An aging Alsatian pastor reflects on homeland, memory, and the ravages of war while wandering vineyard slopes and village paths. He remembers personal tragedies, including his institutionalized wife and a son returned from battle with nervous trauma, and models himself on a former pastoral exemplar as he contends with questions of belonging and cultural strife during the Great War. The narrative blends lyrical landscape description, local conversations, refugee scenes, letters and diary fragments, and episodes in Strasbourg and Heidelberg to examine regional identity, spiritual resignation, and the fraught overlap of private grief and communal upheaval.