It is 1957, the savage Algerian War rages on. Captain Andre Degorce is reunited with Lieutenant Horace Andreani, with whom he experienced the horrors of combat and imprisonment in Vietnam. Captives now pass from Degorce's hands into Andreani's: one-time victims have become torturers. Andreani has fully embraced his new status, but Degorce has lost all sense of himself. He only finds peace when he is with Tahar, a commander in the National Liberation Army who is held in a cell that now acts as a confessional, the jailor opening up to his prisoner.