The Ways of War

by Tom Kettle

MEMOIR

My husband in his last letter to his brother, written on the 8th of September, 1916, on the battlefield, expressed the wish that I should write a memoir of him as a preface to his war book. It is only at his express instance that I would have undertaken the writing of such a memoir, as there are many obvious reasons—notably two—why I am unfitted for that high duty. I have not the literary gifts of many of his distinguished friends, who in writing of him would have exercised their powers of sympathetic understanding and appreciation to the uttermost. But the personal relationship is an even greater handicap. If the reader will accept me as his comrade—since he has honoured me with the proud distinction—I shall do my best to interpret the “soul-side” with which he “faced the world.” For my shortcomings, I must crave indulgence. I only bring to this task the vision of love.

I shall give hereafter a biographical sketch, but first I wish to deal with his attitude to the war and a few points which he desired to be emphasised.

What urged him—the scholar, the metaphysician, the poet, above all the Irishman, irrevocably and immutably Irish, the man of peace, who had nothing of the soldier except courage—to take a commission in the British Army and engage in the cruel and bloody business of war? His motives for taking this step, he wished to be made clear beyond misrepresentation. It should be unnecessary to do this, as he proclaimed them on many platforms and in many papers. His attitude and action are the natural sequence and logic of his character and ideals. Since I first knew him, he loved to call himself a “capitaine routier” of freedom, and that is the alpha and omega of his whole personality. As Mr. Lynd has said, he was not a Nationalist through love of a flag, but through love of freedom. It was this love of freedom that made him in his student days in the Royal University lead the protest against the playing of “God Save the King” at the conferring of Degrees. The words of the Students’ manifesto went, “We desire to protest against the unjust, wasteful and inefficient Government of which that air is a symbol.” It was the same love of freedom that made him during the Boer War distribute in the streets of Dublin anti-recruiting leaflets. The Tom Kettle who did these things, who said in an election speech in 1910 that “for his part he preferred German Invasion to British Finance,” was the same Tom Kettle who believed it Ireland’s duty in 1914 to take the sword against Germany as the Ally of England.

“This war is without parallel,” he wrote in August, 1914; “Britain, France, Russia, enter it, purged from their past sins of domination. France is right now as she was wrong in 1870, England is right now as she was wrong in the Boer War, Russia is right now as she was wrong on Bloody Sunday.”

In August and September, he acted as war correspondent for the Daily News, and in this capacity was a witness of the agony of Belgium. He returned to Ireland burning with indignation against Prussia. He referred to Germany as “the outlaw of Europe.” “It is impossible not to be with Belgium in this struggle,” he wrote to the Daily News; “it is impossible any longer to be passive. Germany has thrown down a well-considered challenge to all the forces of our civilisation. War is hell, but it is only a hell of suffering, not of dishonour, and through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.”

It was as an Irish soldier in the army of Europe and civilisation that he entered the war. “He was horrified,” said Mr. Lynd very truly, “by the spectacle of a bully let loose on a little nation. He was horrified, too, at the philosophic lie at the back of all this greed of territory and power. He was horrified at seeing the Europe he loved going down into brawling and bloody ruin. Not least—and no one can understand contemporary Ireland who does not realise this—he was horrified by the thought that if Germany won, Belgium would be what he had mourned in Ireland—a nation in chains. An international Nationalist—that was the mood in which he offered his services to the War Office.”

I think the chief reason his motives have been misunderstood is that few have gone to the trouble of understanding his wide outlook. He was a European. He was deeply steeped in European culture. He was au courant with European politics. He knew his France, his Germany, his Russia as well as we know our Limerick, Cork and Belfast. Mr. Healy once said his idea of a nation ended with the Kish lightship. Tom Kettle’s ideal was an Ireland identified with the life of Europe. “Ireland,” he wrote, “awaits her Goethe who will one day arise to teach her that, while a strong nation has herself for centre, she has the universe for circumference.... My only programme for Ireland consists in equal parts of Home Rule and the Ten Commandments. My only counsel to Ireland is, that to become deeply Irish, she must become European.”

That counsel was given six years before the war. It was acting on that counsel that he deemed it right to make the final sacrifice, and in a European struggle sign his ideal with the seal of his blood. England and English thought had nothing to do with his attitude to the war. England happened to be on the side of Justice. He acknowledges that, but says rather bitterly, “England goes to fight for liberty in Europe but junkerdom in Ireland.” Mr. Shane Leslie is absolutely right when he says, “He died for no Imperialistic concept, no fatuous Jingoism.”

“Let this war go forward,” he wrote to the Daily News in 1914, “on its own merits and its own strong justice. After the war of the peoples, let us have the peoples’ peace. Let us drop statecraft and return to the Ten Commandments—now that we have got such a good bit of the way back.”

Mr. Padraic Colum, in a memoir of my husband in the Irish-American paper, Ireland, says: “When the Germans broke into Belgium, he advised the Irish to join the British Army and to fight for the rights of small nationalities. Had death found him in those early days he would at least have died for a cause he believed in.” I think Mr. Colum, if only for the sake of an old friendship, might have troubled to understand the idea for which Tom Kettle died, and in which he believed to the end. Does Mr. Colum mean to suggest that my husband no longer believed in the maintenance of the rights of small nationalities? Was his enthusiasm for Belgium quenched—Belgium the heroic who preferred to lose all that she might gain her own soul? Is not Belgium still an invaded country? And even if England juggles with Ireland’s liberty, is not the fight for truth and justice to go on? As my husband says in this volume, “Ireland had a duty not only to herself but to the world... and whatever befell, the path taken by her must be the path of honour and justice.”

In one of my last letters from him, he speaks his faith, even if it is the faith of a sad and burdened soul: “It is a grim and awful job, and no man can feel up to it. The waste—the science of waste and bloodshed! How my heart loathes it and yet it is God’s only way to Justice.”

Mr. Colum proceeds: “He knew by the dreams he remembered that his place should have been with those who died for the cause of Irish Nationality.” I postulate that Tom Kettle died most nobly for the cause of Irish Nationality, in dying for the cause of European honour.

Mr. Colum continues: “He knew she (Ireland) would not now take her eyes from the scroll that bears the names of Pearse and Plunkett and O’Rahilly and so many others, and yet, Thomas Kettle at the last would not have grudged these men Ireland’s proud remembrance.” I think, too, I may confidently assert that Tom Kettle’s name will be entered on the scroll of Irish patriots, and that he has earned, and will have, Ireland’s “proud remembrance” quite as much as the rebel leaders whose valour and noble disinterestedness he honoured, but whose ideals he most emphatically did not share.

Mr. Leslie is in shining contrast to Mr. Colum in sympathetic understanding: “Irishmen will think of him with his gentle brother-in-law, Sheehy-Skeffington, as two intellectuals who, after their manner and their light, wrought and thought and died for Ireland. What boots it if one was murdered by a British officer and the other was slain in honourable war by Germans? To Ireland, they are both lovable, and in the Irish mind, their memory shall not fail.... Ireland knows that they were both men of peace and that they both offered their lives for her. England can claim neither. In death, they are divided, but in the heart of Ireland they are one.”

In The Day’s Burden, my husband referred to Ireland as “the spectre at the Banquet of the Empire.” He died that Ireland might not be the spectre at the Peace Conference of Nations.

His last thoughts were with Ireland, and in each letter of farewell written to friends from the battlefield, he protests that he died in her holy cause. His soldier servant, writing home to me, says that on the eve of the battle the officers were served with pieces of green cloth to be stitched on the back of their uniforms, indicating that they belonged to the Irish Brigade. Tom touched his lovingly, saying: “Boy, I am proud to die for it!” Ireland, Christianity, Europe—that was what he died for. “He carried his pack for Ireland and Europe. Now pack-carrying is over. He has held the line.” Or, as he says in his last poem to his little daughter, he died—

“Not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed,

And for the secret scripture of the poor.”

