Guy and Harriet Pringle, escaped to Egypt from a Europe overrun by Hitler, are here cut off from England, living a precarious existence and facing the prospect of capture by the enemy and separation from each other. They are complemented by a group of similar refugees, and their story is paralleled by that of the soldiers like young Simon Boulderstone, twenty, fresh out from England, thrown precipitously into the alternating boredom and heat of the desert and the horrors of its warfare.