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When the sniper reached the laneway on the street level, he felt a sudden curiosity as to the identity of the enemy sniper whom he had killed. He decided that he was a good shot, whoever he was. He wondered did he know him. Perhaps he had been in his own company before the split in the army.
The story’s protagonist has recovered his composure and slipped down to a laneway, from which point he can carefully make his way to his commander to report on his successful assassination. He is in good spirits and feels fairly safe. Yet when he has the opportunity to leave the embattled streets, he finds that he can’t. He needs to know who he killed. Professional respect may motivate him; he and his enemy were well matched, and while he prevailed, his enemy did fracture his arm. More than that, however, the sniper feels that he knows his enemy, not just casually but as brothers in arms, perhaps even from “his own company.” The army, the narrator says, has been “split.” A body dedicated to the same principles, trained in the same methods, was once one thing but now is two. Soldiers who had fought together now fight each other, like twin halves of a powerful being. The Republican sniper is drawn to know about his other half, the half he killed.
The sniper darted across the street. A machine gun tore up the ground around him with a hail of bullets, but he escaped. He threw himself face downward beside the corpse. The machine gun stopped.
Then the sniper turned over the dead body and looked into his brother’s face.
These lines, which end the story, show the lengths to which the Republican sniper is willing to go to see whether he knows the man he killed. He had calculated the risk to his safety to be minor because the street was quiet, but his reasoning is doubtful. More likely is that he downplays the risk because the need to know who the dead man is compels him forward. Barely avoiding a “hail of bullets,” the sniper flings his body to the street by the dead body. He lies there, exposed and still, like the “corpse” that the body is. Neither man’s body is now intact, and the machine gun’s operator, ominously, is not going anywhere.
In this precarious position, the sniper finally learns his enemy’s identity—not only a brother in arms, but his actual brother. Two men, raised together, have found themselves on opposite sides. One has been wounded, the other killed, though the first may soon join his brother in death. Despite their political beliefs, they are much more alike than different.