That was the dream that haunted his soul, that impelled him to the last sacrifice, and what a sacrifice! What he gave, he gave well—all his gifts, his passionate freedom-loving heart, his “winged and ravening intellect,” intimate ties of home and friendship and motherland, his career, and better than career—the chance of fulfilling his hopes for Ireland—he sacrificed all that “makes life a great and beautiful adventure.” And now that he has died... “in the waste and the wreckage paying the price of the dreams that cannot sleep,” let not anyone commit that last treachery of travestying his ideals and aspirations.

In his final letter to his brother, written the day before he was killed, he outlined the things for which, had he lived, he would have worked—

“If I live I mean to spend the rest of my life working for perpetual peace. I have seen war, and faced modern artillery, and I know what an outrage it is against simple men.”

And in another letter, written to me some weeks before he entered the battle of the Somme, he speaks of this mission even more poignantly—

“I want to live, too, to use all my powers of thinking, writing and working, to drive out of civilisation this foul thing called War and to put in its place understanding and comradeship.” This note, indeed, rings through all his letters like a pleading. “If God spares me, I shall accept it as a special mission to preach love and peace for the rest of my life.”

It is this that makes his sacrifice doubly great, that he, realising with all the wealth of his abundant imagination the horror and cruelty and outrage of war, should step deliberately from the sheltered ways of peace and security and take his share “in the grim and awful job” because “it was only a hell of suffering but not of dishonour, and through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.”

Prussia was to him the enemy of peace and civilisation. In almost his last letter, he again emphasises this.

“Unless you hate war, as such, you cannot really hate Prussia. If you admit war as an essential part of civilisation, then what you are hating is merely Prussian efficiency.”

And with this mission of universal peace mingled his dream of a reconciled Ulster. He knew that there was no abiding cause of disunion between North and South, and hoped that out of common dangers shared and suffering endured on a European battleground, there would issue a United Ireland. For this he counted much on “the brotherhood that binds the brave of all the earth.” “There is a vision of Ireland,” he wrote in 1915, “better than that which sees in it only a cockpit, or eternal skull-cracking Donnybrook Fair—a vision that sees the real enemies of the nation to be ignorance, poverty, disease; and turning away from the ashes of dead hatreds, sets out to accomplish the defeat of these real enemies. Out of this disastrous war, we may pluck, as France and Belgium have plucked, the precious gift of national unity.”

In one of my letters he writes—

“One duty does indeed lie before me, that of devoting myself to the working out of a reconciliation between Ulster and Ireland. I feel God speaking to our hearts in that sense out of this terrible war.”

In his Political Testament he makes a dying plea for the realisation of his dream.

“Had I lived I had meant to call my next book on the relations of Ireland and England: The Two Fools: A Tragedy of Errors. It has needed all the folly of England and all the folly of Ireland to produce the situation in which our unhappy country is now involved.

“I have mixed much with Englishmen and with Protestant Ulstermen, and I know that there is no real or abiding reason for the gulfs, salter than the sea, that now dismember the natural alliance of both of them with us Irish Nationalists. It needs only a Fiat Lux, of a kind very easily compassed, to replace the unnatural by the natural.

“In the name, and by the seal of the blood given in the last two years, I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland—a thing essential in itself and essential as a prologue to the reconstruction of the Empire. Ulster will agree.

“And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in Ireland, and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this war has taught us anything it is that great things can be done only in a great way.”

As a writer in the Freeman very truly says—

“If Tom Kettle could have asked for a gift in return for his great sacrifice, it would have been that a great peace unite the hearts and strivings of all those of his fellow-countrymen who worked for the only land he loved.”

Mr. Leslie interpreted his vision exquisitely—

“He did not resent the littleness that had dogged his life and left him lonely at the end—but he looked back and hated the pettiness and meanness which had injured Ireland—which had taken every advantage of Ireland, which had fooled her leaders and shuffled off her children on feeble promises. He asked for that touch of greatness by which alone great things are achieved. Like a thousand ardent spirits in Ireland at the time, he was ready to leap to a new era by the bridge of great things greatly done, even if the bridge was to be the bridge of death. English statesmen offered them a bridge of paper and an insecure footing at that, but many rushed forward, hopeful of the future. Others turned bitterly back. All who died, whether they died in Ireland or France, died bitterly.

“Disappointed but undismayed Kettle stood with nought but a mystic’s dream between himself and the Great Horror. He felt afraid for Ireland, but not for himself. Then the irony of his life and the bitterness of his death must have come home to him... stripped of all, his career, his ambitions, his friends and lovers, with his back turned to Ireland and his heart turned against England he threw himself over the mighty Gulf, where at least he could be sure that all things good or evil were on the great scale his soul had always required. With earth’s littleness he was done.”

He wished, too, to live to chronicle the deeds of his beloved Dublin Fusiliers. There is no more generous praise ever given to men than that he gave his Dubliners—unless, perhaps, their praise of him. In his last letter to his brother, on the eve of death, he says—

“I have never seen anything in my life so beautiful as the clean and so to say radiant valour of my Dublin Fusiliers. There is something divine in men like that.”

Again in a letter to a friend—

“We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances of leaving them—one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I have chosen to stay with my comrades.”

In a letter written to me shortly after going out, he writes out of his great, generous heart: “What impresses and moves me above all, is the amazing faith, patience and courage of the men. To me it is not a sort of looking-down-on but rather a looking-up-to appreciation of them. I pray and pray and am afraid, but they go quietly and heroically on. God make me less inferior to them.”

That is the essence of Tom Kettle, his noble and humble appraisement of a gift which he possessed par excellence himself. And I think he found happiness and peace of heart with those loyal, valorous men whose comrade he was and whose risks he shared. They too, I think, knew and loved the greatness of him, and found in his genius, his radiant simplicity and high courage, their example and inspiration.

* * * * *

Thomas M. Kettle was the third son of Andrew J. Kettle, and of Margaret MacCourt. He was born at Artane, Co. Dublin, in 1880. From his father, the great land reformer who did more than any other to emancipate Irish farmers from the crushing yoke of landlordism, Tom Kettle inherited his political principles. He might be said to have “lisped” in politics. From his father, too, he inherited that courage, moral as well as physical, that fearless outspoken way he had of enunciating his beliefs and ideas. He was intensely proud of his father and always loved, in later years, when the old man was confined indoors, to drive out to his country home to thresh out current politics with him. Though apparently they seldom came to agreement, still it was obvious that each radiated pride in the other.

Tom Kettle lived in the country till he was twelve, and the quiet charm and peace of the land cast a spell on him that held him always. He hungered to go back, to quit politics and platforms, and in a picturesque cottage cultivate literature and crops. It was a dream he would never have realised—he was born to be in the thick of things—but it was constantly before him like a mirage.

In one of his last letters he recurs to it—

“We are going to live in the country, and I am going to grow early potatoes. I am also going to work very hard and make very few speeches.”

He was educated first at the Christian Brothers’ school in Richmond Street, Dublin. In 1894 he went to Clongowes Wood College. He had a brilliant Intermediate career, obtaining First Place in the Senior Grade with many medals and distinctions. There is a story told that this year when his great success was a matter of public comment, his father’s only remark was, “I see you failed in Book-keeping.” It might strike as harsh those who did not know Mr. Kettle, but it was not really intended as such, it was meant rather to check vanity and a possible swelled head. To Tom, it was exquisitely humorous, and he loved the upright, somewhat stern old man none the less for his seeming lack of appreciation.

