The Ways of War: Idealism, Hope and Truth . Tom Kettle

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—