Lieutenant Alexandre PagĂšs, a Roussillon man in the French army, is wounded during the First World War. The secret service takes advantage is his being out of action to send him to the French consulate in Barcelona on a secret mission: to enlist young Catalan patriots into the allied army, on the promise that once the war is over, Catalonia could be an independent country.

This novel reveals the involvement of the Catalans in the war, which did not only consist of the complicity of the industrialists who placed their factories at the service of the European armies. The author places us with a precision that falls between the cynical and the lyrical in Barcelona of 1914 to tell us the sad story of the Catalans who lost the First World War.