The horizon is reddish black, the soil exhales scarlet vapors. The huge wheel turns and turns, rotates for aeons together with the earth, and howls through space with heart-rending moans. Bound hand and foot upon it, I have little choice but to follow its deadly revolutions. They are sluggish, for the wheel turns without the slightest haste. Hopelessly slow, it exhibits the sure and inexorable motion of natural law.
Reason is the weakest of all bulwarks against their frenzied activities.
The hell of war is brought to life in an almost sensual glory, as told by a young soldier recording his life for his girl back home. So the tension in this work is not whether he will survive, or what army will emerge victorious. The narrative tension is held by each small story as it unfolds, and the promise of more to come. He joined the army as a college educated idealist from Lesvos who was joining the revolution to overthrow the king of Greece and institute a classical democracy. Ostensibly, they were fighting the Germans and the Bulgarians who, ostensibly, were attempting to restore the King to his throne.