When news reached Walt Whitman that his brother had been wounded at the first battle of Bull Run, the poet made his way to Washington to care for him. As it turned out, the brother was only slightly wounded and soon returned to his regiment, but Whitman was deeply affected by the savagery, suffering, and waste he observed in the makeshift hospitals scattered through the capital. He stayed on as a volunteer and wrote Memoranda, a moving portrait of men at the limits of their endurance, and of the ravages of a bitter war between countrymen.