The trenches were only a taste of hell. It took a woman to teach him the real meaning of pain.


Young musician Tolly Tolman and his best pal Harry join up in 1914. To them it’s the great adventure, a ripping lark. Tolly pledges to wed his childhood sweetheart Ruth, Harry’s sister, ‘when the job is done’.

But nothing could have prepared Tolly for the horror of the trenches. Following the Armistice, he wanders lost in Paris. He can never face Ruth again, carrying a terrible guilt about the night Harry died.

He joins a jazz band and throws himself into tormented hedonism, embarking on an obsessive, drug-fuelled affair with a debauched American heiress.

Now she lies dead, and Tolly must flee Paris or face arrest and the guillotine. He finds himself back home, reading his own name on the town’s new war memorial…

…and learns the truth.