Adrien F., a lieutenant in the French army, succumbs to mortar fire on the banks of the Meuse river. In the years that follow, Adrien is often to consider whether it would have been better had he died on the day.
Hit in the face, Adrien sustains terrible injuries, that make his survival under the rudimentary care he receives at the field hospital unlikely. But survive he does and within days he is sent to the hospital at Val-de-Grace on the outskirts of Paris, to a closed ward without mirrors, specially reserved for those who have lost their faces. Adrien will know nothing of the terrible hardships his comrades suffer in the trenches, the agony of a war that is meant to be over in months but lasts for five years.
For him, the war is this one room and the endless round of pain and reconstruction. But among the men who have no faces a special bond of friendship is created, and when their select group is joined by a woman whose beauty can only now be imagined, Adrien discovers that hope and humanity and humour can endure even there, in the officers' ward.
This novel is based on the real story of one man's war, as Marc Dugain, a prize-winning novelist in his native France, recreates the experience and the words of his own grandfather.
In the officers' ward of a Paris hospital, three young men and a woman meet in the early days of World War I. Each has suffered horrific injuries to the face and the friendship that forms between them sustains them through the months and years that follow.
