The throb and racket of the final Japanese attack had begun a mile or so away. Arcs of fire, red, yellow, orange, streamed across the sky; flares splashed glaring whiter and brighter than the moon, and sank slow as thistledown. The display raged in brilliant and beautiful violence, seeming to come from fore and aft of the position they had just abandoned, for perhaps twenty minutes, half an hour—then, over the deep clamor of explosives, there came the howl, thinned by distance but piercing eardrums like a glacier wind, of the Japanese infantry going in for the kill.

October 1941. Twenty-one-year-old Alan Mart is posted to India and taken under the wing of the dogmatic, overbearing acting captain Sam Holl. Following the Japanese advance on Singapore, the men are deployed to Malaya. What follows is a searing, quietly shattering depiction of the futility of war.