The year is 1918. The Great War is raging through Europe, while Erna Jensen tends to her ordinary, tranquil life at home in Bramstrup, where she lives with her simple-minded son, Kalle.
That is, until the day everything changes — when the village constable, Meier, arrives to conscript Kalle for military service in the German Empire, of which Southern Jutland is, at this time, a part.
Ever since Kalle’s dramatic birth, Erna has promised the Lord that no one should ever be allowed to touch so much as a single hair on the boy’s head. And now, she must hand him over to the German war machine.
Erna realises that if she is to save Kalle from an uncertain fate in the trenches, she must follow him through thick and thin. As fate would have it, she rescues a deserting soldier, and the two of them swap clothes and identities. Now disguised as Private Julius Rasmussen, Erna heads toward the front.
In her encounter with soldier Anton Seiersen, the blacksmith from Jels, new and previously unknown sides of herself are awakened.