Could one meet death in a nobler way? He had his last lines at Ginchy, and “his fine word and incomparable gesture.” And now Picardy of the waving poplars--Picardy that my student days had garlanded with many memories, that shone in recollection with many friendships, now by the strange way of destiny holds my husband’s grave. But he sleeps well in his beloved France, wearing the green emblem of his Motherland with his fallen comrades of the “Irish Brigade.” As his distant wind-swept grave in the Valley of the Somme rises to vision, some noble words of René Bazin recur to me making a picture: “The loyal land, the honest land, the land of love, now moist, now parched, where one sleeps the last sleep with the lullaby wind in the shade of the Cross.” The many who loved him and now grieve for him will find in his own proud lines on Parnell a fitting message-- “Tears will betray all pride, but when ye mourn him, Be it in soldier wise, As for a captain who hath gently borne him, And in the midnight dies.... So let him keep, where all world-wounds are healed, The silences of God.” MARY S. KETTLE. WHY IRELAND FOUGHT I.--PRELUDE We have lived to see Europe--that Europe which carried the fortunes and the hopes of all mankind--degraded to a foul something which no image can so much as shadow forth. To a detached intelligence it must resemble nothing so much as a sort of malign middle term between a lunatic asylum and a butcher’s stall. We have seen committed, under our own amazed eyes, the greatest crime against civilisation of which civilisation itself keeps any record. The Blood-and-Ironmongers have entered into possession of the soul of humanity. No one who remembers our social miseries will say that that was a house swept and garnished, but it did seem secure against such an invasion of diabolism: that was an illusion, and it has perished. The face of things is changed, and all the streams are flowing up the hills and not down them. If in the old world it was the task of men to build, develop, redeem, integrate, carnage and destruction are now imposed upon us as the first conditions of human society. We are gripped in the ancient bloodiness of that paradox which bids us kill life in order to save life. Nations are at war on land and sea, and under and above both _usque ad cœlum et infernum_. Millions of men have been marched to this Assize of Blood to be torn with shells and bullets, gutted with bayonets, tortured with vermin, to dig themselves into holes and grovel there in mud and fragments of the flesh of their comrades, to rot with disease, to go mad, and in the most merciful case to die.