Being inescapably on both sides of one of the Twentieth Century's tragic faultlines forces neutrality upon German-Australian sailor Friedrich "Fredy" Boettcher; a farmer's son from New South Wales. As an ineffectual witness to a horrifying incident of the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915, he suffers profound shock and loses his sense of touch for most of his adult life. He is propelled around the world, meeting the Australian poet Banjo Patterson in Cairo, and Lawrence in Arabia, riding the rods as a hobo before working in Hollywood, rescuing a simple man from Hitler's racial hygiene laws and much more.