I remember experiencing this movie in my teens in the 70's. It overwhelmed me emotionally as a first person account of the horrors of war from the perspective of a quadriplegic WW1 soldier with the additional lack of eyes, ears, face and mouth with which to communicate, but sadly, with a functioning brain in tact. Imagine a man entombed within what is left of his own body.....that is the core of this anti-war film. In a series of flashbacks we learn the war experiences led up to his present state of helplessness, his day to day physical sense of time passing slowly in the hospital and of his attempts to communicate with his caretaker nurse. When a critical breakthrough occurs and the female nurse takes pity on his plight, she is prevented from helping him to find release from his agony. His agony becomes ours in the end. A truly remarkable perspective on the horrors of war, in a film written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, a member of the ten most unjustly alienated writers in Hollywood during the blacklisting era of the 1940's.