In _The Day’s Burden_, my husband referred to Ireland as “the spectre at the Banquet of the Empire.” He died that Ireland might not be the spectre at the Peace Conference of Nations. His last thoughts were with Ireland, and in each letter of farewell written to friends from the battlefield, he protests that he died in her holy cause. His soldier servant, writing home to me, says that on the eve of the battle the officers were served with pieces of green cloth to be stitched on the back of their uniforms, indicating that they belonged to the Irish Brigade. Tom touched his lovingly, saying: “Boy, I am proud to die for it!” Ireland, Christianity, Europe--that was what he died for. “He carried his pack for Ireland and Europe. Now pack-carrying is over. He has held the line.” Or, as he says in his last poem to his little daughter, he died-- “Not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor, But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed, And for the secret scripture of the poor.” That was the dream that haunted his soul, that impelled him to the last sacrifice, and what a sacrifice! What he gave, he gave well--all his gifts, his passionate freedom-loving heart, his “winged and ravening intellect,” intimate ties of home and friendship and motherland, his career, and better than career--the chance of fulfilling his hopes for Ireland--he sacrificed all that “makes life a great and beautiful adventure.” And now that he has died... “in the waste and the wreckage paying the price of the dreams that cannot sleep,” let not anyone commit that last treachery of travestying his ideals and aspirations. In his final letter to his brother, written the day before he was killed, he outlined the things for which, had he lived, he would have worked-- “If I live I mean to spend the rest of my life working for perpetual peace. I have seen war, and faced modern artillery, and I know what an outrage it is against simple men.” And in another letter, written to me some weeks before he entered the battle of the Somme, he speaks of this mission even more poignantly-- “I want to live, too, to use all my powers of thinking, writing and working, to drive out of civilisation this foul thing called War and to put in its place understanding and comradeship.” This note, indeed, rings through all his letters like a pleading. “If God spares me, I shall accept it as a special mission to preach love and peace for the rest of my life.” It is this that makes his sacrifice doubly great, that he, realising with all the wealth of his abundant imagination the horror and cruelty and outrage of war, should step deliberately from the sheltered ways of peace and security and take his share “in the grim and awful job” because “it was only a hell of suffering but not of dishonour, and through it, over its flaming coals, Justice must walk, were it on bare feet.” Prussia was to him the enemy of peace and civilisation. In almost his last letter, he again emphasises this.