Follow lifelong friends Catholic Markus and Jewish Levi in this sweeping historic family saga-the story of two young men in the years before World War I. As young Imperial German soldiers in 1900, battling with other Europeans besieged in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, Markus and Levi find themselves in dire circumstances. Markus abandons the legation's relative safety for a dangerous cross-country adventure to find his love, the beautiful Li Ling. Tragedy interrupts their romance and he soon finds himself escaping with Sun Yat Sen downriver on a pirated Chinese mail boat. He reunites with his friend Levi after the battle of Peking, and the two encounter danger and adventure on their return by ship to Germany. A shark attack off New Guinea and a sexual bacchanal with Samoan natives and icebergs in the south Atlantic challenge the two friends. Their homeward ship stops in Uruguay, where Levi meets his future wife, Katherina Obermaier, a beautiful young Jewish girl bound for university in Berlin. Home again in Bavaria, Levi returns to his ancestral home Kalvarianhof, a grand estate deep in the forests outside of Munich, and Markus to his home in the city. It is the time of 'Belle Epoch', the 'Beautiful Era' in Europe. Still, Markus and Levi and their families face challenges and heartbreak- and a forbidden love affair that threatens to tear apart the young men's friendship. The story continues in Book II of this four-part series, where the two friends find themselves far from the trenches of France on the eve of World War I. In the splendors and perils of the vastness of Africa, Markus and Levi find romance, hardship and tragedy that endangers their very survival.