The young Irish fighters played cards with their two British captives, discussed politics and religion, and soon they developed bonds of friendship. But there was no way out- they had to kill them.
Guests of the Nation, the famous short story by Frank O’Connor, was first published in 1931, only a few years after the writer had seen active service in the IRA, first fighting the British and, later, the pro-Treaty forces during the Irish Civil War. The story has been widely regarded as an expression of revulsion against war, a turning away from armed struggle, a humanist statement: that no cause, no matter how right, can justify killing.
Certainly the story expresses horror, dealing with the violence it depicts in an anti-heroic, realistic manner which allows no evasion for the reader. Yet it’s not polemical, requiring us to think for ourselves.
The title 'Guests of the Nation' is heavily ironic. The “guests” are British soldiers, hostages of the IRA during the Irish War of Independence. The two men, Hawkins and Belcher, are being held in response to the imprisonment of Irish soldiers by the British.
The story shows the human bonds of friendship that have developed between the prisoners and their captors. We see them playing cards and arguing over religion and politics, in the old woman’s cottage where they are confined.
At dusk the big Englishman, Belcher, would shift his long legs out of the ashes and say "Well, chums, what about it ?" and Noble and myself would say “All right, chum " (for we had picked up some of their curious expressions), and the little Englishman, Hawkins, would light the lamp and bring out the cards.
While Belcher is big and polite and quiet, Hawkins is pugnacious and voluble, arguing constantly – against religious obfuscation, against capitalism – clashing particularly with Noble, who is a believer. These arguments, though fierce, are comradely.
The tension enters only when Donovan, the captors’ leader, informs the narrator Bonaparte – who, like Noble, is an inexperienced, naïve young Irish fighter – of what might have been obvious to a more experienced man:
“The enemy have prisoners belonging to us, and now they’re talking of shooting them,” he said. “If they shoot our prisoners, we’ll shoot theirs.”
As soon as we know this, the heated discussion that night between Hawkins and Noble about 'the next world' and whether angels have wings or not becomes unbearably dark. We, along with Bonaparte, understand how poignant is this seemingly abstract wrangling over death.
And sure enough, Donovan comes with news the next evening that the Irish prisoners have been shot, and that now they must kill Belcher and Hawkins in return.
The difficulty of reverting to being enemies after having been friends is underlined when Donovan explains the situation to the Englishmen. Hawkins refuses to take it seriously until Donovan asks Bonaparte to confirm it:
“I mean it, chum,” I said.
“You don’t sound as if you meant it.”’
“If he doesn’t mean it, I do,” said Donovan, working himself up.
“What have you got against me, Jeremiah Donovan?”
“I never said I had anything against you. But why did your people take out four of your prisoners and shoot them in cold blood?”
We are taken right inside Bonaparte’s mental agony:
I had the Smith and Wesson in my pocket and I kept fingering and wondering what I’d do if they put a fight for it or ran, and wishing to God they’d do one or the other… By this time we’d reached the bog, and I was so sick I couldn’t even answer him.
Hawkins tries to argue that he wouldn’t shoot them if the positions were reversed. There is a whole page in which he repeats his points to his “chums” over and over, and it’s hard for us not to agree:
“Listen to me Noble,” he said. “You and me are chums. You can’t come over to my side, so I’ll come over to your side. That show you I mean what I say? Give me a rifle and I’ll go along with you and the other lads.”
The reader hopes that somehow this gesture of solidarity might work. But our hopes are quickly dashed by the flat statement of fact by our narrator: We knew there was no way out.
Where Noble opts out, saying “Leave me out of that”, Bonaparte 'alone of the crowd' watches Donovan raise his gun and shoot Hawkins; he tries to pray, but by implication can’t. He is opened-eyed; and it is he who kneels down and finally kills Hawkins when Belcher, awaiting his turn to be shot, points out that Hawkins is “not quite dead.”
After the executions, Noble retreats into prayer along with the superstitious old woman, haunted by the image of that 'little patch of bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it'; for him the world has narrowed right down. For Bonaparte, the effect is opposite:
… but with me it was as if the patch of bog where the Englishmen were was a million miles away, and even Noble and the old woman, mumbling away behind me, and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow.
This distanced view of himself as a tiny being in the universe reminds us of Adam cast out of Eden – of which we had a taste in the seemingly pre-lapsarian harmony of the cottage at the story’s start.
Guests of the Nation presents us with a seemingly absurd situation – made all too real by the plethora of mundane detail – and leads us to wonder why there was no way out. Hawkins misses the point when he asks why Noble wants to plug him. His understanding is at an individual level only. We realise that while people are feeling, human subjects, they are at the same time objectively part of history. It is as British soldiers, hostages, that the two chums must die.
The narrator’s unvoiced acceptance that there are historical forces bigger than individuals doesn’t soften the blow for him. He refuses to take cover behind his patriotism, as Donovan the hard man is able to do. In telling the story with such unerring accuracy, he faces what he’s done head-on without repudiating his actions, implying that this is a world in which terrible decisions have to be taken. This seems also to be Belcher’s instinctive position. He forgives his executioners, accepting the necessity of their act in a way that Hawkins and Noble do not, and understanding how hard it is for them. “I don’t mind”, he says, and adds later: “… I think you’re all good lads, if that’s what you mean. I’m not complaining.”
Like Bonaparte, he stares death in the face unmediated:
"You don't want to say a prayer?” asked Donovan.
“No, chum,” he said. “I don't think it would help. I'm ready, and you boys want to get it over."
This story is not an expression of regret for the IRA’s anti-colonial war; yet neither does it deny the horrific human cost of such a war. Frank O’Connor’s autobiographical narrative is an insider’s view of the armed struggle at its sharpest, disavowing revolutionary romanticism, while taking responsibility for the measures taken. The burden of bearing history on one’s shoulders is shown to be profoundly difficult, and human.