At the outbreak of World War I, Karl le Barron, an attention-craving Greenwich Village poet of German heritage, declares himself a German sympathizer merely to gain notoriety. With the sinking of the Lusitania, however, his position becomes untenable, and he is soon a patriotic American, claiming that he will fight for the U.S. in France. A coward at heart, Karl is horrified to find himself on the battlefield, and to save himself, he exchanges uniforms with the corpse of a German soldier and later is reported dead himself. Karl is taken prisoner in a British camp, where he learns that his poems, published as the work of a hero killed in a battle, have become immensely popular. Eager to claim his glory, Karl escapes and returns home, only to find that his friends do not recognize him and that his wife Amy has remarried. In the end, Karl lives up to his own heroic reputation by sacrificing his life to thwart a group of German spies.—AFI