The shattered bronze of the fallen general didn’t remain in the square to rust. By noon, four heavy quarry wagons were loaded with the jagged metal plates and hauled through the snow to the town foundry at South Wharf.
“The bronze was paid for with stolen commoner relief funds,” Tomas Reed instructed the master founder. “Melt it down fully. Cast forty eight-inch water-pipe channels and fifty sewer grates for the lower working district of High Redoubt. Let the metal that was cast to boast of false glory spend the next century carrying clean water to working people.”
Meanwhile, in the center of the square, six master stonemasons set up their work frames around the bare, scarred stone base of red granite.
With steel chisels and heavy mallets, they cut deep into the polished stone, carving Captain Danel’s unchanging words across the southern face:
WE STOOD BECAUSE THE ROAD BEHIND US WAS FULL OF OUR OWN MOTHERS.
And on the other three faces of the granite block, the masons chiseled the names of all two thousand four hundred conscripts of the Fourth Commoner Levy, grouping them by their sixty-four native villages.
When the final stroke was carved and the lead inlay smoothed flush with the granite, Sergeant Karr and Martha Miller laid a wreath of fresh winter spruce boughs at the foot of the stone base.
