Editing The Ghost Road (section)

==Plot summary==
Prior, despite his new-found peace of mind and engagement to munitions worker Sarah, has been affected by the war and therefore does not have a lot of concern for his safety. Prior has been cured of [[shell-shock]] and is preparing to return to France.<ref name=autogenerated1>{{cite web|url=http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=1487 |title=Barker, Pat : The Ghost Road |publisher=Litmed.med.nyu.edu |date=5 July 1999 |access-date=10 December 2011}}</ref> Prior experiences numerous and risky sexual encounters; his only rule is that he never pays for sex – a rule he eventually breaks.

Rivers, concerned for Prior's safety, finally recognises that his relationship with Prior, and his other patients for that matter, is deeply paternal. In contrast with upper-class officers like Sassoon, with whom Rivers has been able to form warm friendships, he has always found Prior to be a thorn in his side. As Prior returns to the front, Rivers continues to take care of his patients and his invalid sister; amid this, he reminisces uncomfortably about his childhood and memories of his experience ten years earlier on an anthropological expedition to [[Simbo]] (then called Eddystone Island) in the [[Solomon Islands]] in [[Melanesia]]. There, he befriended Njiru, the local priest-healer who took Rivers on his rounds to see sick villagers and also to the island's sacred Place of the Skulls.<ref name=autogenerated1 /> With him on the expedition was [[Arthur Maurice Hocart]].

This episode is a symbolic capitulation to the inevitability of Prior's death at the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front]], a fate he shares with the poet [[Wilfred Owen]]. In a futile battle that takes place a few days before the Armistice, Billy and his friend Owen are killed.<ref name=autogenerated1 />