Silent film director D.W. Griffith turns his spectacle making skills to the (then) topical theme of World War I. Marie (Lillian Gish) and her sister (Dorothy Gish) are part of an American family living in France who find themselves swept up in the fray. Her fiancé (Robert Harron) goes off to enlist and Marie is left at home to worry and carry on. Bombs drop, their land is occupied, and soon the sisters face defilement at the hands of the Huns. British and American troops try their best to ride to the rescue, but trench warfare has slowed things down to an agonizing crawl. The film was modeled after Griffith's phenomenally successful THE BIRTH OF A NATION in hopes it would sway America out of its neutral stance on the war; by the time the film was released, however, America was already involved. When viewed today this film can seem simplistic and somewhat obvious as propaganda (the Germans are all monstrous ogres), but it's still a classic Griffith picture, simmering with vibrant emotional performances, painstaking detail, and full-scale battle scenes, which incorporate actual war footage.