An impoverished Silesian Junker, a biergarten server from Essen, and two laborers from Pomerania were thrown together amid the fields of slaughter in northern France in March 1918.  From then on their lives seemed to be intertwined, meshed to cross in Silesia amid the German Civil War, in Latvia with the Freikorps, and then in Northern Russia with the doomed counterrevolutionary army of General of the Infantry Nicholia Iudenich.  Max von Kemper, the last surviving member of a once aristocratic family, was an carpenter's apprentice when the war began. Teresa Stumpf, an orphan educated in a convent, served heady beers to the Essen iron workers.  As the war progressed business slumped and women took jobs normally reserved for men.  The new freedom should have meant their salvation but factories cruelly exploited the women.  Stumpf salvation came when volunteered to be a sister of mercy.  Otto Faltz and Michael Boehm, life long friends, saw the war as an opportunity for a military career.  Perhaps it was in their destinies forged in ancient times or as a solution to a quantum physics equation, whenever one of them reached a crisis in their lives, the four would be brought together.