Anezka visits her husband, a major of the Austrian army, in Stryj, a town in the midst of World War I. The major is slowly dying as he suffers from third-degree burns after an assasination. Though he has been in a brothel at the time of the attack he gets a hero's accolades. Anezka is not very impressed. She starts working as a nurse in a military hospital where she meets a handsome prisoner with whom she soon falls in love.