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.