When Bernie Jones went to war in 1918 he was part of a transition that changed the whole nature of our country. Born just before the turn of the Century, he grew up in a day when Kansas City, Missouri was on the dividing live between a maturing nation and the old wild west. He and his gang of boyhood friends looked on their advent into the United States Army as a great camp-out with little chance of real action. It was supposed that the German forces would fold the minute they saw fresh new troops opposite them in the trenches of France. It didn't happen. They fought fierce last-ditch engagements at Chateau Thierry, Saint Mihiel, and especially the Argonne. Bernie and his friends find their moments-of-truth in that last desperate fighting. When the smoke clears, he is left alone to go home to an uncertain future in a country that would never again be isolated. His stressed-out mind is full of bloody images and self-doubts, leaving him to rely on a tenuous faith that promises to keep him alive until the time when he can reorient himself and begin life over again.