religion. “Religion,” he writes in this volume, “is one of the ideal
forces that make men good citizens and gallant soldiers.” And again,
“If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will
they fight on an empty soul.” Perhaps because he loved his faith, so
he could afford to take it humorously at times. I remember once his
throwing off in an epigram the difference between the Catholic and
Protestant religions. “The Catholics take their beliefs table d’hôte,”
he said, “and the Protestants theirs à la carte.” What chiefly appealed
to him in Catholicity was its mystery and its gospel of mercy. If he
often quoted Heine’s well-known semi-cynical “Dieu me pardonnera,
c’est son métier,” it was because he felt an amazed gratitude that a
God should choose such an original profession. He greatly liked the
society of Irish priests. He used to say they were gentlemen first,
and priests after. They, too, loved him, and took his gentle chaff as
it was meant. I remember how a priest friend of his enjoyed a sermon
for golfers which Tom composed for him. Needless to say it was never
preached. In it golfers were enjoined to “get out of the bunker of
mortal sin with the niblick of Confession.” During the Dublin strike
an anti-cleric was railing against the priests, who had intervened to
prevent the deportation of the children. Tom completely won him over
with the original argument “that the priests were acting as members of
a spiritual trade union.” Writing of the great Catholic poet, Francis
Thompson, he puts in a lyric plea for his religion: “The superiority
of the Catholic poet is that he reinforces the natural will by waters
falling an infinite height from the infinite ocean of spirit. He has
two worlds against one. If we place our Fortunate Islands solely
within the walls of space and time, they will dissolve into a mocking
dream; for there will always be pain that no wisdom can assuage. They
must lie on the edge of the horizon with the glimmer of a strange sea
about their shores and their mountain peaks hidden among the clouds.”
He had a wonderful spiritual humility. What he found admirable in
Russian literature was “an immense and desolating sob of humility and
self-reproach.” He abjured the self-righteous who, he used to say,
went round as if they were “live monuments erected by God in honour
of the Ten Commandments.” He was, indeed, over generous in the praise
of qualities in others which he had superlatively himself. Anyone
with a gift, a “plus” man at golf, a Feis Gold Medallist, an expert
gardener--just the distinguishing _cachet_ of excellence won his
admiration. Witness how he lauds the valour of his Dublin Fusiliers,
and yet his courage was no newly acquired virtue. I remember several
years ago he went to a political meeting at Newcastle West. A faction
party took possession of the platform. The intending speakers were for
abandoning the meeting, but Tom declined to give in without at least
a fight, and led the attack on the platform. After a nasty struggle
they captured their objective. Mr. Gwynn, who was one of the speakers,
was so impressed with my husband’s daring that he wrote me his
admiration, saying that he led the attack “with nothing but an umbrella
and a University degree.” His moral courage, too, never failed. When
occasion demanded it, he could always be counted on to say “the dire
full-throated thing.”
For the memory of Parnell he had a deep reverence. This is his vision
of him--
“A flaming coal
Lit at the stars and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The Scandal of Content.”
A life, or rather an impressionist study, of “the Chief’s” career was
a work he frequently projected but unfortunately never accomplished.
The plinth at the back of Parnell’s Statue in O’Connell Street should,
he maintained, have been broken to symbolise the wrecking of Parnell’s
career. “Parnell,” he wrote, “died with half his music in him.” Once in
a discussion on the eighties he remarked: “What is the history of the
eighties? It is the history of two Irishmen--Oscar Wilde and Parnell.”
For G. K. Chesterton my husband had a great admiration. In _The Open
Secret of Ireland_, he refers to him as wielding “the wisest pen in
contemporary English letters. There is in his mere sanity a touch of
magic so potent that although incapable of dullness he has achieved
authority, and although convinced that faith is more romantic than
doubt or even sin, he has got himself published and read.” The only
flaw he found in Mr. Chesterton was that he was not a suffragist. My
husband was, of course, an ardent supporter of the Women’s Movement,
and wrote a brilliant pamphlet entitled _Why Bully Women?_ Mr.
Chesterton paid him a noble tribute in the course of an article in the
_Observer_: “The former case, that of the man of letters who becomes
by strength of will a man of war, is better exemplified in a man like
Professor Kettle, whose fall in battle ought to crush the slanderers of
Ireland as the fall of a tower could crush nettles.”
Another book projected but unachieved was on Dublin. His idea was
to, follow the method of E. V. Lucas in his _Wanderer in London_.
For Dublin city he had a great love and pride: “Of no mean city am
I,” he often quoted proudly of his native city. For its poor he had
a tremendous pity. The city beggars always found him an easy victim.
