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”--