This is the story of two youthful combatants caught up in one of the most famous and important campaigns in all history. After two years of war and thirty-five days of intense marching along a hundred miles of hot summer roads, Thomas Ware, a Confederate soldier from rural Georgia, and Franklin Horner, a Union soldier from the coal country of Pennsylvania, end up fighting on virtually the same battlefield at Gettysburg. En route to that fateful day, both make daily entries in small, leather-bound diaries they carry. They write about what's important to them -- receiving mail, writing letters, having something to eat, surviving combat. Historian Mark Nesbitt places the entries into the larger context of the war and amplifies the diarists's commentary.