“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.
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Thomas M. Kettle was the third son of Andrew J. Kettle, and of Margaret MacCourt. He was born at Artane, Co. Dublin,