Summary
In a crumbling Victorian doss-house where wallpaper peels like old scabs, a taciturn drifter—half-ragged scarecrow, half-undiscovered poet—collects human flotsam: a gin-soaked ex-clerk who recites invoices as if they were psalms, a consumptive boy who coughs up blood shaped like question marks, a widowed charwoman who carries grief in her cracked palms. From this mildewed microcosm he forges a battalion of misfits, trading despair for khaki, converting inertia into bayonet hymns until the boarding-house’s sagging floorboards echo with martial drumbeats and the air reeks of paraffin polish and patriotic delusion. Their enlistment is less a march than a surreal baptism: candlelight morphs into searchlights, tin plates become breastplates, and the landlord’s rusty bugle blares a cracked reveille that summons not glory but the smoky maw of Flanders. What begins as a lonely man’s escape mutates into a collective hallucination—war as absolution, trenches as cathedral—leaving the viewer to wonder whether the greatest casualty is the myth they carry in their ribcages.
A lonely man converts boarding-house slackers and they enlist.
