Marthe (1997)

Autumn 1915.Mud,cold,visceral fear,lifelong disability,death:Promises of the days of combat in order to only advance or retreat 30 yards. When Simon is stabbed with a bayonet in the trenches of the Argonne Forest in the early fall of 1915 during nasty and violent War World I,he is one of a group of soldiers transferred to a hospital behind the lines,far from the front.There,a peninsula caught between sky and sea where the men's wounds heal and they learn to live again,before returning to absurd war.On the beach,near the hospital where Simon is treated by a sympathetic colonel doctor,he meets Thérèse and Miss Marthe who were on their school day in nature.The breezy child Thérèse ending up climbed on his shoulders while the young Marthe in her first year of teaching being fallen in love at first sight.But Simon and Marthe's ardent rendezvous with all-consuming passion will soon have been terminated by the vagaries of a fierce war.