I remember one night on coming out of a theatre, an urchin of about
five years came clamouring after him. I began the usual stunt on
the parental iniquity that allowed youngsters to go out begging at
eleven at night; but Tom, unheeding, was already chatting with the
boy. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Patsy Murphy, sir.” “Well, Patsy,
which would you rather, a shilling or a halfpenny?” “A halfpenny,
sir,” was the amazing reply. “Now tell me why?” questioned my husband,
interested. “Well,” said the kid, “I might get the halfpenny but I’d
never get the shilling.” His naïve philosophy got him both on this
occasion.
In a speech on Dublin he said: “We cannot ignore the slums, for the
slums are Dublin and Dublin is the slums.” On the same occasion he
remarked: “Dublin is in one respect like every other city. It is
convinced that it possesses the most beautiful women and the worst
corporation.”
In a letter written from the boat on his way to France, with already a
prophetic sense of death waiting for him on the battlefield, he wrote:
“I have never felt my own essay ‘On Saying Good-bye’ more profoundly
aux tréfonds de mon cœur.”
I shall quote the conclusion of the essay--
“There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain
our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death,
normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any
of its horrors. The old woman” (an old woman previously mentioned who
complained that “the only bothersome thing about walking was that
the miles began at the wrong end“)--”the old woman when she comes to
that road will find the miles beginning at the right end. We shall all
bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours. Time and
Space: and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will
have power to cheat or defeat us. ‘However amusing the comedy may have
been,’ wrote Pascal, ‘there is always blood in the fifth act. They
scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over, for ever.’
Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The
wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have
good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort
in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, à Dieu.
Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to another,
why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its
forerunners?”
Could one meet death in a nobler way? He had his last lines at Ginchy,
and “his fine word and incomparable gesture.” And now Picardy of the
waving poplars--Picardy that my student days had garlanded with many
memories, that shone in recollection with many friendships, now by the
strange way of destiny holds my husband’s grave. But he sleeps well in
his beloved France, wearing the green emblem of his Motherland with
his fallen comrades of the “Irish Brigade.” As his distant wind-swept
grave in the Valley of the Somme rises to vision, some noble words of
René Bazin recur to me making a picture: “The loyal land, the honest
land, the land of love, now moist, now parched, where one sleeps the
last sleep with the lullaby wind in the shade of the Cross.” The many
who loved him and now grieve for him will find in his own proud lines
on Parnell a fitting message--
“Tears will betray all pride, but when ye mourn him,
Be it in soldier wise,
As for a captain who hath gently borne him,
And in the midnight dies....
So let him keep, where all world-wounds are healed,
The silences of God.”
MARY S. KETTLE.
WHY IRELAND FOUGHT
I.--PRELUDE
We have lived to see Europe--that Europe which carried the fortunes
and the hopes of all mankind--degraded to a foul something which no
image can so much as shadow forth. To a detached intelligence it must
resemble nothing so much as a sort of malign middle term between a
lunatic asylum and a butcher’s stall.
We have seen committed, under our own amazed eyes, the greatest crime
against civilisation of which civilisation itself keeps any record.
The Blood-and-Ironmongers have entered into possession of the soul of
humanity. No one who remembers our social miseries will say that that
was a house swept and garnished, but it did seem secure against such an
invasion of diabolism: that was an illusion, and it has perished. The
face of things is changed, and all the streams are flowing up the hills
and not down them. If in the old world it was the task of men to build,
develop, redeem, integrate, carnage and destruction are now imposed
upon us as the first conditions of human society. We are gripped in the
ancient bloodiness of that paradox which bids us kill life in order to
save life.
Nations are at war on land and sea, and under and above both _usque ad
cœlum et infernum_. Millions of men have been marched to this Assize
of Blood to be torn with shells and bullets, gutted with bayonets,
tortured with vermin, to dig themselves into holes and grovel there in
mud and fragments of the flesh of their comrades, to rot with disease,
to go mad, and in the most merciful case to die.
Worse, if possible, is the malign transformation of the mind of
mankind. Dr. Jekyll has been wholly submerged in Mr. Hyde. Killing has
become an hourly commonplace--for the aggressor as the mere practice
of his trade, for the assailed as a necessity of defence and victory.
The material apparatus of butchery and destruction has proven to be far
more tremendous in its effects than even its planners had imagined.
The fabric of settled life has disappeared not by single houses, but
by whole towns. Cathedrals are mere dust and shards of stained glass.
Strong forts have all but vanished under the Thor’s hammer of a single
bombardment. The very earth, that a few months ago gave us food and
iron and coal, is wealed, pitted, scarred, mounded, entrenched into the
semblance of some devil’s nightmare.
