Meeting the curate on the Walton bank

1 Four fighting-machines carry their dead comrade's wreckage back across Horsell Common

2 One fighting-machine keeps watch at the pit rim above the blackened heather of Horsell Common

3 Seen from the Thames, Halliford's deserted riverside houses burn, smoke rising straight up

4 The narrator wakes in the long grass by the Walton hedge to find a stranger beside him

5 At sunset on the Walton bank, the curate rises in a frenzy and points at burning Weybridge

6 The curate raises his thin hands to the reddening sky and cries that the end has come

7 The scalded narrator grips the shaken curate's shoulder: God is not an insurance agent

8 On the Walton bank at sunset, the curate stares at nothing with wide pale eyes

9 The narrator and the curate stand listening to distant guns and a strange far-off crying

10 At dusk the scalded narrator turns north and beckons the curate, still facing Weybridge