James Allen Lawton, a young farmer from Arkansas, is conscripted into the infantry and shipped to France to fight in the trenches of No Man's Land. He is eventually injured in a mustard gas attack, discharged and sent stateside where he convalesces in a sanitarium in North Carolina. There he meets his future wife, a young woman suffering from tuberculosis. As he recovers, she grows weaker. Even as she loses her life, James Allen finds his.