In autumn 1914, on one of the first days of shooting, Adrien Fournier, a lieutenant in the French Army, leads a reconnaissance mission to the Meuse River. From the opposite bank, German mortar fire blasts the team, killing all but Adrien who is hit in the face by shrapnel. He sustains terrible injuries. In the ensuing years, Adrien is left to wonder whether it would have been better had he, too, died that day on the river.Adrien is sent to the hospital at Val-de-Grace on the outskirts of Paris - to a closed ward without mirrors, reserved for those who have been disfigured. He will never know the incredible hardships his comrades will suffer in the trenches, nor the agony of a long war that most expected to last only a few months.Instead, Adrien's war is an endless round of pain and reconstruction and this one room, which he shares with a Jewish aviator and a Breton aristocrat. Between bouts of surgery, a special bond of friendship forms among these faceless men. And when a once-beautiful woman joins their group, Adrien discovers that hope, humanity, and humor can endure even there, in the officers' ward. Read Less