This powerful story of a young rifleman's agony during the Battle of Franklin in 1864 ranks with the foremost novels of the Civil War. It has already won praise for it's originality and power in the New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Southern Living and many other journals. The black flower symbolizes the rifleman's sense of doom in the midst of Union cannons firing upon John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee. That army literally disappears in a hail of rifle and cannon fire from the Union entrenchments. Bushrod Carter's senses record the Confederate charge and its deadly consequences with the clarity of Michael Shaara's Killer Angels and the poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet's epic John Brown's Body.