These are the years of the First World War and Dr. Stefano Zorzi spends his days in the Exemption Clinic in a large city of Northern Italy, where he not only takes care of soldiers who arrive from the massacre of the front, but also he fights simulation and self-harm of those who hope to be dispensed, by sending them before the Military Court. Stefano would never have thought of meeting someone capable of deliberately procuring a pathology, as one procures a lifeboat to save himself from greater evil. But now he's tired of that conflict that made him an inspector and, if necessary, a gendarme. In the apartment of a secluded building, Dr. Giulio Farradi works. A restless man, deeply opposed to war, capable to feel a tender and possessive love for the soldiers of his ‘private war’. If Stefano, in fact, does his utmost to heal soldiers and send them back to fight, Giulio makes them ill, or helps them to self-injure seriously enough to be exonerated.
The two doctors, who went to university together and were great friends, they not only (secretly) challenge each other on a professional level, but also on the sentimental one: they are both linked to Anna, a courageous nurse with a strong character. But when the great ‘Spanish’ fever epidemic arrived in 1918, the time for love, politics and science ends up getting confused dangerously...