He considers his nationality an asset and doesn't feel ashamed when British officers try to belittle him. "The English may have seen war, but I have lived with Pa, so I have seen Hell." But it all turns against him when he is accused of murder, rape and crimes he never committed. He is accused without any proof and even the ones he considered his friends side with the accusers. The whole war scene gets even more bleak and darker as Stanhope finds himself among enemies on his own front. The story turns from depiction of external horrors to delusions of inner world that Stanhope experiences as war progresses. These delusions have a strong bearing on him as begins seeing an imaginary graveyard. The delusions turn even stranger when he notices that he is capable of seeing ghosts of dead soldiers that roam around in the battlefield not knowing they are dead. His world has turned upside down since he came to war and he is no longer naive young man lost in his own idealistic world. When idealism clashes with ugly realities, the result is even as shattering as the mental and emotional state of Stanhope who longs to share his experiences with his brother in a desperate attempt to make some sense of the senselessness surrounding him. The...

This is what sets it apart from millions of other war stories churned out every now and then. For example in Chapter six of the book, Stanhope writes: "You could hear the wounded moaning long before we ever got there. They were lying in the grass around the portable buildings. Men, towels over their eyes, were sitting dumbfounded and gasping in the road.... In the yard, the freshly wounded; inside, men were puffed grotesque with rot: fingers the size of pickles, arms and legs like blood-sausage balloons."
All in all, the novel is at par with other exceptional war fiction such as Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the western front. But unfortunately not every author is as wise or as lucky as their contemporaries because to hand over her work to a science fiction publisher was equivalent to a career suicide. Patricia Anthony probably didn't know which genre to place her novel in and thus offered to Ace Publishers. But little did she know what her blunder would cost her- her writing career.

References

Patricia Anthony Flanders, Ace Publishers, 1998