In 1897 he went to University College. In a year or so, he became Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society and obtained the Gold Medal for Oratory. His great gifts were already conspicuous. A fellow-student wrote of him: “Amongst them all, Kettle stood supreme. Already that facility for grasping a complicated subject and condensing it in a happy phrase, that bright, eager mind so ready to take issue on behalf of a good cause, that intellectual supremacy which was so pre-eminently his, had marked him out for far-reaching influence and a distinguished career.”

His University course was interrupted by a breakdown in health which necessitated his withdrawal from collegiate life for nearly a year. Over-study had strained his nervous system, and he never quite regained normal health. In 1904 a brother, a veritable twin-soul, to whom he was deeply attached, and of whom he had high hopes, died. This was an everlasting grief to him. This sorrow, together with his shattered nerves, was responsible for his somewhat tragic and melancholy temperament. In 1904 he went to the Tyrol to recuperate, and in that wander-year, Europe laid her spell on him. He was a fine linguist and, being an omnivorous reader, was soon intimately acquainted with the best European literature.

His journalistic talent was displayed as Editor of St. Stephen’s, 1903–4, a spasmodically produced college magazine which he described in a long-remembered phrase as “unprejudiced as to date of issue.”

In 1902 he had entered the King’s Inns as a Law student. Of this period, a friend writes: “At the students’ dinners Kettle was cordially welcomed, and though very young in those days, still at no time and in no place did rich humour and rare conversational power show to more advantage. The company one meets at Law students’ dinners is varied to a degree, boys in their ’teens sitting at table with men of middle age and over on even terms. Struggling poverty sits check by jowl with good salary and wealth. On one occasion when Kettle was dining, one of the men present was a very well-to-do business man of about fifty. This gentleman was holding forth very earnestly on the rights of property and the amount of violence a householder is entitled to display towards a burglar. Kettle suddenly startled him with the query: ‘Have you ever considered this question from the point of view of the burglar?’ The magnate was horrified and hastily withdrew.”

That story is typical of him. His term at King’s Inns concluded with his securing a Victoria Prize, and he was called to the Bar in 1905. With his oratorical gifts and passionate delivery, a brilliant career was foretold. A writer in the Irish Law Times says: “He did everything that came his way with distinction.... There was a freshness and vigour about his style and a rare eloquence in his language which satisfied everyone that he would be an instant success if he was going to make law his profession.” Personally, I think he would never have been happy as a lawyer. He was too sensitive. I remember his defending a criminal who was convicted and sentenced to penal servitude. The conviction worried him greatly. He used to say that it was a fearful responsibility to plead for a man and think that perhaps had another lawyer been chosen there would be no conviction. That the man was guilty mattered nothing to him. He went on the principle that the innocent are those who are not found out.

“Everywhere the word is man and woman;

Everywhere the old sad sins find room.”

He looked at the Law Courts and their victims, not with the eyes of a modern lawyer who seems as if a spiritual blotting-pad had been applied, draining him of all emotion—he looked rather with the eyes of a metaphysician. In The Day’s Burden, he wrote: “One does feel intensely that these legal forms and moulds are too narrow and too nicely definite, too blank to psychology to contain the passionate chaos of life that is poured into them.” He was at once judge and jury, prisoner and counsel. He had that uncanny gift of seeing everybody’s point of view with equal intensity of vision. Such a gift makes for a very lovable personality, but a lawyer should only see the point of view for which he is briefed.

When the opportunity offered he forsook the Law. In 1904 he was first President of the “Young Ireland Branch” of the United Irish League. In 1905 came his brief editorship of the Nationist. These two events were the stepping-stones to his political career, and it was upon them that he came to the notice of the public. The Nationist—a name he coined—was a weekly journal. He was editor for three months of its six months’ life. If its career was brief, it was brilliant. It was, perhaps, the most courageous of Irish papers—and what is more, courageous in consummate prose. He thoroughly enjoyed this period of journalistic activity. He was allowed rather a free hand by the proprietors, and it was a keen joy to him to exercise his powers in the endeavour to educate the young Nationalist mind. Finally, however, he was deemed too outspoken, and he left the editor’s chair with regret.

“If one had taken the precaution to have a father who had accumulated sufficient wealth,” he wrote once, “to allow his sons the caviare of candour, nothing would be more entertaining than starting a paper.”

In 1906 an opportunity was offered to him of entering Parliament. It was his chance, but it was a fighting chance. After the most strenuous of fights, he was returned as Parliamentary representative for East Tyrone. His majority was only sixteen, and it may be fairly said that only he could have won and held that seat in the Nationalist interest.

In the autumn of 1906 he went with Mr. Hazleton to America on a Home Rule Mission. His oratorical gifts were much appreciated there, and his six months’ tour of the States was a fine experience, if a physically trying one. He liked America, with her love of freedom and her genial, hospitable ways, and always hoped again to “cross the pond.”

I remember a few sayings which he brought back from America which he regarded as typical of American humour—such as “I don’t know where I am going, but I am on my way,” and “We trust in God; all others pay cash.”

In 1908 he translated M. Dubois’ Contemporary Ireland, and wrote an introduction, which established his literary reputation.

At the general election in 1910 my husband increased his majority of sixteen to one of one hundred and eighteen. Mr. Shane Leslie, who gave him valuable help in this election, wrote thus—

“Kettle was the most delightful of platform speakers, and his witticisms and lyrical turns of speech made the election one long intellectual treat. He could turn over weighty questions of economics or of international policy with an ease that struck home to the peasant mind.... At one spot, I remember, he was greeted by a poverty-stricken populace, who had improvised a mountain band and crude home-made torches of turf and paraffin. Kettle immediately said: ‘Friends, you have met us with God’s two best gifts to man—fire and music.’ It was as instantaneous as graceful.” Having had such a hard fight, he loved his constituency as if it were a human thing. The issues fought in East Tyrone, as in all northern constituencies, were not the issues raised in ordinary Nationalist politics. In the North, religion is the predominant colour; it is the Catholic Green against the Protestant Orange. I say guardedly, predominant; of course there is the great issue—Home Rule v. Unionism. But the conspicuous place religion took struck a Dubliner as something quite extraordinary. I remember one amusing incident of the election, which my husband often cited as typical. Our motor-car broke down, and while repairs were in progress a small boy was an interested spectator. When all was in order again and we were about to start, the boy looked wistfully at us—at least as wistfully as a northern boy can: they are not demonstrative except on the Twelfth of July. My husband interpreting the look, invited him for a drive. He accepted, and as my husband set him down after his spin the boy lifted his cap and said: “Thank you, Mr. Kettle, I am much obliged. To hell With the Pope!” and walked sedately away. It was surely a spirited and quaint declaration of independence and incorruptibility.

Another incident, too, stands out. The night the poll was declared there was wild enthusiasm in Tyrone. As Mr. Leslie says, “there was a green rash.” My husband had promised that if he won, he would address a meeting at Cookstown. To get there it was necessary to pass through an Orange hamlet; as feeling was high and the hour late, it was deemed imprudent for us to go, but my husband insisted. We were about to start in a motor when one supporter, who had done his best to detain us, said very lugubriously: “Well, you have a terrible road before you.” “What’s the matter with it?” questioned the chauffeur anxiously. He was a Dublin man and quite ignorant of local politics. “Is it full of hills?” “No,” replied the other in a tone of grave warning; “full of Protestants.”

My husband’s opponent in this last election was Mr. Saunderson, who based his claims chiefly on the fact that he was the son of the late Colonel Saunderson. “Mr. Saunderson,” said my husband, “has protested so often that he is the son of Colonel Saunderson, that I, for my part, am inclined to believe him”—a touch of ridicule that went home with an Irish audience.