All this came upon a world which was more favourable to the hopes of
honest, Christian men than any save the Golden Ages of fable. Being
myself a plain, Christian man, I am not going to suggest that in 1914
the Earthly Paradise had arrived or was in sight. Coventry Patmore
is entirely right when he says that belief in the perfectibility of
man on earth is the last proof of weakmindedness. If we fall to rise,
it is also true that we rise to fall. It is, perhaps, the chief gain
of the agony of war that men have come once more to recognise that
in their proudest exaltations sin stands chuckling at their elbows;
that moral evil is a reality, and that the opposite notion was a
spider-web spun by German metaphysics out of its own entrails. But
with these limitations the world before the war promised well for all
reasonable human hopes. The old materialism was all but dead. It is
true that a few antiquated German heresiarchs like Professor Haeckel
still expounded a thing called Monism in sixpenny editions. It is true
that a tribe of German professors were still engaged (with much aid
and abetment from English savants and publishers) in an attempt to
shred into myth those plain historical documents, the Gospels. But on
the whole the reigning philosophy was that of Bergson, a philosophy
of life, Latin and lucid, which was a distinct return to St. Thomas
Aquinas, to Aristotle, and to the common daylight. And in the region of
Higher Criticism people were asking themselves very earnestly whether
savants like Harnack and the rest, having regard to their general
flat-footedness of apprehension, were likely to be good judges of any
evidence of anything whatever, human or divine.
In the field of social problems the outlook was of the hopefullest. The
conscience of men had been aroused more sharply than ever before to
the mass of evil in our society which was inevitable only as a fruit
of selfish apathy, and could be exterminated by sound knowledge and
strong action. The very loud clamour of the indecently rich was in
itself the best proof that the main cause had been bull’s-eyed, and the
best guarantee of approaching change. On the other hand the emptiness
of the old Socialism, its inadequacy not only to the spiritual but to
the bodily business of life, had emerged into clear vision. Property
for every man, and not too much property for any man, had become the
watchword of sensible men. Trusts, combines, and private conspiracies
of every kind, economic and political, were growing more nervous and
by consequence more honest under a growing acuteness of scrutiny.
Conservatism, which, for all its faults, had kept the roots of life
from being torn up, and Democracy, which, for all its, had been like
the sap in the tree forcing itself out into new forms of life, were
coming to understand that they were not enemies but allies. If you
refused all change it was death; if you changed everything at once it
was equally death.
There were, indeed, obvious blots. Men, and not irresponsible men,
were playing with fire in these countries. The King’s conference at
Buckingham Palace was known to have failed just twelve days before
Armageddon. We were committed to the monstrous doctrine that only
through the criminal madness of civil war could the political future
of Ireland be settled. Women, or some women, were already at guerilla
war with men, or with some men, and the failure to find a way out was
a grave reproach to statesmanship. Perhaps our most damning defect of
that vanished time before the war was our entire lack of the sense of
proportion. All the little fishes of controversy talked like whales.
The galled jade did not _wince_, it trumpeted and charged like a
wounded bull-elephant. If you put another penny on the income tax the
rich howled out in chorus that Dick Turpin had got himself into the
Exchequer, that all industry would come to an end, that the stately
homes of England would fall into decay, and that all capital would
emigrate to Kamchatka. If a bilious works manager spoke crossly to a
similarly indisposed Trade Union workman, there was grave danger that
in a week we should have a national crisis and a national strike.
The scene has changed. There must be many a man who, looking out on the
spectacle of blood and disaster which now passes for Europe, exclaims:
“If I had only known!” There is many a home, deep in the mourning of
this titanic tragedy, in which they sigh: “If we could only bring back
that 1914 in which we were not wise!”
These are not vain regrets; they have the germ of future wisdom. But
they are not our immediate business. Enough for the present to remember
that we were playing with unrealities while this crime of all history
was being prepared.
All our civilisation of that time, however disturbed, had in it a
principle of growth and reconciliation. The temper of these countries
might have permitted inflammatory verbiage, and even scattered
anarchical outbursts, but it would have revolted to sanity at the first
actual shedding of blood.
And now every landmark has been submerged in an Atlantic of blood.
There has been forced upon us a dispensation in which our very souls
are steeped in blood. The horizon of the future, such horizon as is
discernible, is visible only through a mist of blood. Now this was
not a war demanded by the peoples of the world. It was not, like the
Great Revolution, created by the universal uprising of oppressed men,
to be marred and to pass over into murder, lust and tyranny. It was
not like the old wars of religion. The sort of religion that tortures
its enemies and puts them to death no longer flourishes under the
standard of the Cross. It does flourish under that of the Crescent,
as the corpses of eight hundred thousand slain Armenians terribly
testify. There was indeed before the war one people in Europe, but only
one, whose leaders preached war as a national duty and function. How
far the militarism of his rulers had penetrated to the common man in
Germany must remain something of a question. Personally, I do not think
that the peasant who knelt by the wayside crucifix in the Tyrol, or
the comfortable, stout farmer in Bavaria or Würtemberg, or the miner
in Westphalia, or any typical Rhinelander wanted to dip his hands in
blood. He bore with rulers who did so want. In the rest of Europe the
atmosphere was one of profound peace. That it was so in France even
German witnesses testify.
