Summary

The reader is told the story about Jo and the Marshal. After a truce between factions in the Irish civil war is broken, the fighting resumes. Jo and the narrator get involved in combat, then spend the night in a castle. When they return to the other soldiers they learn that the Marshal wants to join the other side of the fighting. Jo becomes somewhat unstable, and believes the narrator is going to give him up to the other side. One morning not that long after, the narrator discovers the Marshal has been killed in fighting. Jo later explains he was the man who killed him.

Analysis

This is another story about the emotional effects that war can have on people, as exemplified by Jo, who begins to obsess that friends of his are after his girl, and who shoots and kills the Marshal, a son...