He was impatient of bigotry and narrowness and any attempt to stir up in Ulster the ashes of old hatreds and animosities. Once appealing to Ulstermen to forego their enthusiasm for William of Orange, he said with effect: “Why let us quarrel over a dead Dutchman?” His famous reply to Kipling, who by his doggerel tried to fan the flames of civil war, is worth quoting—

“The poet, for a coin,

Hands to the gabbling rout

A bucketful of Boyne

To put the sunrise out.”

In Parliament, he was an instant success. He was a born orator and spoke with all the intensity that passionate conviction lends. In his book on Irish Orators, he wrote: “Without knowledge, sincerity, and a hearty spiritual commitment to public causes, the crown of oratory, such as it is, is not to be won.” He had those requisites abundantly. In this book he gives a definition of an orator than which nothing could be finer: “The sound and rumour of great multitudes, passions hot as ginger in the mouth, torches, tumultuous comings and goings, and, riding through the whirlwind of it all, a personality, with something about him of the prophet, something of the actor, a touch of the charlatan, crying out not so much with his own voice as with that of the multitude, establishing with a gesture, refuting with a glance, stirring ecstasies of hatred and affection—is not that a common, and far from fantastic, conception of the orator?”

An appreciation of him containing reminiscences of two speeches in the House may not be deemed amiss here: “Wit and humour, denunciation and appeal came from him not merely fluently but always with effect. Tall and slight, with his soft boyish face and luminous eyes, he soon startled and then compelled the attention of the House by his peculiar irresistible sparkle and his luminous argument. Two pictures of him in that period survive. The first was on the occasion of the second reading of one of the numerous Women’s Suffrage Bills. ‘Mr. Speaker,’ he said in his rich Dublin accent and almost drawling intonation, ‘they say that if we admit women here as members, the House will lose in mental power.’ He flung a finger round the packed benches: ‘Mr. Speaker,’ he continued, ‘it is impossible.’ The House roared with laughter. ‘They tell me also that the House will suffer in morals. Mr. Speaker, I don’t believe that is possible either.’ The applause rang out again at this double hit.... I remember him again in the House on a hot night in June. A dull debate on Foreign Affairs was in progress. The recent travels of Mr. Roosevelt through Egypt and his lecture to England at the Guildhall reception were under discussion. Kettle let loose upon the famous Teddy the barbed irony of his wit. I recall only one of his biting phrases: ‘This new Tartarin of Tarascon who has come from America to shoot lions and lecture Empires.”

Another distinguished critic writing of him says: “His darting phrases made straight for the heart of unintelligence—sometimes also, no doubt, for the heart of intelligence. When he sat in Parliament he summed up the frailty of Mr. Balfour in yielding to the Tariff Reformers in the phrase: ‘They have nailed their leader to the mast.’”

He could be caustic to a degree. “I don’t mind loquacity,” he once remarked, “so long as it is not Belloc-quacity.”

“Mr. Long,” he said another time, “knows a sentence should have a beginning, but he quite forgets it should also have an end.”

In a flashing epigram he once summed up the difference between the two great English Parties: “When in office, the Liberals forget their principles and the Tories remember their friends.” Asked once to define a Jingo, he replied: “A Jingo is a man who pays for one seat in a tram-car and occupies two.”

This was, I think, the happiest period of his public life. Some have maintained that he should never have entered Parliament—that in doing so “he to Party gave up what was meant for mankind.” To me, looking back, it seems not his going in, but his coming out of Parliament, that was wrong. He was pre-eminently suited to the life. His gifts ensured him success in the House, and his avid intellect made every debate a subject of interest to him. In London political and journalistic life he found his level. He was in touch with the current of European life. Dublin he felt, after London, a backwater, for, owing to the destruction of the national life, there is no intellectual centre. Not that he would have endured living in London. He loved too much for that his Dublin, “the grey and laughing capital.” A quotation from The Day’s Burden explains at once his liking for the tonic experience and stimulus of a foreign city and his nostalgia for home. “A dead Frenchman, a cynic as they say, one Brizeux, murmurs to himself in one of his comedies as I murmur to myself every time I leave Ireland: ‘Do not cry out against la patrie. Your native land, after all, will give you the two most exquisite pleasures of your life, that of leaving her and that of coming back.’”

In 1909, the year of our marriage, he was appointed Professor of National Economics in the National University. In 1910 he resigned his seat in Parliament, as he found it impossible to combine the duties of Professor and Member. It was a whole-time professorship and, further, the subject was almost a unique one, and had practically no text-books. It was therefore necessary for him to devote all his energies, for some years at any rate, to his work in the University. This he did whole-heartedly, as Economics had always attracted him; he regarded it as one of the most important branches of study in the University. He thought that Ireland was in special need of trained economists. In his own words, he set himself to “formulate an economic idea fitted to express the self-realisation of a nation which is resolute to realise itself.” He did not wish either that Economics should be regarded as a dismal science. Writing of Geography, he says, “Geography is a prudent science, but one day she will take risks—even the risk of being interesting.” That risk Economics, in his keeping, certainly adventured. “The Science of Economics is commonly held to be lamentably arid and dismal. If that is your experience blame the Economists, for the slice of life with which Economics has to deal vibrates and, so to say, bleeds with actuality. All science, all exploration, all history in its material factors, the whole epic of man’s effort to subdue the earth and establish himself on it, fall within the domain of the Economist.”

As in every sphere of activity which he entered, he assumed his duties in the College with eager enthusiasm, and was very proud of being identified from the first with the National University.

But if my husband ceased to be a Member of Parliament, it does not mean that he became merely a Professor. He was a leading spirit in every live movement, and by speech and article kept in the political current. When the great labour strike occurred in Dublin in 1913, he was chairman of the Peace Committee which endeavoured to establish better feeling between the employers and employees. He was also a member of the Education Commission appointed by Mr. Birrell to enquire into the grievances of Irish teachers.

As for his work in literature in 1910, he published a volume of essays entitled The Day’s Burden, the best known and most characteristic of his writings.

In 1911 he wrote a pamphlet on Home Rule Finance, and in the same year he translated and edited Luther Kneller’s Christianity and the Leaders of Modern Science.

In 1911 he also edited and wrote a brilliant introduction to M. Halévy’s Life of Nietzsche, translated by Mr. Hone.

In 1912 he wrote The Open Secret of Ireland, putting the case of Ireland in his own inimitable way.

In 1912 he was one of the first prominent men identified with the foundation of the National Volunteers. A passage taken from an article written for the Daily News on the Volunteers has now a poignant interest—

“The impulse behind the new departure is not that of the swashbuckler or the fire-eater. Ancient Pistol has no share in it. In no country is the red barbarism of war as a solvent of differences more fully recognised than in Ireland. In no other is the wastage of the public substance on vast armaments more strongly condemned on grounds alike of conscience and intelligence. If Ireland has a distinguished military tradition, she has another tradition to which she holds more proudly, that of peace and culture. In her golden age she, unique in Europe, wrought out the ideal of the civilisation-state as contrasted with the brute-force state. She never oppressed or sought to destroy another nation. What she proposes to herself now is not to browbeat or dragoon or diminish by violence the civil or religious liberty of any man—but simply to safeguard her own.”

It is this man who speaks thus proudly of Ireland’s noble tradition of peace and culture, this man to whom war was “red barbarism,” who found it necessary to quit his own assured path “of peace and culture” and, with only the qualification of courage, assume the profession of a soldier.

In 1914 he edited a book on Irish Orators and Irish Oratory. Many have held his introduction to this his finest piece of writing.

