Kettle fell in the storming of Guinchy. His friend and comrade, Lieutenant James Emmet Dalton, M.C., states that they were both in the trenches in Trones Wood opposite Guillamont, on the morning of September 8th, discussing the loss of two hundred men and seven officers which the battalion had sustained the day before from German shell fire, when an orderly arrived with a note for each of them, saying, "Be in readiness. Battalion will take up A and B position in front of Guinchy to-night at 12 midnight." Lieutenant Dalton continues: "I was with Tom when he advanced to the position that night, and the stench of the dead that covered our road was so awful that we both used some foot-powder on our faces. When we reached our objective we dug ourselves in, and then, at five o'clock p.m. on the 9th, we attacked Guinchy. I was just behind Tom when we went over the top. He was in a bent position, and a bullet got over a steel waistcoat that he wore and entered his heart. Well, he only lasted about one minute, and he had my crucifix in his hands. Then Boyd took all the papers and things out of Tom's pockets in order to keep them for Mrs. Kettle, but poor Boyd was blown to atoms in a few minutes. The Welsh Guards buried Mr. Kettle's remains. Tom's death has been a big blow to the regiment, and I am afraid that I could not put in words my feelings on the subject." In another letter Lieutenant Dalton says: "Mr. Kettle died a grand and holy death--the death of a soldier and a true Christian." Lieutenant Kettle left his political testament in a letter to his wife and in verses addressed to his little daughter. The letter, written a few days before his death, with directions that it was to be sent to Mrs. Kettle if he were killed, says-- "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." The lines, "To my daughter Betty--The Gift of Love," were written "In the field before Guillamont, Somme, September 4, 1916--