When Siegfried Sassoon publicly proclaims that the war is being needlessly prolonged, the authorities declare him mentally unsound and send him to Doctor Rivers at Craiglockhart war hospital, where he is charged with making Sassoon see sense and return to the front. Whilst in his care Sassoon meets a young and timid poet, Wilfred Owen, and a working class officer named Prior who, through shock or possibly choice, has lost the ability to speak.