'The First World War? I wasn't there. The muddy trench, the bone-piercing dampness, the black winter rats, the smell of cigarettes and shit, the rain constantly pouring out of God's steely sky - that wasn't the war I knew.' In the officers' ward of a hospital in Paris, three young men and a woman meet in the early days of the First World War. Each of them has suffered horrific injuries to the face: Adrien, the narrator, Penanster, a Breton aristocrat, Weil, a Jewish aviator, and Marguerite, a nurse, one of the few women in the hospital. The friendship that the four form sustains them through the months and years that follow. When the war ends they are released from hospital, to adapt as they can to life outside. Based on the true war experiences of the author's grandfather, this is a moving, humorous and humane novel about war and survival.