Uncivil Wars opens in 1857 and takes the reader through the horrors of the Indian Mutiny to China and the Second Opium War, during which Speedicut is captured and tortured in the notorious Board of Punishments. Back in England, he remarries and he and his new wife spend their honeymoon in the United States, where they get caught up in the American Civil War - along with Scarlett O'Hara, Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler, all of whose real characters he ruthlessly exposes ...