This book follows Vladimir Lossky's attempt to enlist in the French army after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940. It records his reflections on suffering; the true nature of Christian or Western civilization; the rightness or otherwise of war; the problematic relationship between Church and State; what we mean by a "nation"; and secularization. Such issues are mulled over, not as abstractions, by someone who, as he walks across an increasingly war-torn landscape, quite literally has his feet on the ground.

This work will be a revelation to those who know only Lossky's more scholarly works -- here one discovers his rounded personality, his warm humanity, and his love not only of Christian France but of the West in general.