In the final months of World War One three siblings fight their own personal battles as war rages on the frontlines. Newlywed Gertrude tries to keep her husband happy, take care of their infant daughter, and make a house a home, in the face of great odds. Her older brother Emory, a doctor in a field hospital, caring for soldiers injured in warfare and ravaged by Spanish influenza, finds love with an American nurse. And younger brother J.B. holds on to the dream of getting his life back and returning to his lover after falling victim to unfortunate circumstances. Sometimes survival is the best one can hope for. On the hundredth anniversary of these events the author has penned a remarkable story that fuses fiction and nonfiction.

These are the lives of the his own grandmother and great uncles, pieced together from actual letters, photographs, war diaries, and personal accounts he heard growing up. Attrition takes readers on a journey into the past, from the homefront to the trenches in France, and then further still into the labyrinth that is the human heart.