La vie et rien d'autre (Life and Nothing But)

It is two years after the Great War. France is still licking its terrible wounds and counting its dead - meantime the politicians are in search of The Unknown Soldier, the symbol who will glorify war for France and ennoble the politicos by association. On a former battlefield in France in 1920, a commander of the French army, Major Dellaplane, a quiet, courteous and inhibited man, is charged with identifying and taking a census of soldiers killed in action during the Great War. He is conducting this gruesome and harrowing job when he comes into contact with the widow of a missing officer who is passionately in search of her lost husband and harsh-tongued with the bureaucrats who obstruct her in her quest. She first turns the harshness on him, then, recognising his kindness and sincerity and also beginning to recognise that her husband is gone forever, she turns her long-repressed passion towards him.