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The setting is Saskatchewan, two years after the end of World War I. On the night before her wedding, Mary Chalmers dreams of her first love, Charlie Edwards. She dreams of their first meeting as they take shelter from a prairie thunderstorm and Charlie gives her a ride home on his horse. Their shy love grows, even as Mary's English mother disapproves of the "dirty farm boy" as a match for her daughter.
When war is declared, Charlie joins C Squadron of Lord Strathcona's Horse Regiment and sails for England. In his letters, he tells Mary of meeting the King of England, of volunteering to go over to France after the Second Battle of Ypres, in which the Germans first used chlorine gas as a weapon.
He tells of his sympathetic Sergeant, Gordon Muriel Flowerdew (Flowers) and recounts his life as a soldier –the trenches, the lice, the mud, the thunder of artillery, and the terrible battle of Moreuil Wood in which Flowerdew, now a Lieutenant, leads his squadron against the German machine guns.
The fictional lives of the young lovers in the opera are intertwined with historical events and with the real-life character of Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew, an Englishman who had emigrated to Canada and settled in Walhachin, BC. Flowerdew returned to Europe to serve in the Great War with Lord Strathcona's Horse.
In the 1918 battle of Moreuil Wood, Flowerdew carried out one of the last great cavalry assaults in history, leading a squadron of Lord Strathcona's Horse, armed with sabres, against German rifles and machine guns. The Canadians helped to stop the German offensive, but at enormous cost. Flowerdew himself died from his wounds and was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military award for valour.
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