Flanders, 1914. David, a young Belgian schoolteacher, stands before the firing squad, sentenced to death as a deserter. Days earlier, he was teaching his fellow soldiers in the trenches to read and write, dreaming of a forbidden love back in Elverdinge, the Flemish village where he had worked as a teacher—and where, despite family tragedy, squalid surroundings, the rigid mindsets of the villagers and the malign influence of the Catholic Church, David had tried to create something beautiful. But when he befriended a sensitive young pupil, Marcus Verschoppen, disaster followed.