- In 1940, during World War II, an officer is sent to investigate rumors of German spies in a sleepy village where various people are the victims of war hysteria.
- A film about the cruelty of war. Charles Dance plays an officer who is sent out to investigate a rumour about German spies during the chaotic days of 1940. At the same time three land girls are arriving at a sleepy little village. These three together with a German refugee family and the local doctor falls victims to war hysteria and is killed by a local mob - while Charles Dance is trying to rescue them.—Robert Paladin
- The story, framed as the recollection of an elderly soldier Captain John Truman, tells of his experiences in an East Anglian village after the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940.
Transferred to light duties while recovering from combat neurosis, he is sent to the village to investigate morale at the same time as three land girls are arriving. He finds the villagers to be xenophobic and misogynistic, made paranoid by the threat of invasion. Their growing hostility becomes focused on the occupants of a house where the land girls live with a family of German Jewish refugees. Particular hatred is directed at the forceful leader of the occupants, Alice Durkow, who is variously rumoured to be a witch and a lesbian.
Truman befriends them, becoming close to the female village doctor who has been helping them. After protecting them when villagers led by the local ARP warden raid the house and believe they have discovered a secret radio (it turns out to be a diathermy machine), Truman finds himself trapped in the house with the women as a mob collects outside. He agrees to try to get help, and escapes across the fens during the night, arriving exhausted at an army base.
Partly because the army has higher priorities (there is a false alarm that German invasion is imminent) and partly because Truman's psychiatrical history makes them doubt his story, Truman is kept waiting and the situation isn't investigated immediately. When Truman is eventually brought to the village the next day, he is horrified to find the house is a heap of rubble. He is taken aside by a government official and sworn to secrecy about the truth: the army arrived too late, to find that the mob had broken into the house, and some of the village men had raped and killed the women. The army shot these men and dynamited the house; the official story, in order to preserve national morale, will be that the house was hit by a stray bomb.
Truman, in old age, remains traumatised by the experience, yet is still bound by official secrecy not to reveal the truth. We see however after his funeral that he has written it down and hidden his account in a summer-house desk drawer, where in the closing scene his young grandson finds it.
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