The poet Siegfried Sassoon (Wilby), having published a pamphlet opposing the war, has been diplomatically dispatched to Craiglockhart Castle, a military hospital, where pioneering psychiatrist William Rivers (Pryce) tends shell-shocked victims of the trenches. His 'convalescence' brings him into contact with another writer, Wilfred Owen (Bunce), whose poetry Sassoon encourages. Rivers, meanwhile, is heading for a breakdown of his own, brought on less by overwork than his empathy with traumatised patients like Billy Prior (Miller), a working class officer rendered mute by his battlefield experiences. A powerful period piece, and a subtle, elegant, sharply intelligent, sensitive, but never sentimental, adaptation of Pat Barker's novel..