In public life Kettle was a vivid figure, and very Irish. At first he belonged to the extreme, or irreconcilable section of Nationalists, noted for a cast of thought or bias of reasoning which finds that no good for Ireland can come out of England. When England was fighting the Boers he distributed anti-recruiting leaflets in the streets of Dublin. To his constituents in East Tyrone he once declared that Ireland had no national independence to protect against foreign invasion. "I confess," he added, referring to the over-taxation of Ireland, "I see many reasons for preferring German invasion to British methods of finance in Ireland." But increased knowledge brought wider views. As a result of his experiences in Parliament, where he found in all parties a genuine desire to do what was best for Ireland according to their lights, he approached the consideration of Irish questions with a remarkably tolerant, broad-minded and practical spirit. When the war broke out there was no more powerful champion of the Allies. The invasion of Belgium, which he had witnessed as a newspaper correspondent, moved him to an intense hatred of Germany, and, throwing himself with all his energy into the recruiting campaign in Ireland, he addressed no fewer than two hundred meetings, bringing thousands of his countrymen to the Colours. One of his epigrammatic and pointed sayings--suggested by the ill-favour of absentee landlordism of old in Ireland--was: "Nowadays the absentee is the man who stays at home." In a letter written to a friend on the night his battalion was moving up to the Somme, Kettle said he had had two chances of leaving--one on account of sickness and the other to take a Staff appointment. "I have chosen to stay with my comrades," he writes. "The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination. Nor did I ever think that valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers." On the eve of his death he wrote to his wife another fine tribute to his battalion. "I have never," he says, "seen anything in my life so beautiful as the clean and, so to say, radiant manner of my Dublin Fusiliers. There is something divine in men like that."