Hunt has successfully portrayed the awful implications of war upon family, youth, and allegiance. Each of these subjects plays a significant role in Jethro's experience of the war. Each of these aspects of his life are dramatically altered as a result of the events of the war and how people he knows respond to those events.
Since the book begins with a depiction of Jethro's home life, it sets up this dynamic as the most significant guiding force in his life. Jethro's mother is his solid force; she keeps him grounded in a sense of stability. His family has survived some devastating tragedies already before the war's start, so they are no strangers to chaos. Unfortunately, young Jethro is not immune to the angst his family's unknown fate instills within him. When his brothers leave for the war, he loses all focus. The strong force in his life, his mother, cannot calm his fears. His antebellum life revolved around the idea of stability perpetuated by his work on the farm and his relationship to his famiiy. The intrusion of the war upon his routine threatens Jethro's worldview.
When his brothers leave, they may never return. Jethro is no stranger to losing family members, though, because of his sister's death. Now, however, he characterizes the situation differently because he is no longer a child. That's the real conflict of this novel. Jethro is faced with the choice to grow up or not because of how he decides to react to the effects of the war in his life. When the unpleasant reality of death, hate, and destruction are imposed into his life, he has to respond. All he can do is respond since he is helpless to change the situation. Over the course of the novel, Jethro makes a series of responses to changes which result from the chaos of living in a country fighting against itself. With each successive choice, he both gives up a piece of his youthful innocence and grabs hold of maturity. By the end, he emerges from the harsh forge of war a fully developed man.
Along the way, the issue which is repeatedly thrown in Jethro's face is that of allegiance. North, south, neither - who does he side with? His community sides with the north, but does he? When Bill is persecuted with hysteria for his decision of allegiance to the south, he throws a wrench in Jethro's well-ordered understanding of loyalty. Naturally, up to that point, Jethro would agree with his family, but what should he do when his family takes up mixed loyalties? He is forced to wrestle with the question of loyalty and whether his opinions about the war reflect on his allegiance to members of his family or if those opinions can exist on their own merit without familial association. In the end, both Jethro and his family conclude that the issue of loyalty never really mattered. Four years of their lives had been occupied against their will by hateful matters. Nobody won, and certainly everybody lost. Jethro concludes, then, that the only allegiance he owes to anyone is himself. He must treat all people with respect because they're doing all they can, just like him. If no one asked to endure a war, then they shouldn't be condemned for getting lost during that conflict.
Faced with a leaderless, war-torn country at the end of the novel, Jethro, the man, goes back to work on the family farm. His understandings of self, family, and country may have changed, but he holds onto those things because really that is the only way he sees fit to live. War changed everything, but then again, life continues. That's what life is: a series of events that are experienced and demand a response within each person.
