Through My Eyes: The Ground Beneath Our Feet (Through My Eyes: A Civil War Novel Series)

Spring, 1861. Warm light spills across the Georgia hills, and talk of war drifts no farther than the porch rails and crossroads stores.Robert Mercer knows every furrow of his family's land — the way the clay turns under the plow, the way the creek sounds after rain, the way the light falls across the upper field at dusk. He doesn't care much about politics. What he cares about is the farm, his neighbors, and the quiet life he's trying to build with a girl named Eleanor. But when a company begins forming in town, Robert doesn't weigh the cause. He mends what needs mending. He shows up where he's needed. He goes.Thomas Reed is the printer's son — the one who reads too much, notices too much, and says the sharp thing no one else will. He sets type in his father's shop and understands, better than most, how words can be arranged to make men march. He sees the contradictions stitched into the flag before the first shot is fired. He enlists anyway, because Robert does, and because some truths are easier to carry with a friend beside you.Harlan Jenkins left the South. He found work up North, built something that almost looked like a future, and tried not to think too hard about home. But when word of the war reaches him, something pulls tighter than ambition. He packs his things, crosses back below the line, and walks into the same recruiting office as the two boys he grew up with. He tells himself it's loyalty. He isn't sure yet what it will cost him to prove it.Three men. One company. A war none of them fully understand.'The Ground Beneath Our Feet' follows Robert, Thomas, and Harlan from the farms and workshops of their hometown into the sprawling chaos of Confederate camp life and, finally, into battle. This is not a story about generals or grand strategy. It is a story about the men who stood in line — who drilled in dust and slept in mud and wrote letters home that said less than they meant. Men who didn't own the South they were asked to die for, but who couldn't separate themselves from the ground beneath their feet or the people standing next to them.As the war strips away everything familiar, each man is forced to confront what he actually believes — about duty, about home, about the cause he signed up for and the one he's really fighting. Robert discovers that steadiness can become its own kind of trap. Thomas finds that seeing clearly doesn't protect you from anything. And Harlan learns that coming back is not the same as belonging.Told in rotating points of view with prose rooted in the physical world — red clay, wood smoke, mule sweat, the weight of a rifle that hasn't been fired yet — 'The Ground Beneath Our Feet' is a debut historical novel about friendship, complicity, and the impossible space between loyalty and conscience. It asks the question the history books leave out: What did it feel like to be an ordinary man fighting for a cause you couldn't fully name? Read more