It will be said that all such considerations are now empty, that we
have experienced war and realise all that it means, and that it is the
part of wisdom to banish such memories from the human imagination. This
sort of plea is, indeed, likely to be popular; it has all the qualities
of popularity--that is to say, it is feeble, edifying, and free from
all the roughness of truth. But it is precisely the truth in all its
roughness of which we stand in need. Our duty is not to banish the
memories of war as we have experienced it, but to burn them in beyond
effacement, every line and trait, every dot and detail. Civilised men,
in the mass, have not yet begun to understand the baseness and the
magnitude of this adventure in de-civilisation. There is no calculus
of suffering that can sum up the agonies endured since the sentence of
blood was daubed on the lintel of every cottage in Europe. The story of
war is not yet realised because it has not yet been told; there has not
been time for the telling even to begin. It is the part of wisdom to
see that it is not slurred over, but written and remembered.
We shall have the usual fluttered imputations of “rhetoric” and
“extravagance,” the usual “scientific historians” with their
deprecating gesture, against “the introduction of feeling” into any
narrative. Such people, I suppose, have their place in the world. This
is a scientific age, and the function of science may be exhausted when
it has counted the corpses on a battlefield, unless indeed it goes on
to append an estimate of their manurial value. It can render both these
accounts without admitting a hint of emotion into its voice. But to the
conscience the killing of men remains the most terrible of all acts. A
mutilated corpse not only overwhelms it with horror, but also suggests
at once that there is a murderer somewhere on the earth who must be
sought out and punished. Passion will break into the voice, and anger
into the veins at such a confrontation, for to be above passion is to
be below humanity. I have no apology, then, to make for any “emotional”
phrase or sentence in this book. It is in the main a narrative of
facts--verified by evidence which stands unshaken by criticism--but I
confess that, being no more than human, I have slipped into the luxury
of occasional indignation.
When I call this war a crime I use the word in its fullest and simplest
sense, an evil act issuing from the deliberate choice of certain human
wills. There is a sort of pietism, hardly distinguishable from atheism,
to which war appears as a sort of natural calamity, produced by
overmastering external conditions. You will hear people of this school
of thoughtlessness chattering away as if the earthquake of Lisbon,
the cholera outbreak of 1839, and the war of 1914 all belonged to the
same category of evil. But the first was plainly beyond the reach of
human power; the second was an evil imposed from without which might
have been nullified by a wise organization of medical knowledge; and
the third was, on the part of its authors, just as plainly a thing of
deliberate human choice. Another type of mind, numerously represented,
considers that it has settled everything philosophically when to war
it has added the label “inevitable.” Everything is apparently involved
in a sort of gelatinous determinism; everybody is somewhat to blame
for everything, and nobody is very definitely to blame for anything.
According to this notion because Germany is rather big, and the British
Empire, France, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary are also rather
big, and because they all manufacture goods and sell them, the fabric
of civilisation is to blow up in minute fragments from time to time
under the explosion of an “inevitable war.” No casual connection is
indicated. Before thought begins these two doctrines must be dismissed.
War is not a calamity of nature, and there are no “inevitable wars.”
Or rather the only war inevitable is a war against aggression, and
aggression itself is never inevitable.
If any fault has ever been urged against Belgium it was that of a
too great and apathetic complacency. The average Englishman--bating
the unreal fever-frenzy regarding Ireland--so little planned attack
on anyone that events have proved his complete unpreparedness, an
unpreparedness common and creditable to all the Allies. Russia wanted
no war, Italy wanted none, Serbia, ravaged with disease, wanted none.
Yet suddenly there was launched upon us this abomination of desolation.
Who launched it? Who was guilty of this crime above all crimes? The
author of it, whether a ruler, a junta, or a whole nation, comes
before history stained with an infamy to which no language can reach.
If his assassin’s stroke is not beaten down into the dust it is all
over with Europe and civilisation. Who, then, was the criminal? There
is an invertebrate view according to which everybody is equally
blameable and blameless for everything. The holders of this view have
never gone quite so far as to take up the New Testament story, and
argue that Judas Iscariot was a misunderstood man; but, were they
logical, they would do so. Since they are not logical they must not
be allowed to apply their mechanical and deterministic formula to the
tragedy of world-history. No nation in this war is without a blot,
and many blots on its past, not even Ireland. Any people that claims
complete worthiness to bear the sword and shield of justice is a people
intoxicated with vanity. The participants in this struggle are, like
the participants and witnesses in a murder-trial, human. That does not
prevent a jury adjudging the supreme guilt of blood to that one of the
many imperfect individuals on whom it lies.