By autumn 1943 in Danton, Kentucky, the government has converted the small town's college into an Army Air Corps pre-preflight facility, the nearby state mental hospital into a treatment center for soldiers suffering battle-fatigue, and installs a satellite POW camp in the south end of town. Major Sam Ross, a fighter pilot shot down and badly wounded in Tunisia, arrives to take command of the school. Ross, also an excellent musician, has a chance encounter with a widowed schoolteacher with whom he falls in love but faces possible rejection because of her teenage son. Woven into the story are the accounts of an anti-Nazi German prisoner of war who, fearing for his life, escapes one POW camp and tries to get to the Danton POW facility; attempts to heal battle fatigue, especially a case involving a heinous crime perpetrated by German captors on a U.S. soldier later liberated; an itinerant evangelist gassed in France in WWI and his musically gifted wife; the wisdom of a one-legged, railroad-crossing watchman, a veteran of the Spanish-American War; the searching for meaning by a ministerial student; a night-club/big-band songstress; and how it was in small-town U.S.A. in the precise time-frame of autumn 1943.

By autumn 1943 in Danton, Kentucky, the government has converted the small town's college into an Army Air Corps pre-preflight facility, the nearby state mental hospital into a treatment center for soldiers suffering battle-fatigue, and installs a satellite POW camp in the south end of town. Major Sam Ross, a fighter pilot shot down and badly wounded in Tunisia, arrives to take command of the school. Ross, also an excellent musician, has a chance encounter with a widowed schoolteacher with whom he falls in love but faces possible rejection because of her teenage son. Woven into the story are the accounts of an anti-Nazi German prisoner of war who, fearing for his life, escapes one POW camp and tries to get to the Danton POW facility; attempts to heal battle fatigue, especially a case involving a heinous crime perpetrated by German captors on a U.S. soldier later liberated; an itinerant evangelist gassed in France in WWI and his musically gifted wife; the wisdom of a one-legged, railroad-crossing watchman, a veteran of the Spanish-American War; the searching for meaning by a ministerial student; a night-club/big-band songstress; and how it was in small-town U.S.A. in the precise time-frame of autumn 1943.

This passionate and moving story of social injustice, violence and revenge, set in the Valencian huerta, has become the classic text of Spanish regional realism. Blasco Ibanez, the 'Spanish Zola', dramatically confronts one of the great social issues of the late nineteenth century, the possession of land, in a vivid recreation of the local types and traditional customs of a closed rural community which jealousy guards its rights and administers its own rough justice against the outsider. The novel is both a lyrical hymn to nature and an expose of man's inhumanity to man, narrated with a human compassion worthy of his master, Galdos. Spanish text with facing-page translation, introduction and notes.