Spoilers ahead. Looking back at it I think the writer wanted to show the real effects of war on normal people. Nobody gets what they want, if you don't die you know somebody who does and things just arn't fair. The end is especially sad when one brother dies needlessly, right before he could have been rescued and the other brother is denied his revenge when a man dies of the flu, before the revenge can take place.

The main characters were; Two English brothers, one had a wife. An American with a farm in Africa and a family, A German with a farm in Africa and a family. It should not have taken half the book to get these 5 charicters developed and on their way to the war in Africa. Of these 5, 3 die and the remaining 2 generally go through many hardships, none of them brought about by their own doing. At least a dozen other important supporting charicters die along the way.

The author had one annoying habit. When it comes to the most important events of the book he just flat out skips them. An affair, brothers death, suicide, death by flu when the guy was healthy the page before. Then sometimes he spends the next 20 pages with a charicter describing what big event we missed, so sometimes you find out what happened. It was annoying and I never got the point of writing things that way.