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.