A pre-war amateur cycling career is cut short by call-up. Trained as a sniper, the man, whose name the reader never knows for sure, embarks for war-torn Europe. Undecided how to resume his life at the War’s close and disturbed by what he has left behind on the Continent, he is compelled to return, dispensing first medical aid, then something quite different. His story, he learns, has been turned into a novel. Without his knowledge or approval. As he now reads, comments on and corrects the novel, he begins to struggle to distance himself from false heroics and death.