Mr. Padraic Colum, in a memoir of my husband in the Irish-American
paper, _Ireland_, says: “When the Germans broke into Belgium, he
advised the Irish to join the British Army and to fight for the
rights of small nationalities. Had death found him in those early
days he would at least have died for a cause he believed in.” I think
Mr. Colum, if only for the sake of an old friendship, might have
troubled to understand the idea for which Tom Kettle died, and in
which he believed to the end. Does Mr. Colum mean to suggest that my
husband no longer believed in the maintenance of the rights of small
nationalities? Was his enthusiasm for Belgium quenched--Belgium the
heroic who preferred to lose all that she might gain her own soul? Is
not Belgium still an invaded country? And even if England juggles with
Ireland’s liberty, is not the fight for truth and justice to go on? As
my husband says in this volume, “Ireland had a duty not only to herself
but to the world... and whatever befell, the path taken by her must be
the path of honour and justice.”
In one of my last letters from him, he speaks his faith, even if it
is the faith of a sad and burdened soul: “It is a grim and awful job,
and no man can feel up to it. The waste--the science of waste and
bloodshed! How my heart loathes it and yet it is God’s only way to
Justice.”
Mr. Colum proceeds: “He knew by the dreams he remembered that his
place should have been with those who died for the cause of Irish
Nationality.” I postulate that Tom Kettle died most nobly for the cause
of Irish Nationality, in dying for the cause of European honour.
Mr. Colum continues: “He knew she (Ireland) would not now take her
eyes from the scroll that bears the names of Pearse and Plunkett and
O’Rahilly and so many others, and yet, Thomas Kettle at the last would
not have grudged these men Ireland’s proud remembrance.” I think, too,
I may confidently assert that Tom Kettle’s name will be entered on
the scroll of Irish patriots, and that he has earned, and will have,
Ireland’s “proud remembrance” quite as much as the rebel leaders whose
valour and noble disinterestedness he honoured, but whose ideals he
most emphatically did not share.
Mr. Leslie is in shining contrast to Mr. Colum in sympathetic
understanding: “Irishmen will think of him with his gentle
brother-in-law, Sheehy-Skeffington, as two intellectuals who, after
their manner and their light, wrought and thought and died for Ireland.
What boots it if one was murdered by a British officer and the other
was slain in honourable war by Germans? To Ireland, they are both
lovable, and in the Irish mind, their memory shall not fail.... Ireland
knows that they were both men of peace and that they both offered their
lives for her. England can claim neither. In death, they are divided,
but in the heart of Ireland they are one.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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