After her father, brother and husband were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, grief-stricken Elizabeth Turner leaves Oxford and volunteers to serve as an ambulance driver with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in Flanders. She finds love again with a fellow ambulance driver in the Corps, but Catherine is lost to her too when Elizabeth is taken prisoner by the Germans during their offensive in 1918. After the war she is released into the care of the British Red Cross and returns to England a very different young woman to the one who left its shores two years before. Distrustful of men and estranged from her family, Elizabeth gradually rebuilds her life through a mysterious man who has also been damaged by war.