My husband in his last letter to his brother, written on the 8th of September, 1916, on the battlefield, expressed the wish that I should write a memoir of him as a preface to his war book. It is only at his express instance that I would have undertaken the writing of such a memoir, as there are many obvious reasons--notably two--why I am unfitted for that high duty. I have not the literary gifts of many of his distinguished friends, who in writing of him would have exercised their powers of sympathetic understanding and appreciation to the uttermost. But the personal relationship is an even greater handicap. If the reader will accept me as his comrade--since he has honoured me with the proud distinction--I shall do my best to interpret the “soul-side” with which he “faced the world.” For my shortcomings, I must crave indulgence. I only bring to this task the vision of love. I shall give hereafter a biographical sketch, but first I wish to deal with his attitude to the war and a few points which he desired to be emphasised. What urged him--the scholar, the metaphysician, the poet, above all the Irishman, irrevocably and immutably Irish, the man of peace, who had nothing of the soldier except courage--to take a commission in the British Army and engage in the cruel and bloody business of war? His motives for taking this step, he wished to be made clear beyond misrepresentation. It should be unnecessary to do this, as he proclaimed them on many platforms and in many papers. His attitude and action are the natural sequence and logic of his character and ideals. Since I first knew him, he loved to call himself a “capitaine routier” of freedom, and that is the alpha and omega of his whole personality. As Mr. Lynd has said, he was not a Nationalist through love of a flag, but through love of freedom. It was this love of freedom that made him in his student days in the Royal University lead the protest against the playing of “God Save the King” at the conferring of Degrees. The words of the Students’ manifesto went, “We desire to protest against the unjust, wasteful and inefficient Government of which that air is a symbol.” It was the same love of freedom that made him during the Boer War distribute in the streets of Dublin anti-recruiting leaflets. The Tom Kettle who did these things, who said in an election speech in 1910 that “for his part he preferred German Invasion to British Finance,” was the same Tom Kettle who believed it Ireland’s duty in 1914 to take the sword against Germany as the Ally of England. “This war is without parallel,” he wrote in August, 1914; “Britain, France, Russia, enter it, purged from their past sins of domination. France is right now as she was wrong in 1870, England is right now as she was wrong in the Boer War, Russia is right now as she was wrong on Bloody Sunday.”