Charley Goddard

Charley is a fifteen-year-old boy who is growing up in Winona, Minnesota at the beginning of the Civil War. When the story begins, he is almost a man, working in the fields for long hours along with the men. His voice has just changed, and he is tall enough to look like a man. He has large hands, big as a stove lid. He cannot grow a beard yet, but he wants to be treated like a man.

Charley experiences the worst horrors of the war in front-line combat, and the reader sees him mature from a young, impressionable boy into an "old man." He is not old in the sense of years, but in the sense of battles: meadows, tree lines, noise, smoke, blood, suffering and a great deal of death.

Charley steals food and trades with the enemy illegally, but this is accepted behavior. Charley...