This is a very unusual book – both as regards the theme and the style. Two WWI soldiers experience the horrors of war, slaughtering mercilessly and seeing their comrades slaughtered. Each one finds himself alone in the most devastating conditions on a mountainside in the Romanian Carpathians, after all of his respective companions have died – accidentally, by suicide or in the relentless gunfire while attempting to push a cannon up the hillside. Neither of them has any real hope or wish to survive. They are starving, bitterly cold, lost among the snow-covered boulders.