This book is about the relentless horror of the trenches of the First World War. Before the reader is a grim chronicle of an imperialist slaughter, where death lurks for everyone, and only the author, by sheer accident, remains alive. Here are the front line, and rare leaves, and nights spent in villages; field dressing stations and endless digging of trenches. People live, fight, die—and the war goes on, like an endless nightmare. Barbusse dreamed that this conflict would be the last; yet, calling people "machines of oblivion," he bitterly doubted that humanity would ever renounce organized killing.