Pierre Barres was a French machine gunner during World War I. He participated in the Battle of Verdun, where he experienced periods of monotony fighting off rats, poor rations, dysentery and boredom punctuated by violence as he and his comrades fought off the German advance. The horror Barres witnessed left him and his comrades so numb that they did not realize that God's judgment, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation, had very nearly taken place on no-man's-land.