"I will break through because I want to break through," wrote Milan R. Stefanik in his diary. Milan was the sickly son of a poor Evangelical pastor who lived in a small village in the middle of nowhere in western Slovakia.  Perhaps because of this, he became during his short 38-year-old life a recognized scientist and astronomer, a globetrotter, a secret missionary, an aviator, a French army general, and finally the Minister of War in the newly established Czechoslovakia, to which he never returned alive.
The story takes place between 1890 and 1919 in many countries around the world, including France, Italy, Russia, Algeria, Tahiti, Japan, and Brazil, in the splendor of large cities and aristocratic palaces, under frontline firing and in blizzards of highest mountains, even in the romantic atmosphere of Pacific island beaches, on t land, sea, and in the air. 
It's a paradox that what it has taken others a lifetime to establish - the establishment of a new state - was just a brief episode in the life of this incredible man.