son, lifted and hugged him. Turning to Hanna, he pulled her to himself, kissed and tightly held her as long as he could. Then, it was time to go. Some neighbor men were already on the road calling to Elliott to come with them. He grabbed his small satchel and his rifle, turned back to look at his family, stepped off the porch and was about to reach the road, when Hanna called after him.

She came running, tears in her eyes, little Telemachus trotting behind her. She held out a small fold of orange cloth, a bandana, that she had made out of a bit of extra fabric from which she had made a blouse. She had already packed a few white handkerchiefs for him in his satchel, but this one was special. She loved the color, it reminded her of sunsets and orange Pippin apples, like the ones in their orchard from which she made Elliott’s favorite pies. She placed the new bandana around his neck and lovingly tied it. She said it would have to stand in for her while they were apart, close and warm around him. With that, he quickly turned and following the calls from the other men, he opened the gate and moved off, leaving his world behind.

The war went on and on, a few letters reached Hanna, even fewer reached Elliott. His regiment went to Washington to defend the national capital. There, they mustered with other brigades, and eventually went on to New Orleans and from there, back through Georgia. His regiment saw action in North Carolina and Virginia and those who remained were finally mustered out in July of 1865. Elliott was mustered out by a sniper’s bullet a few months earlier, near Savannah.

He never lived to see his daughter, Penelope, born exactly nine months after he left Hanna and Telemachus behind, who became a foreign missionary, lost  en route to the Ottoman Empire in 1899. He never lived to see his son go to Bowdoin College and become a teacher like himself, and who perished on the Titanic, as he returned from a long-awaited sabbatical to Oxford in 1912. He never lived to grow old with Hanna, who never remarried and lived to her late 70’s, when she was taken by the Spanish Flu.

A cold rain came down, as daylight fell. The remains of now Capt. Elliott Libby lay by the road. In his hand was a wad of orange cloth. When the orderlies came to retrieve his body, the cloth fell to the ground. There it lay, almost indistinguishable, from the red ochre-colored mud of Georgia, to be forgotten or perhaps to be found and repurposed by someone as a cloth to clean a rifle or polish a pair of boots; or maybe to just to lie there and became one with the earth, the blending of Hanna’s love and Elliott’s sweat and blood, left behind on a foreign field of battle, as has happened millions of times throughout the history of mankind: A forgotten bit of cloth, a forgotten man, a forgotten human tragedy.