In the shadow of World War I, a wounded man must decide what he owes to a country that has already taken so much from him. Nicholas Nanjivell, Nicky-Nan to the folks of Polpier, once moved through the world with easy confidence. Now he shuffles through his days in a fog of pain and penury, his injured leg and empty pockets having driven him into bitter isolation. The children play at war in the streets while their elders whisper of battles to come, and the entire town holds its breath as Europe slides toward catastrophe. When the call comes for Nicky-Nan to serve as a naval reservist, he faces a cruel arithmetic: his country demands his body, but his body has already failed him once. Written in 1915, when the war's end remained unimaginable, Quiller-Couch captures a community suspended between the old world and the unimaginable one about to descend. His Cornwall, rocky, windswept, stubbornly human, provides the backdrop for this intimate study of what duty means when you have little left to give.
