It is 1978. Edward is 72 years old. For reasons that are uncertain even to himself, he decides he ought to try to find out what had happened to his Father. All he knows is that his Dad, who was wounded in the Boer War, voluntarily enlisted in the First World War and was killed just before the end. Edward’s only recollection of this is the hardship it caused his mother and his two younger brothers, for whom he became the main bread winner in the family. Where his father was buried, where, how and even precisely when he died, Edward has never been told. Edward asks his eldest son to try to find out all he can. As that search for information proceeds, faltering step by faltering step, out of it come facts which form the basis of two stories, one of the soldier himself, the other of his family. Together they recapture the true impact the Great War had upon the lives of ordinary people.