James and Kevin Bannon, Brothers introduced in Look Away, continue to serve on opposing sides as the Civil War enters it third year, James with the 4th Virginia Infantry and Kevin commanding a company in the 4th New Jersey. From the dark and inconclusive days of the Mine Run Campaign in the Fall of 1863, through the terrible ‘Forty Days’ that took the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to the gates of Petersburg, the brothers soldier on.
James, with Lee’s Army, watches as it slowly bleeds itself to death defending the state he has grown to love. Kevin, living with the realization his brother is serving in the army his nation is committed to destroy, is torn between a desperate search for James and his terrible duty as an officer, leading men he has grown to love into battles that claim their lives, one by one.
While the Bannons deal with their struggles on and off the battlefield, the women they love are faced with their own desperate struggles. Mary Beth McPherson, amid the devastation that years of war have brought to Winchester, Virginia, strives to hold her surviving family together and somehow maintain their farm, all the while clinging to the hope the man she has grown to love will return.
In the North, Harriet Shields, daughter of a prominent New Jersey judge, sets aside the duty and dignity of her social class and, with Kevin’s full support, ministers to the needs of the wounded under conditions that try her resolve, her stamina, and often, her own faith.
As the war drags on, claiming more lives and crushing the sprits and hopes of those who endure it, James and Mary Beth, and Kevin and Harriet come to understand that even if they survive, the world they knew will never be regained, that their futures have become as uncertain as their own survival. Yet each resolves, for his and her own reason, to carry on as best they can, until the end.
