The first novel in Barker`s World War I trilogy. Siegfried Sassoon, a homosexual and a poet, protests the war with a statement in a London newspaper and, rather than being court-martialed, is sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital in the care of a psychiatrist, William Rivers, who specializes in shell-shock. His treatment of Sassoon and the other patients at the hospital--among them poet Wilfred Owen--leads him to question the rationale for his work: to send these men back to the front. The novel is an eloquent protest of the madness of war.