Story obstacle - looking for some opinions

Okay - so I'm in the midst of outlining the story for WIP #2, and came across a stumbling block I'm having a bit of difficulty figuring out how to address. Hoping you all may have some suggestions.

The basic situation:

Longtime soldier lets his cousin talk him out of retirement to serve in one last campaign, and when he returns to the army, he links up with numerous friends and colleagues from his past. The ensuing battle is a disaster, and at least 2/3 of the army perishes in the fighting. Oh, and all of this unfolds by the end of the second chapter (out of a planned sixteen).

My dilemma:

While a number of my MCs friends survive the battle, and prove essential to the later story, a great many of them die in the fighting. The thing is, though, this is all very early in the story, and I want to keep things rolling, not venture off into reunionland. At the same time, I don't want to focus exclusively on the three or four friends who survive, because I always hate it in books and movies when all of the heroes friends conveniently survive disasters while everyone else dies around them.

So...I suppose I'm looking for suggestions/opinions on how to introduce a larger number of characters and then kill most of them off in the space of about a chapter.

The best solution I've managed to come up with is alluding to a larger number, but focusing on five or maybe six close friends, then killing half of them off (and possibly having some of those alluded friends take more prominence later on).

Make sense?

The focus is definitely on events after the battle...but the MC's story very definitely starts before the battle, and I think it's important to begin there for certain character arc reasons that crop up later in the narrative.

TheIT said:

The MC is the POV character?

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Yes, he is.

Think of the POV character's viewpoint rather than thinking of it as introducing other characters. Unless the other characters are important, I wouldn't spend a lot of words on them. Sounds like what's important is how the MC is going to be affected by their deaths. What needs to get established is that they're important to the MC.

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Some of the surviving characters will be crucial to the story. Those that die I don't want to spend a lot of time on, but I also don't want to just list off a bunch of names. I want to hint at a deeper connection, a shared history, but do so very briefly. The main point of their deaths is twofold. The first - realism (i.e. avoiding the convenience of all his friends happening to survive). The second - to bring this epic tragedy to a personal level, so of, say, twelve friends, maybe only three make it out alive.

Another thing to consider: reader reaction. Whenever I start reading a story, I spend the first chapter or so trying to figure out who the important characters are, in other words, my traveling companions for the rest of the novel. If too many detailed characters are thrown into the mix at once, it gets really confusing.

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That's why I want to keep the first chapter as I've planned, with the MC working his farm, content in his retirement, until his happy pastoral life is interrupted by a visit from his cousin.

And it's also the core of my dilemma with these old war buddies - I don't want to enter confusion territory, but again, I want to avoid falling into the convenience of all the MC's friends surviving the battle while so many others don't.

Can you have a hospital scene after the battle? Lots of new people. They can just be discarded when MC moves on or they can receive a direct hit.

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It'd be tough. We're talking 3rd century B.C. Roman Republic here - no formalized hospitals to speak of, and certainly nothing capable of wiping out said hospital with a direct hit.