Part 3

“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.