Although the story only covers twenty-four hours, Jonathan is fighting an internal battle the entire time. He struggles with issues of patriotic activism contrasted with detached security, courage and cowardice, and loyalty and betrayal.

Jonathan has heard about the coming war, so at the first opportunity, he decides to show his patriotism by joining the revolutionary forces. His father had warned him to stay home and out of the conflict, but Jonathan will not listen. His desire to serve—and to experience adventure—wins that particular battle.

Once he gets into a fighting unit and enters the fighting, his zeal cools considerably. He had assumed that he was a brave person and would act courageously, even nobly, to distinguish himself. When presented with a choice between advancing and retreating, he chooses the latter and flees to the relative safety of the woods. Although he does not stay there long, it is long enough to make him realize that being brave is no simple matter.

Once involved with the patriot and Hessian forces, he struggles again to be convinced that the Hessians are simply the evil enemy. Some individual men treat him kindly, so he in turn has compassion for them, which leads him to try to disobey an officer’s order. Now he is really torn, for he cannot determine which decision is right. By the time he returns home, his internal battle seems to have declared a temporary truce, but he has learned that this battle will resurface every time he goes off to fight.

The battle that Jonathan fights within himself is whether to tell the Corporal where the Hessian soldiers are. When the three soldiers captured him, Jonathan discovered that they have another young boy with them whose parents have been murdered. Jonathan believes that the Hessians were the killers, but it confuses him when one of the soldiers buries them and says a prayer for them. The entire time he is with them, they treat him kindly and not like a prisoner.

So, when he is able to escape and get to the Americans, Jonathan is shocked to realize that the Corporal is the real killer of the boy's parents, claiming that they were Tory traitors. The Corporal wants Jonathan to lead him to the Hessians, but Jonathan fights a battle within himself. He had thought of the Hessians as the evil enemy, but they had treated him with kindness, and it was his own side that had committed a monstrous act of murder. Should he be loyal to his own people, or should he protect the "enemy"? That is Jonathan's war.