When the war broke out he was engaged in Belgium buying rifles for the Volunteers. In August and September, 1914, he was war correspondent for the Daily News in Belgium. I shall quote just one passage which briefly sums up his attitude—an attitude which I have already endeavoured to explain, as far as explanation is necessary. “When this great war fell on Europe, those who knew even a little of current ethical and political ideas felt that the hour of Destiny had sounded. Europe had once more been threatened by Barbarism, Odin had thrown down his last challenge to Christ. To you, these may or may not seem mere phrases: to anyone whose duty has imposed on him some knowledge of Prussia, they are realities as true as the foul of Hell. When the most fully guaranteed and most sacred treaty in Europe—that which protected Belgium—was violated by Germany, when the frontier was crossed and the guns opened on Liége, without hesitation we declared that the lot of Ireland was on the side of the Allies. As the wave of infamy swept further and further over the plains of Belgium and France, we felt it was the duty of those who could do so to pass from words to deeds.”

“To Odin’s challenge, we cried Amen!

We stayed the plough and laid by the pen,

And we shouldered our guns like gentlemen

That the wiser weak might hold.”

In November, 1914, he joined, as he called it, the “Army of Freedom.” His oratorical gifts and prestige as a Nationalist made him a great asset to the recruiting committee. It is said he made over two hundred speeches throughout Ireland. “He spent himself tirelessly on the task,” writes a contributor to a Unionist paper. “His brilliant speeches were the admiration of all who heard them. To him, they were a heavy duty. ‘The absentee Irishman to-day,’ he said in a fine epigram, ‘is the man who stays at home.’ All the time he was on these spell-binding missions, he was chafing to be at the front. His happy and fighting nature delighted in the rough-and-tumble of platform work, and in the interruption of the ‘voice’ and hot thrust of retort. I remember him telling me of an Australian minor poet who was too proud to fight. The poet was arguing that men of letters should stay at home and cultivate the muses and hand on the torch of culture to the future. ‘I would rather be a tenth-rate minor poet,’ he said, ‘than a great soldier.’ Kettle’s retort on this occasion was deadly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘aren’t you?’”

He went to the front with a burdened heart. The murder of his brother-in-law, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, cast a deep gloom on his spirit. As he wrote to his friend Mr. Lynd shortly before his death, it “oppressed him with horror.” I do not think it out of place to recall here a brief obituary notice he wrote of Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington, whom he loved, as Mr. Lynd so truly says, for the “uncompromising and radically gentle idealist he was”—

“It would be difficult at any time to convey in the deadness of language an adequate sense of the courage, vitality, superabundant faith, and self-ignoring manliness which were the characteristic things we associated with Francis Sheehy-Skeffington. To me, writing amidst the rumour of camps, the task is impossible. There are clouds that will never lift.

“He was to me the good comrade of many hopes, and though the ways of this scurvy and disastrous world led us apart, he remained to me an inextinguishable flame. This ‘agitator,’ this ‘public menace,’ this ‘disturber’ was wholly emancipated from egotism, and incapable of personal hatred. He was a man who had ranged the whole world of ideas, and rather than my own words I would use those of the great whom we agreed in admiring. I could style him with Guyau—

‘Droit comme un rayon de lumière,

Et, comme lui, vibrant et chaud;—’

“or put in his mouth the proud and humble faith of Robert Buchanan—

‘Never to bow or kneel

To any brazen lie;

To love the worst, to feel

The worst is even as I.

To count all triumph vain

That helps no burdened man;

I think so still and so

I end as I began.’

“But in truth there is no phrase of any of his torchbearers that does not win new life from association with him. Strangest of all, he, who turned away from soldiers, left to all soldiers an example of courage in death to which there are not many parallels. This brave and honourable man died to the rattle of musketry; his name will be recalled to the ruffle of drums.”

Easter week, too, had been for him a harrowing and terrible experience. MacDonagh, who was shot, was a fellow-professor at the College, as was also MacNeill, in whose favour he gave evidence at the court-martial. Pearse, the leader, was a friend of many years. With the rebellion he had no sympathy—indeed it made him furious. He used to say bitterly that they had spoiled it all—spoiled his dream of a free united Ireland in a free Europe. But what really seared his heart was the fearful retribution that fell on the leaders of the rebellion. When Beaumarchais’s play, The Marriage of Figaro, was produced, it created a furore. The author’s cynical comment was that the only thing madder than the play was its success. So it might be said that the only thing madder than the insurrection was the manner of its suppression. Two wrongs do not make a right, nor do two follies make common sense. We in Ireland had the right, if not the precedent, to expect as fair treatment as was meted out by Botha to rebels in South Africa. My husband felt after the disasters of Easter week more than ever committed to the attitude he had taken up. He brought pressure to bear that he might be sent immediately to the front. On the 14th of July, 1916, he sailed for France.

His comrades speak of his wonderful courage, endurance and buoyant spirits at the front. He was never out of cheer, though he had a curious prophetic feeling all through that he would die on the battlefield in France.

“Do not think of us as glum,” he wrote to me in August. “Gaiety is a sort of courage, and my Company is the gayest of the Battalion.” In a letter to a friend he again speaks of his happy mood and his deep love of France: “I myself am quite extraordinarily happy. If it should come my way to die, I shall sleep well in the France I always loved, and shall know that I have done something towards bringing to birth the Ireland one has dreamed of.”

France he loved in truth. In this volume he refers to her “as the most interesting and logical of nations,” and in The Day’s Burden he says: “The Irish mind is moreover like the French—‘lucid, vigorous and positive,’ though less methodical since it never had the happiness to undergo the Latin discipline. France and Ireland have been made to understand each other.” France, too, knew and loved him. In a beautiful tribute to him in a French journal, L’Opinion, the writer says: “All parties bowed in sorrow over his grave, for in last analysis they were all Irish, and they knew that in losing him, whether he was friend or enemy, they had lost a true son of Ireland. A son of Ireland? He was more. He was Ireland! He had fought for all the aspirations of his race, for Independence, for Home Rule, for the Celtic Renaissance, for a United Ireland, for the eternal Cause of Humanity.... He died, a hero in the uniform of a British soldier, because he knew that the faults of a period or of a man should not prevail against the cause of right or liberty.”

In a farewell letter to his close and honoured friend, Mr. Devlin, he shows that he had envisaged death and was ready: “As you know, the character of the fighting has changed; it is no longer a question of serving one’s apprenticeship in a trench with intermittent bursts of leaving cover and pushing right on. It is Mons backwards with endless new obstacles to cross. Consequently our offensive must go on without break. This means, of course, the usual exaction in blood. You will have noticed by the papers how high the price is, and all Irish Regiments will continue to have front places at the performances. So you see, even I have no particular certainty of coming back. I passed through, as everybody of sense does, a sharp agony of separation. If I were an English poet like that over-praised Rupert Brooke, I should call it, no doubt, the Gethsemane before the climb up the Windy Hill, but phrase-making seems now a very dead thing to me—but now it is almost over and I feel calm.... I hope to come back. If not, I believe that to sleep here in the France I have loved is no harsh fate, and that so passing out into the silence, I shall help towards the Irish settlement. Give my love to my colleagues—the Irish people have no need of it.”

But the moral and physical strain on a man, bred as he was, was terrible, and in spite of his fine efforts at insouciance there is a note of nostalgia. “Physically I am having a heavy time. I am doing my best, but I see better men than me dropping out day by day and wonder if I shall ever have the luck or grace to come home.” And again: “The heat is bad, as are the insects and rats, but the moral strain is positively terrible. It is not that I am not happy in a way—a poor way—but my heart does long for a chance to come home.” And in another letter of farewell to a friend he says: “I am not happy to die, the sacrifice is over-great, but I am, content.” Some critics have hinted that he died in France because he had not the heart to live in Ireland. Some even went so far as to suggest that he died in France because he knew he ought to have died in the G.P.O. in Dublin. I quote these letters—almost too intimate to quote—to show that he made the sacrifice, knowing and feeling that it was a sacrifice—he made it for his Ireland and his Europe. He came unscathed through the engagement before Guillemont. An officer, telling me of that, said he behaved splendidly, taking every risk and seemed withal to have a charmed life. They had a day to reorganise before attacking Ginchy. In his last letter to his brother, written on the 8th, he described the battle-scene and his mood. “I am calm and happy but desperately anxious to live.... The big guns are coughing and smacking their shells, which sound for all the world like overhead express trains, at anything from 10 to 100 per minute on this sector; the men are grubbing and an odd one is writing home. Somewhere the Choosers of the Slain are touching, as in our Norse story they used to touch, with invisible wands those who are to die.”

