What Major John MacBride learns when leading the Irish Brigade in the Second Anglo-Boer War against the British Empire isn't much help when fighting his estranged wife in the French courts. She is the beloved muse of Ireland's leading poet and so charismatic that militant Irish nationalists think she is worth a platoon of heavy dragoons in Ireland's fight for freedom. Back in Ireland, MacBride's involvement in that fight moves the same poet to say that he has transformed from a drunken, vainglorious lout to a major player in the 'terrible beauty' of the 1916 Easter Rising. This is a rollicking story of a life-long struggle against an implacable foe with a tragic love story thrown in.