In the thick of the brutal trench warfare of World War I France, British Private Arthur Hamp (Courtenay), shellshocked after a particularly brutal attack, elects to walk home to England from the front. When he is subsequently court-martialed, his assigned defender, Captain Hargreaves (Bogarde), finds that the private is just a simple boy from the country. As Hargreaves slowly begins to appreciate the helplessness of Hamp and other enlisted men, he is forced to confront the horror of war and the fatal consequences of the hierarchies of officer and enlistee, rich and poor, within the army. After The Lawless, Time Without Pity and The Damned, this is the last of Losey's "message pictures."