During World War I, a French general (Macready) orders his men on a suicidal charge; when they fail, he picks three of them to be tried and executed for cowardice. An extraordinarily effective showing of the insanity of war, of life in the trenches, and probably more genuinely pacificist than either Saving Private Ryan or The Thin Red Line. The screenplay is written by Kubrick with two of his favorite novelists, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson.