Detective Douglas Kingsley, for refusing to go fight in World War I, ends up in prison. There, a near-certain death awaits him—he is a London police officer. However, British intelligence kidnaps him to send him to Flanders—not to fight, but to investigate the murder of an officer: a noble aristocrat and famous poet.
Soon he understands that both evidence and witnesses disappear in the bloody whirl of war. And he himself almost disappears—he lives under another name, and his wife has been told that he died. Will he live under a new name? Will he find a new meaning in life and new love?