Sylvia Day who goes to Crete to be with her brother, an archaeologist, who is working on the island with a young Italian in the days immediately preceding World War II. Those peaceful days are remembered when later the brother and sister find themselves once again on the island, the former a nurse and her brother an airman. The remains of past civilisations take a prominent part in this story as Cretan patriots and Allied troops fight a guerilla warfare through the mountains and Sylvia stays on after the evacuation and helps organise an underground resistance movement against the Nazis. The novel gets its title from that gallant band who, in the harbors and on the soil of Crete, planted '...so immortal a flower of heroism.'