Two provincial newspaper reporters - one a young idealist starting out on his career, the other an embittered man who previously wrote for a failed national daily - swap views.
An obsessed sculptor kills a young women to make a perfect bronze sculpture of her. Years later at his secluded home a number of people become trapped in a web of revenge, murder and horror.
When the Great War begins, English sportsman Cyril Hammersley is thought to be a slacker because he refuses to join the army for pacifistic reasons. His American fiancée, Doris Mathers, knows that he is not a coward, but she questions his patriotism when Sir John Rizzio intimates that Hammersly may be a German spy.
