About Dick Heldar, an aspiring artist. Although he is devoted to his childhood sweetheart, Maisie Wells, his ambition drives him to faraway places. He meets Torpenhow, a war correspondent, at Port Said, and accompanies him into battle.
At the start of the First World War, in the middle of Africa’s nowhere, a gin soaked riverboat captain is persuaded by a strong-willed missionary to go down river and face-off a German warship.
Society miss Sally Raeburn is left penniless and is helped out by an older woman. The woman makes it clear that to repay her, Sally must marry wealth, so when the very well-heeled Lester comes to her village, Sally goes after him. Lester has been traveling incognito in the hopes that no one will discover him, so when Sally wins him she feels guilty and confesses that she knew who he was all along.
A young woman is framed and sent to prison for a crime she didn't commit. When she is released, she sets out to take her revenge on those responsible.
A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.
Eddie Manning, on a secret mission in Central America, is apparently penniless, and he becomes friends with a street urchin named Muggsy. When Muggsy is knocked down by a car, Manning meets its owner, Miriam Folansbee, and she offers him a job as a chauffeur. There is a plot to overthrow the country and Inez, a dancer at a cafe, tells Manning that Carlos Medina is the leader of the revolutionaries.
A young Catholic priest from Boston confronts bigotry, Nazism, and his own personal conflicts as he rises to the office of cardinal.
The story of an idle rich boy who joins the US Army's Rainbow Division and is sent to France to fight in World War I, becomes friends with two working class men, experiences the horrors of trench warfare, and finds love with a French girl.
Lorenzo Carilo selects more-or-less menial jobs at which to make a living, other more "select" jobs not paying enough, and then he meets and falls in love with Vivian Forrester the daughter of a new-rich family. What's a poor boy to do? He might pose as a French Duke.