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Like all war or post-war novels, this one describes soldiers who were briefly called heroes and then were left to live in poverty and despair. But there is more than this thread in the story. It's also a story about failed relationships between a son and a father, betrayal of loved ones, friendship, greediness, corruption, secrets, pain, lost serenity... The novel is tragic and comic at the same time, where protagonists meet the end that had been written long since...

But he feels so tired. Exhaustion has finally overtaken him. Because this is all so stupid. It is as though he has just set down his suitcase, as though he has arrived. He could not climb the slope even if he wanted. He was within a hair’s breadth of surviving the war, and now here he is at the bottom of a shell crater. He slumps rather than sits and takes his head in his hands. He tries to assess the situation, but his confidence has suddenly melted away. Like an ice cream.
*
He looks like he is sleeping. Édouard recognizes him—what was his name again? He is dead. The realization is so devastating that Édouard Péricourt stops and stares down at his fallen comrade, and in that moment, he feels as though he, too, is dead, that what he is contemplating is his own death, and the pain of it is vast, overwhelming . . .
*
For several months, since he was first wounded at the Somme, since the interminable nights spent working as a stretcher bearer, scuttling around, terrified of being hit by a stray bullet, looking for wounded men on the battlefield, and even more since he had returned from among the dead, he knew that he would forever be inhabited by an indefinable, pulsing, almost palpable fear. This had been made worse by the devastating effects of having been buried alive. Some part of him was still buried in the earth, his body had emerged, but some captive, terrified part of his brain had remained trapped below.
*
His thoughts now were frozen images, distant and yet tenuously connected to him. There was no place for anger or for hope.
Édouard was profoundly depressed.
*
He made valiant efforts, he clenched his fists and vainly tried to picture the future, but it leached away through the tiniest of cracks, leaving him brooding about his past, which surged past like a river, a torrent of images with neither rhyme nor reason.
*
What you see is not exactly reality, your thoughts are ever shifting, your plans are like illusions, you live in a dream, in a story that is never quite your own.

And there is no tomorrow.
*
He had to face the facts: though inexplicable, it was not a misfortune, it was a tragedy. The end—whether this or another—had to come because it had been written long since.