Spending leave together on the South Coast during the Battle of Britain and the beginning of the blitz, Clive and Prudence have an affair. Having survived Dunkirk, but having a crisis of conscience over what the war is being fought for and disgusted at the incompetence of the ruling elite, Clive decides not to return to the Army and to go absent without leave.

Deserving comparison to Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms", This Above All was heralded as the first great novel of the Second World War... and it is about the war, but first and last it is a great love story, a great adventure in thinking things through. This soldier, discharged on leave after hospitalization, meets a girl in uniform of the W.A.A.F's - and they break through the barriers of tradition and class and come to understand what both of them really stand for.