On the midnight of the 8th they advanced to their position before Ginchy. A fellow-officer gave me a gruesome description of the march, saying: “The stench of the dead that covered the road was so awful that we both used foot-powder on our faces.” On the 9th, within thirty yards of Ginchy, he met his death from a bullet from the Prussian Guards.

I quote here an account which a staff-officer from the front gave to the Press Association of his last days—

“Kettle was one of the finest officers we had with us. The men worshipped him, and would have followed him to the ends of the earth. He was an exceptionally brave and capable officer, who had always the interests of his men at heart. He was in the thick of the hard fighting in the Guillemont-Ginchy region. I saw him at various stages of the fighting. He was enjoying it like any veteran, though it cannot be denied that the trade of war, and the horrible business of killing one’s fellows was distasteful to a man with his sensitive mind and kindly disposition. I know it was with the greatest reluctance that he discarded the Professor’s gown for the soldier’s uniform, but once the choice was made he threw himself into his new profession, because he believed he was serving Ireland and humanity by so doing.

“In the Guillemont fighting I caught a glimpse of him for a brief spell. He was in the thick of a hard struggle, which had for its object the dislodgment of the enemy from a redoubt they held close to the village. He was temporarily in command of the company, and he was directing operations with a coolness and daring that marked him out as a born leader of men. He seemed always to know what was the right thing to do, and he was always on the right spot to order the doing of the right thing at the right moment. The men under his command on that occasion fought with a heroism worthy of their leader. They were assailed furiously on both flanks by the foe. They resisted all attempts to force them back, and at the right moment they pressed home a vigorous counter-attack that swept the enemy off the field.

“The next time I saw him his men were again in a tight corner. They were advancing against the strongest part of the enemy’s position in that region. Kettle kept them together wonderfully in spite of the terrible ordeal they had to go through, and they carried the enemy’s position in record time. It was in the hottest corner of the Ginchy fighting that he went down. He was leading his men with a gallantry and judgment that would almost certainly have won him official recognition had he lived, and may do so yet. His beloved Fusiliers were facing a deadly fire and were dashing forward irresistibly to grapple with the foe. Their ranks were smitten by a tempest of fire. Men went down right and left—some never to rise again. Kettle was among the latter. He dropped to earth and made an effort to get up. I think he must have been hit again. Anyhow, he collapsed completely. A wail of anguish went up from his men as soon as they saw that their officer was down. He turned to them and urged them forward to where the Huns were entrenched. They did not need his injunction. They swept forward with a rush. With levelled bayonets they crashed into the foe. There was deadly work, indeed, and the Huns paid dearly for the loss of Kettle.

“When the battle was over his men came back to camp with sore hearts. They seemed to feel his loss more than that of any of the others. The men would talk of nothing else but the loss of their ‘own Captain Tom,’ and his brother officers were quite as sincere, if less effusive, in the display of their grief. His loss will be mourned by all ranks of the Brigade, for he was known outside his own particular battalion, and his place will be hard to fill either in the ranks of his battalion or in the hearts of his men.”

Had he survived Ginchy, he would have been appointed Base Censor and been out of the danger zone. He had refused to take up his appointment till he had seen his comrades through; he wished also to give the lie to his enemies who had delighted to call him a “platform soldier.” Had he survived Ginchy, even though he were covered with wounds and glory, would not the tongues of his revilers, who, he said, always spoke of him “with inverted commas in their voice,” have waged their war of calumny again? But death is very convincing. As the Freeman said, “His victor’s grave at Ginchy is their answer.” He could have no more splendid epitaph than the official War Office announcement that he fell “at the post of honour, leading his men in a victorious charge.”

“It is not the death of the Professor nor of the soldier, nor of the politician, nor even of the poet and the essayist, that causes the heartache we feel,” writes a comrade. “It is the loss of that rare, charming, wondrous personality summed up in those two simple words—Tom Kettle.”

A friend once said of him that he was “infinitely lovable.” His great gifts accompanied by a rare simplicity and charm of manner that broke down all social barriers, compelled affection. He was known to all as “Tom Kettle.” To his men, he was “their own Captain Tom.” Perhaps the greatest proof of his magnetic personality lies in the fact that all classes, the Unionist and Nationalist, the soldier, the Sinn Feiner, and, as the Freeman says, “those wearing the convict garb” of England, united in mourning his death and paying tribute to his memory.

The Irish Times, the opponent of all his political ideals, said: “As Irish Unionists we lay our wreath on the grave of a generous Nationalist, a brilliant Irishman, and a loyal soldier of the King.”

“There was in his rich and versatile temperament,” said the Church of Ireland Gazette, “nothing of that narrow, obscurantist spirit which is the curse of much of Irish Nationalism.”

Ireland was his one splendid prejudice. In The Open Secret of Ireland he wrote: “We came, we, the invaders,”—an allusion to his Norse ancestry—“to dominate and remained to serve. For Ireland has signed us with the oil and chrism of her human sacrament, and even though we should deny the faith with our lips, she would hold our hearts to the end.” He had a radiant pride in the indomitable spirit of his country that, many times conquered, was always unconquered. “A people such as this is not to be exterminated. An ideal (that of National Autonomy) is not to be destroyed. Imitate in Ireland” (he counsels England) “your own wisdom in dealing with the Colonies, and the same policy will bear the same harvest. For justice given the Colonies gave you friendship, as for injustice stubbornly upheld, they had given you hatred. The analogy with Ireland is complete so far as the cards have been played. The same human elements are there, the same pride, the same anger, the same willingness to forget. Why then should the augury fail?” In his pamphlet on Home Rule Finance he says: “The Irish problem that is now knocking so peremptorily at the door of Westminster is a problem with a past, history is of its very essence and substance; the wave that breaks in suave music on the beach of to-day, has behind it the unspent impulse of fierce storms and vast upheavals. It is not wise, it is not even safe to handle the reorganisation of the political fabric of Ireland in the same ‘practical’ fashion that you would handle the reconstruction of an Oil Company. There is in liberty a certain tonic inspiration, there is in the national idea a deep fountain of courage and energy not to be figured out in dots and decimals; and unless you can call these psychological forces into action your Home Rule Bill will be only ink, paper and disappointment. In one word Home Rule must be a moral as well as a material liquidation of the past.” His pride in Ireland forbade the insult of futile sympathy. “Tears, as we read in Wordsworth, to human suffering are due. If there be anyone with tears at command, he may shed them, with great fitness and no profit at all, over the long martyrdom of Ireland. But let him, at least if he values facts, think twice before he goes on to apply to her that other line which speaks of human hopes defeated and overthrown. No other people in the world has held so staunchly to its inner vision; none other has, with such fiery patience, repelled the hostility of circumstances, and in the end reshaped them after the desire of her heart. Hats off to success, gentlemen! Your modern god may well be troubled at the sight of this enigmatic Ireland which at once despises him and tumbles his faithfullest worshippers in the sand of their own amphitheatre. Yet, so it is. The confederate general, seeing victory suddenly snatched from his hands and not for the first time, by Meagher’s Brigade, exclaimed in immortal profanity, ‘There comes that damned green flag again!’ I have often commended that phrase to Englishmen as admirably expressive of the historical rôle and record of Ireland in British politics. The damned green flag flutters again in their eyes, and if they will but listen to the music that marches with it, they will find that the lamenting fifes are dominated wholly by the drums of victory.” Ireland always moved him to lyric patriotism. His appeal not to rend “the seamless garment of Irish Nationality” is immortal. Mr. Lynd, whom I have quoted so frequently because he has understood my husband as it is given to few to understand another, calls the last lines of his “Reason in Rhyme” his testament to England as his call to Europeanism is his testament to Ireland.

