This is another story we had on our high school curriculum in Ireland, if I remember correctly. I re-read it recently and it hit home with much more force. I had in mind that it was a great story about hostages being held during the revolutionary era in Ireland but I had forgotten the ending. Each of the two British captives, their rebel guards, the woman whose farmhouse they occupy and the occasionally visiting rebel commandant are vividly brought to life. The people in the safe house form somewhat friendly relationships over their long stay. The visiting commandant takes a cold view of all this and doesn’t say much. The men play cards and smoke tobacco by the fireside and the hostages hope to be released in due course. But the commandant turns up one night and orders the captors to take the prisoners down a lane on the farm to some bogland. The guard whose point of view we share objects to this turn of events, but the British had just executed several Irish prisoners, “six of our lads”. The taciturn one of the captives is resigned and asks only for his wristwatch and a note to be forwarded to his family. The other, an extrovert working class lad says he supports the rebel cause and offers to switch sides and fight for them. But nothing can save them. The ending is terrible in the true sense of the word.
First published in The Atlantic, 1931. Collected in Guests of the Nation, Macmillan, 1931, also in Modern Irish Short Stories, Oxford University Press, 1957 and My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005
A Personal Anthology 