Huss has suffered a partial breakdown, but while he is recuperating in the company of his wife at the fictional seaside town of Sundering-on-Sea they have learned that their only son has been "shot down over the German lines."

Job Huss's response to him includes an extended evocation of submarine warfare that has been called the most powerful writing in the novel.

Under anaesthesia, he converses with God and is told that "If you have courage, although the night be dark, although the present battle be bloody and cruel and end in a strange and evil fashion, nevertheless victory shall be yours.

"[2] The character of Job Huss is loosely based on Frederick William Sanderson, of whom in 1922 Wells would write a biography entitled The Story of a Great Schoolmaster.

One of Wells's biographers groused that the novel is "a parade of ideas leading to a predetermined conclusion: that the one true god is the yearning for the ideal in the human heart, which can be successfully developed through education.