After a prologue with
Robert E. Lee smashing the
Army of the Potomac at the Battle of
Camp Hill, Pennsylvania due to him not losing
Special Order 191, in October 1862, and the subsequent Anglo-French diplomatic recognition of the
Confederate States of America. The embittered
Abraham Lincoln tells
British Ambassador Richard Lyons that the United States would eventually get even by finding a European ally to match both the
United Kingdom and
France; the Ambassador laughs scornfully, but Lincoln's prophecy comes true when by 1914 the US would be the firm ally of
Imperial Germany. In the larger Southern Victory Series context, the CSA and the
USA remained hostile powers toward one another during the decades between 1862 and 1914. A second military defeat of the USA by the CSA in the
Second Mexican War (1881–1882) greatly intensified the resentment and hatred of the Confederate States in the USA, where
Remembrance Day becomes a grim official holiday marking the 1882 surrender and keeping alive the dream of revenge for the two humiliations inflicted by the South. The novel's main plot begins on June 28, 1914, the same day
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife
Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg of
Austria-Hungary, are
assassinated in
Sarajevo by
Nedeljko Čabrinović with a bomb thrown into their car and explodes (as opposed to
Gavrilo Princip with a gun in our timeline), with the incident drawing the
European powers into a whirlwind of war. At the eruption of an alternate
World War I known as the
Great War, the USA and CSA find themselves on opposite sides of the divide between the
Central Powers and the
Entente Powers, respectively. The fighting in
Europe quickly spreads to
North America, where the pro-German United States under
President Theodore Roosevelt and 75-year-old General
George Armstrong Custer declare war on
President Woodrow Wilson's CSA, which are allied with the United Kingdom, France, and
Russia. After the Confederate seizure of
Washington, D.C., and invasion into
Pennsylvania, and initial US invasions of
Kentucky,
Canada, and western
Virginia, the conflict bogs down into
trench warfare. By the end of novel, in the autumn of 1915, the Confederates have been slowly driven out of Pennsylvania and back into
Maryland, while
poison gas assists the
U.S. Army's slow advance through Kentucky. Across the
Mississippi River, in the western part of the continent, the conflict is a war of movement, with the U.S. pushing deep into
Sequoyah (our world's
Oklahoma) and Confederate-owned
Sonora. In the wider world the war has gone much the same as in actual history but the U.S has successfully conquered the
Sandwich Islands (
Hawaii) from Britain, and
Argentina has joined the Entente and is fighting Central-Powers' allied
Chile. In Canada, British and Canadian forces are slowly driven back to
Guelph,
Ontario and U.S. soldiers successfully establish a foothold on the north bank of the
St Lawrence river.
Winnipeg remains in Canadian hands, enabling Canada to remain in the war. The novel ends with the beginning of a
Marxist rebellion of
African Americans against the war-distracted government of the CSA. Most of the characters in the book are everyday people caught up in the bigger world of a global war. One main character in the book who goes on to play a major role in the series is a Confederate artillery sergeant named Jake Featherston. This book is followed by
The Great War: Walk in Hell, and then
The Great War: Breakthroughs. ==Similar works==