THE NIGHT HORSEMAN
THE TALE OF THE TWO ACES
Eastern to Western Europe and back.
1914-1918. 2018.
1914-1918. 2018.
The town, by this time more settled near a modest college and a mountain spa somewhat less modest, suddenly finds itself in peril on the eastern perimeter of the First World War at its start where the story begins but, like the war, sweeps far beyond through the last days of Imperial Austria, the hell of the Western Front and behind the lines into the bizarre hidden labyrinths of privilege, poverty and crime in Paris and Marseilles. Then a return to the small town in the eastern Carpathians 100 years later for a most singular search.
Coming of age as a little noticed poor country boy with a rich imagination, a café worker discovers a flare for self-drama that tumbles into a near-lethal infatuation and a string of mishaps thrusting him, along with a comrade seen far more confident, all the way to the Western Front -- as a "gift" from an Austrian general to a German colonel -- and adventures comic, horrific, mysterious, as the "Two Aces" lead (and are led by) a little Belgian war orphan and her protector, a princely black African colonial trooper, across vast battlefields and borders on a quest yielding extraordinary transformations of body, mind and spirit.
Coming of age as a little noticed poor country boy with a rich imagination, a café worker discovers a flare for self-drama that tumbles into a near-lethal infatuation and a string of mishaps thrusting him, along with a comrade seen far more confident, all the way to the Western Front -- as a "gift" from an Austrian general to a German colonel -- and adventures comic, horrific, mysterious, as the "Two Aces" lead (and are led by) a little Belgian war orphan and her protector, a princely black African colonial trooper, across vast battlefields and borders on a quest yielding extraordinary transformations of body, mind and spirit.