These poems also demonstrate Whitman's belief that this war is a good thing for America's ideals. He believes without such a conflict and threat to society, those ideals could be taken for granted and lost to decay. It seems that war takes binary oppositions, people at all different levels of society, and tethers them together toward a righteous and common purpose. However, Whitman also knows, at least aesthetically at this point, that war does have its horrors. He conveys this through the poem "The Centenarian's Story" in which a veteran of George Washington's campaign in the Revolutionary War recalls for a Civil War volunteer both the heroism and bravery of watching men charge willingly into terribly perilous situations and the horror of watching a large proportion of this mass of men be slaughtered.