A story of love for horses and the love for two women. The main part of the film is set in Germany and Ireland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, in the years leading up to WW1 and the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916. The German cavalry officer and gifted horseman Godeysen, falls in love first with the German girl Lena, who must marry another, more suitable, man; and then with the Irishwoman Nicoline who is unhappily married to a man involved with the rebels in Ireland. The story is told as flashback from the hospital room of Godeysen's son a young wounded of a young WW2 veteran in the Germany of the early 1950s. It is read from the diary of his father.