In winter 1864, 19-year-old Summerfield Hayes leaves Brooklyn and his schoolteacher sister (for whom he harbors perhaps untoward feelings) and signs up to fight. Devastated by the slaughter and temporarily deafened by an exploding shell, he finds himself deserted by his comrades during the Wilderness Campaign, then battling his own suspicious captain at a military hospital in Washington. Fortunately, Walt Whitman, a daily visitor, becomes his advocate.