Walt Whitman (played by Will Geer) moves through now-deserted fields remembering the “long solemn trenches”, the wounded, the dead, the thousands of personal tragedies of “The War of Attempted Secession”. Poems such as “Ashes of Soldiers” and “The Artilleryman’s Vision” are interspersed with his eye witness prose accounts of the war from the sound track and present the majesty and power of Whitman’s style. Archive photographs and filmed representations of the war are also featured.