“Bond from the toil of hate we may not cease:

Free, we are free to be your friend.

And when you make your banquet, and we come,

Soldier with equal soldier must we sit

Closing a battle, not forgetting it.

With not a name to hide

This mate and mother of valiant ‘rebels’ dead

Must come with all her history on her head.

We keep the past for pride:

No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb:

No rawest squad of all Death’s volunteers,

No rudest man who died

To tear your flag down in the bitter years

But shall have praise and three times thrice again

When at that table men shall drink with men.”

“It was to the standard of the intellect in a gloomy world that he always gaily rallied,” Mr. Lynd observes with truth. He saw the unbridgeable gulf which exists between aspiration and achievement. Heine once said bitterly: “You want to give the woman you love the sun, moon and stars, and all you can give her is a house on a terrace.” He, like Heine, knew this sense of defeat, and it is this which made him regard “optimism as an attractive form of mental disease.” As he says of Hamlet, “he passed through life annotating it with a gloss of melancholy speculation.”

He felt the “weary weight of all this unintelligible world.” “The twentieth century,” he wrote in an article, “which cuts such a fine figure in encyclopædias is most familiarly known to the majority of its children as a new sort of headache.” But he was a fighting pessimist that called for the best. “Impossibilism is a poor word and an unmanly doctrine. We have got to keep moving on and, since that is so, we had better put as good thought as we can into our itinerary. The task of civilisation was never easy. Freedom—the phrase belongs to Fichte or someone of his circle—has always been a battle and a march: it is of the nature of both that they should appear to the participants, during the heat of movement, as planless and chaotic.”

Perhaps the finest definition of his philosophy of life may be found in an essay in The Day’s Burden. “A wise man soon grows disillusioned of disillusionment. The first lilac freshness of life will indeed never return. The graves are sealed, and no hand will open them to give us back dead comrades or dead dreams. As we look out on the burdened march of humanity, as we look in on the leashed but straining passions of our unpurified hearts, we can but bow our heads and accept the discipline of pessimism. Bricriu must have his hour as well as Cuchullin. But the cynical mood is one that can be resisted. Cynicism, however exercisable in literature, is in life the last treachery, the irredeemable defeat.... But we must continue loyal to the instinct which makes us hope much, we must believe in all the Utopias.”

Pessimism is indeed written on his banner, but it is a pessimism which achieves. “Is not the whole Christian conception of life rooted in pessimism,” he argues, “as becomes a philosophy expressive of a world in which the ideal can never quite overcome the crumbling incoherence of matter? May we not say of all good causes what Arnold said only of the proud and defeated Celts: ‘They always went down to battle, but they always fell’!”

There is no need to comment on him as a man of letters. A master of exquisite prose, he had in perfection what he himself calls “the incommunicable gift of phrase” and “the avid intellect which must needs think out of things everything to be found in them.” What he wrote of Anatole France, might fittingly be applied to himself. “A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams as a thunder-cloud is stabbed by lightning is a type of spiritual life far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of consummate prose is an attitude and an achievement, that will help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our century.” His defence of the use of the epigram and its purpose is vigorous and arresting: “The epigrammatist, too, and the whole tribe of image-makers dwell under a disfavour far too austere. We must distinguish. There is in such images an earned and an unearned increment of applause. The sudden, vast, dazzling, and deep-shadowed view of traversed altitudes that breaks on the vision of a climber, who, after long effort, has reached the mountain-top, is not to be grudged him. And the image that closes up in a little room the infinite riches of an argument carefully pursued is not only legitimate but admirable.”

His writings abound in fine images and epigrams which seem to come naturally to his pen. Galway is to him the “Bruges-la-Morte” of western Ireland; again “the opulent loneliness of the Golden Vale,” is a picture in words. He referred to Irish emigrants as “landless men from a manless land”; England, he said, found Ireland a nation and left her a question. Loyalty he described as the bloom on the face of freedom. Mr. Healy, whose wit he admired and whose politics he deplored, he called “a brilliant calamity.” “It is with ideas,” he wrote, “as with umbrellas, if left lying about they are peculiarly liable to change of ownership.” Describing a man of poor parents who had achieved greatness, he said: “He was of humble origin like the violin string.” A very stupid book, published one winter, he referred to “as very suitable for the Christmas fire.” Of the Royal Irish Constabulary he said: “It was formerly an army of occupation. Now, owing to the all but complete disappearance of crime, it is an army of no occupation.” Cleverness he defined as a sort of perfumed malice, the perfume predominating in literature, the malice in life. The inevitableness of Home Rule, he declared, resided in the fact that it is a biped among ideas. “It marches to triumph on two feet, an Irish and Imperial foot.” And surely this is one of his finest epigrams: “Life is a cheap table d’hôte in a rather dirty restaurant, with time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.” Sufferers from the influenza will appreciate his description of that malady. “Other illnesses are positive, influenza is negative. It makes one an absentee from oneself.” Talking of Mr. George Moore, he described him as “suffering from the sick imagination of the growing boy.” The grazing system he declared must be exterminated root and branch, brute and ranch. In his Home Rule Finance, he says: “Home Rule may be a divorce between two administrations, it will be a marriage between two nations. You are in any case free to choose for your inspiration between alimony and matrimony, the emphasis in either case is on the last syllable.”

Few think of him as a poet, and yet his poetry has as unique and distinguished a cachet as his prose. In political poetry and battle song he equalled the best. His “Epitaph on the House of Lords” ranks beside Chesterton’s memorable poem on the same subject. His battle song entitled “The Last Crusade” embodies in perfect lyric form his vision of the war—

“Then lift the flag of the last Crusade!

And fill the ranks of the Last Brigade!

March on to the fields where the world’s re-made,

And the ancient Dreams come true!”

A sonnet written to his little daughter on the battlefield has been declared by a literary critic as sufficient to found the reputation of a poet.

“TO MY DAUGHTER BETTY, THE GIFT OF GOD.

“In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown

To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime,

In that desired, delayed, incredible time,

“You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,

And the dear heart that was your baby throne,

To dice with death. And, oh! they’ll give you rhyme

And reason: some will call the thing sublime,

And some decry it in a knowing tone.

So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,

And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,

Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,

Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,

And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

“In the field, before Guillemont, Somme,

“September 4, 1916.”

“Ballade Autumnal” is in Villon’s perfect manner, and his replies to Kipling and Watson will be remembered in Ireland for all time. In a volume entitled Poems and Parodies, his verses have been collected and published.

Style in writing was a thing he regarded as of paramount importance. Though a prolific writer for newspapers, he was no believer in the theory of dashing off an article. On the contrary, he maintained that one of the drawbacks incidental to anything hastily written is that it is bound to be too serious. To write well, you must labour infinitely, otherwise one’s work is sure to bear traces of what he called the “heavy paw.” In the Nationist, when the slipshod work of some popular writer was being reviewed he observed, “At least we are stylists.”

In the same degree as he loved the expert, he abhorred the quack, the charlatan, the pseudo-writer of prose or poetry. I remember one night a popular novelist and writer of magazine stories, who had achieved fame and money without achieving literature, was telling with great unction of his success. He told how his recent book had been translated not only into French, Italian, Spanish, but even into a Dutch dialect. My husband, flicking the ash from a cigarette, said in a very urbane voice: “That is very interesting. I dare say then it will soon be translated into English.”

