One stormy night in November 1954 Marcel Bozin, a low-born reservist from a rough, working class district of Paris, arrives at the grand old chateau of a long-lost comrade and professional soldier, Jean-Michel de Laziere de Rochefoulon. He is there hoping to rekindle a bizarre, symbiotic friendship that once blossomed when he helped this dashing aristocrat escape a massacre of French prisoners-of-war at the hands of the Nazis. Played out against the backdrop of France's brutal struggle in Algeria, as the story of that friendship unfolds Rochefoulon's passionate, yet unrequited wife meanwhile offers the observation that "in the end all of life comes down to that inner struggle to be doing the right thing - and hopefully for the right reasons." Hence, we encounter our two friends (and indeed France herself) wrestling with the conundrum of how to win a war against a ruthless and determined enemy whilst all the time operating within constraints of justice and a respect for human dignity borne of their own all-too-recent experience of occupation and tyranny. Furthermore, Elizabeth's words are given added poignancy by virtue of the conflict raging within Bozin between remaining true to his friend or yielding to forbidden desire towards his friend's beautiful and alluring wife; of the contradiction inherent in vocally condemning an 'immoral' war whilst simultaneously engaging in an act of personal immorality that, however masterfully it may seek to justify itself, ultimately cannot defy the laws of cause and effect; of the nobility of what pours from a man's lips being at variance with ignoble deeds done in secret? So, in life, love and war, do the ends ever justify the means? If so, as human beings what price must we therefore pay for willfully pursuing the expedient? By the time Bozin is finally compelled to undertake his perilous 'act of atonement', the answer - for these three tormented individuals, as well as for their country - is a very high price indeed.