Rosi's powerful antiwar film, based on Emilio Lussu's memoir of World War I, has been compared to Kubrick's classic Paths of Glory in showing the false valor and needless carnage of that war, and by extension, all wars. Set in the Carso Mountains in 1916, it tells of a fanatical general (Alain Cuny) who orders his troops into an obviously futile battle against the Austrians, a socialist officer (Gian Maria Volonté) who gains a following in opposing the general, and a young lieutenant (Mark Frechette) who comes to think that some orders should be disobeyed. Like all of Rosi's films, this is about class conflict: what Rosi called “the clear separation between the men who had decided to initiate the war and those who had been mobilized to fight it” is seen in the Italian soldiers from the South fighting for regions they didn't even know were part of Italy.