In speaking, too, while his notes were scanty, in fact mere headings, he always thought out beforehand both the matter and form. As he put it, he favoured “carefully prepared impromptus.”

Friends will remember him at his best as a conversationalist. As a raconteur he was inimitable, and, as a critic says, “It was not so much the point of his tale that counted. The divagations from the text in which he loved to indulge were the delight of his auditors.” “What Doctor Johnson said of Burke,” observes another critic, “was essentially true of Kettle, ‘that you could not have stood under an archway in his company to escape a passing shower without realising that he was a great man.’”

He had the literary man’s constitutional distaste for writing or answering letters. A friend once said chaffingly to him that he might write “The Life and Letters of T. M. Kettle.” “Well,” retorted Tom, “you may write my life, but there won’t be any letters, for I never write any.” He was also unpunctual in keeping appointments, and finding the telephone very useful, he said it should be called not “telephone,” but “tell-a-fib,” as that was its chief function.

He was intensely Catholic and always flaunted the banner of his religion. “Religion,” he writes in this volume, “is one of the ideal forces that make men good citizens and gallant soldiers.” And again, “If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will they fight on an empty soul.” Perhaps because he loved his faith, so he could afford to take it humorously at times. I remember once his throwing off in an epigram the difference between the Catholic and Protestant religions. “The Catholics take their beliefs table d’hôte,” he said, “and the Protestants theirs à la carte.” What chiefly appealed to him in Catholicity was its mystery and its gospel of mercy. If he often quoted Heine’s well-known semi-cynical “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,” it was because he felt an amazed gratitude that a God should choose such an original profession. He greatly liked the society of Irish priests. He used to say they were gentlemen first, and priests after. They, too, loved him, and took his gentle chaff as it was meant. I remember how a priest friend of his enjoyed a sermon for golfers which Tom composed for him. Needless to say it was never preached. In it golfers were enjoined to “get out of the bunker of mortal sin with the niblick of Confession.” During the Dublin strike an anti-cleric was railing against the priests, who had intervened to prevent the deportation of the children. Tom completely won him over with the original argument “that the priests were acting as members of a spiritual trade union.” Writing of the great Catholic poet, Francis Thompson, he puts in a lyric plea for his religion: “The superiority of the Catholic poet is that he reinforces the natural will by waters falling an infinite height from the infinite ocean of spirit. He has two worlds against one. If we place our Fortunate Islands solely within the walls of space and time, they will dissolve into a mocking dream; for there will always be pain that no wisdom can assuage. They must lie on the edge of the horizon with the glimmer of a strange sea about their shores and their mountain peaks hidden among the clouds.” He had a wonderful spiritual humility. What he found admirable in Russian literature was “an immense and desolating sob of humility and self-reproach.” He abjured the self-righteous who, he used to say, went round as if they were “live monuments erected by God in honour of the Ten Commandments.” He was, indeed, over generous in the praise of qualities in others which he had superlatively himself. Anyone with a gift, a “plus” man at golf, a Feis Gold Medallist, an expert gardener—just the distinguishing cachet of excellence won his admiration. Witness how he lauds the valour of his Dublin Fusiliers, and yet his courage was no newly acquired virtue. I remember several years ago he went to a political meeting at Newcastle West. A faction party took possession of the platform. The intending speakers were for abandoning the meeting, but Tom declined to give in without at least a fight, and led the attack on the platform. After a nasty struggle they captured their objective. Mr. Gwynn, who was one of the speakers, was so impressed with my husband’s daring that he wrote me his admiration, saying that he led the attack “with nothing but an umbrella and a University degree.” His moral courage, too, never failed. When occasion demanded it, he could always be counted on to say “the dire full-throated thing.”

For the memory of Parnell he had a deep reverence. This is his vision of him—

“A flaming coal

Lit at the stars and sent

To burn the sin of patience from her soul,

The Scandal of Content.”

A life, or rather an impressionist study, of “the Chief’s” career was a work he frequently projected but unfortunately never accomplished. The plinth at the back of Parnell’s Statue in O’Connell Street should, he maintained, have been broken to symbolise the wrecking of Parnell’s career. “Parnell,” he wrote, “died with half his music in him.” Once in a discussion on the eighties he remarked: “What is the history of the eighties? It is the history of two Irishmen—Oscar Wilde and Parnell.” For G. K. Chesterton my husband had a great admiration. In The Open Secret of Ireland, he refers to him as wielding “the wisest pen in contemporary English letters. There is in his mere sanity a touch of magic so potent that although incapable of dullness he has achieved authority, and although convinced that faith is more romantic than doubt or even sin, he has got himself published and read.” The only flaw he found in Mr. Chesterton was that he was not a suffragist. My husband was, of course, an ardent supporter of the Women’s Movement, and wrote a brilliant pamphlet entitled Why Bully Women? Mr. Chesterton paid him a noble tribute in the course of an article in the Observer: “The former case, that of the man of letters who becomes by strength of will a man of war, is better exemplified in a man like Professor Kettle, whose fall in battle ought to crush the slanderers of Ireland as the fall of a tower could crush nettles.”

Another book projected but unachieved was on Dublin. His idea was to, follow the method of E. V. Lucas in his Wanderer in London. For Dublin city he had a great love and pride: “Of no mean city am I,” he often quoted proudly of his native city. For its poor he had a tremendous pity. The city beggars always found him an easy victim. I remember one night on coming out of a theatre, an urchin of about five years came clamouring after him. I began the usual stunt on the parental iniquity that allowed youngsters to go out begging at eleven at night; but Tom, unheeding, was already chatting with the boy. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Patsy Murphy, sir.” “Well, Patsy, which would you rather, a shilling or a halfpenny?” “A halfpenny, sir,” was the amazing reply. “Now tell me why?” questioned my husband, interested. “Well,” said the kid, “I might get the halfpenny but I’d never get the shilling.” His naïve philosophy got him both on this occasion.

In a speech on Dublin he said: “We cannot ignore the slums, for the slums are Dublin and Dublin is the slums.” On the same occasion he remarked: “Dublin is in one respect like every other city. It is convinced that it possesses the most beautiful women and the worst corporation.”

In a letter written from the boat on his way to France, with already a prophetic sense of death waiting for him on the battlefield, he wrote: “I have never felt my own essay ‘On Saying Good-bye’ more profoundly aux tréfonds de mon cœur.”

I shall quote the conclusion of the essay—

“There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors. The old woman” (an old woman previously mentioned who complained that “the only bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong end“)—”the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours. Time and Space: and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us. ‘However amusing the comedy may have been,’ wrote Pascal, ‘there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over, for ever.’ Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, à Dieu. Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to another, why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its forerunners?”

Could one meet death in a nobler way? He had his last lines at Ginchy, and “his fine word and incomparable gesture.” And now Picardy of the waving poplars—Picardy that my student days had garlanded with many memories, that shone in recollection with many friendships, now by the strange way of destiny holds my husband’s grave. But he sleeps well in his beloved France, wearing the green emblem of his Motherland with his fallen comrades of the “Irish Brigade.” As his distant wind-swept grave in the Valley of the Somme rises to vision, some noble words of René Bazin recur to me making a picture: “The loyal land, the honest land, the land of love, now moist, now parched, where one sleeps the last sleep with the lullaby wind in the shade of the Cross.” The many who loved him and now grieve for him will find in his own proud lines on Parnell a fitting message—

“Tears will betray all pride, but when ye mourn him,

Be it in soldier wise,

As for a captain who hath gently borne him,

And in the midnight dies....

So let him keep, where all world-wounds are healed,

The silences of God.”

Mary S. Kettle.

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