Could you survive a life of poverty, gruelling toil, a war in a distant barren wilderness, fast-moving sharpshooting farmers' bullets and dangerous diseases?

Joe Rutherford, a young shipbuilder from industrial northeast England, is unusual among his peers. He's an avid reader and inspirational storyteller about the 1899 Boer War between the British Empire and the Afrikaans Boer farmers in Southern Africa. Soon, despite the opposition of their loved ones, he and his friends join the British Army and set out on a great adventure. They soon encounter the harsh and terrifying reality of war, with its atrocities and the desperation of holding on to friendships, relationships and romance in the light of what may be a shortened life ahead of them. For the British Empire, the stakes were the vast resources of diamonds, gold and copper in South Africa. For the Boers, they would fight fiercely for their farmland and freedom.

Unsure of what may happen from one day to the next, the lifelong friends cling tightly to each other, learning that only they, and perhaps luck, can avoid the Boer bullets, disease, sabotage, and keep each other safe.Joe's relationship with a nurse from home blossoms, and she follows him around South Africa and on to India. How long will Joe endure in these perilous times of the British Empire?

This is the first book of four about the lives of ordinary working-class soldiers and wealthier, more famous politicians, commanders and personalities like Winston Churchill, Deneys Reitz, Herbert Kitchener, Jan Smuts and Emily Hobhouse, thrown together and relying on each other in hazardous twentieth-century times of war and economic gains.