"I had a farm in Africa," Tania Blixen let us know. Her father Wilhelm Dinesen (1845-1895), an officer, politician, landowner, and writer, had shown her the way out of the confines of the bourgeois Danish world: he felt at home all over Europe and America. Growing up on a Danish estate and educated in the aristocracy of Copenhagen, Dinesen joined the battle of Dybbøl in 1864 at the age of eighteen as the youngest Danish officer during the Second Schleswig War. A few years later, he enlisted in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War and witnessed the defeat of the French army and its spectacular retreat to Switzerland in 1870/71. Just a few weeks later, Dinesen became a witness to the rise and bloody fall of the Paris Commune. "Fire and Blood" is the first part of the two-volume Dinesen biography, written by Denmark's a.