Lee Harrington, the central figure of the novel, is a young man trying to sort out his memories of the tales of the Civil War told him by his grandfather and his father, and to imagine what their lives must have been like, and what the War had done to them. The tale ranges from past to present, from Gettysburg and Savage's Station and Shiloh to present-day Kansas. Pennell employs a fragmented, interior-monologue narrative style, giving his reader a view of the War as his characters must have experienced it, and he does it with amazing control.