Four Americans—a twenty-year-old social outcast, a breezily iconoclastic Army officer, a ruthless US senator, and a guilt-ridden heiress—are inexorably drawn together in their struggles to deal with America's chaotic involvement in World War I. Their interwoven destinies lead from poverty-stricken slums through the opulence of 1917–1918 Washington, London, and Paris and, climactically, into the Western Front's vicious aerial combat, which establishes the matrix for all air warfare to come.