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.