“War So Terrible” follows the wartime careers of two privates, Benjamin Franklin Meyers of the Union army and Andrew Jackson Stewart of the Confederacy as their attitudes toward battle evolve with their experience in war. Opponents in an 1861 engagement, Meyers and Stewart meet again in a dramatic late-war assault, which provides the occasion thirty-one years later for a ceremony in Stewart’s hometown. Through a series of flashbacks, “War So Terrible” graphically depicts the realities of combat and explores how those realities differed from the way subsequent generations portrayed and remembered the Civil War.

Parental discretion is advised.