THE WAYS OF WAR
[Illustration:
_Lafayette, Dublin, photographers._ _Emery Walker phot._
_Thos M. Kettle_]
THE WAYS OF WAR
BY
PROFESSOR T. M. KETTLE
LIEUT. 9TH DUBLIN FUSILIERS
WITH A MEMOIR BY HIS WIFE
MARY S. KETTLE
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1917
TO
MY DEAR WIFE AND COMRADE
_EX UMBRIS ET IMAGINIBUS IN VERITATEM_
PREFATORY NOTE
Perhaps the order of the chapters in the present book requires a word
of explanation. They have a natural sequence as the confessions of an
Irish man of letters as to why he felt called upon to offer up his
life in the war for the freedom of the world. Kettle was one of the
most brilliant figures both in the Young Ireland and Young Europe of
his time. The opening chapters reveal him as a Nationalist concerned
about the liberty not only of Ireland--though he never for a moment
forgot that--but of every nation, small and great. He hoped to make
these chapters part of a separate book, expounding the Irish attitude
to the war; but unfortunately, as one must think, the War Office would
not permit an Irish Officer to put his name to a work of the kind.
After the chapters describing the inevitable sympathy of an Irishman
with Serbia and Belgium--little nations attacked by two Imperial
bullies--comes an account of the tragic scenes Kettle himself witnessed
in Belgium, where he served as a war-correspondent in the early days of
the war. “Silhouettes from the Front,” which follow, describe what he
saw and felt later on, when, having taken a commission in the Dublin
Fusiliers, he accompanied his regiment to France in time to take part
in the Battle of the Somme. Then some chapters containing hints of
that passion for France which was one of the great passions of his
life. One of these, entitled “The New France,” was written before the
war had made the world realise that France is still the triumphant
flag-bearer of European civilisation. Then, in “The Gospel of the
Devil,” we have an examination of the armed philosophies that have laid
so much of France and the rest of Europe desolate. The book closes
with “Trade or Honour?”--an appeal to the Allies to preserve high and
disinterested motives in ending the war as in beginning it, and to turn
a deaf ear to those political hucksters to whom gain means more than
freedom. Thus “The Ways of War” is a book, not only of patriotism,
but of international idealism. Above all, it is a passionate human
document--the “apologia pro vita sua” of a soldier who died for freedom.
L.
Many of the chapters in this book have already appeared in
various newspapers and magazines, to the editors and proprietors
of which thanks are due for permission to reprint them here. The
sources of the chapters referred to are as follows--
“Under the Heel of the Hun” }
“Zur Erinnerung” }
“The Way to the Trenches” } _Daily News._
“G.H.Q.” }
“Belgium in Time of Peace“: _Freeman’s Journal._
“The New France”: _Irish Ecclesiastical Record._
“The Soldier-Priests of France“: _The Hibernian Journal._
“The Gospel of the Devil”: _T. P.’s War Journal._
CONTENTS
PAGE
MEMOIR 1
WHY IRELAND FOUGHT--
I. PRELUDE 58
II. THE BULLYING OF SERBIA 75
III. THE CRIME AGAINST BELGIUM 91
UNDER THE HEEL OF THE HUN--
I. A WORLD ADRIFT 105
II. “EUROPE AGAINST THE BARBARIANS” 109
SOME THINGS AT STAKE.
III. TERMONDE 115
IV. MALINES 125
V. IN OSTEND 134
TREATING BELGIUM DECENTLY 139
BELGIUM IN PEACE 144
“G.H.Q.” 160
“ZUR ERINNERUNG.” A LETTER TO AN AUSTRIAN FELLOW-STUDENT 165
SILHOUETTES FROM THE FRONT--
I. THE WAY TO THE TRENCHES 170
II. THE LONG ENDURANCE 175
III. RHAPSODY ON RATS 180
THE NEW FRANCE 184
THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE 194
THE GOSPEL OF THE DEVIL--
I. BISMARCK 212
II. NIETZSCHE 220
III. TREITSCHKE AND THE PROFESSORS 230
TRADE OR HONOUR? 235
THE WAYS OF WAR
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.”