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.