“He did not resent the littleness that had dogged his life and left him lonely at the end--but he looked back and hated the pettiness and meanness which had injured Ireland--which had taken every advantage of Ireland, which had fooled her leaders and shuffled off her children on feeble promises. He asked for that touch of greatness by which alone great things are achieved. Like a thousand ardent spirits in Ireland at the time, he was ready to leap to a new era by the bridge of great things greatly done, even if the bridge was to be the bridge of death. English statesmen offered them a bridge of paper and an insecure footing at that, but many rushed forward, hopeful of the future. Others turned bitterly back. All who died, whether they died in Ireland or France, died bitterly. “Disappointed but undismayed Kettle stood with nought but a mystic’s dream between himself and the Great Horror. He felt afraid for Ireland, but not for himself. Then the irony of his life and the bitterness of his death must have come home to him... stripped of all, his career, his ambitions, his friends and lovers, with his back turned to Ireland and his heart turned against England he threw himself over the mighty Gulf, where at least he could be sure that all things good or evil were on the great scale his soul had always required. With earth’s littleness he was done.” He wished, too, to live to chronicle the deeds of his beloved Dublin Fusiliers. There is no more generous praise ever given to men than that he gave his Dubliners--unless, perhaps, their praise of him. In his last letter to his brother, on the eve of death, he says-- “I have never seen anything in my life so beautiful as the clean and so to say radiant valour of my Dublin Fusiliers. There is something divine in men like that.” Again in a letter to a friend-- “We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances of leaving them--one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I have chosen to stay with my comrades.” In a letter written to me shortly after going out, he writes out of his great, generous heart: “What impresses and moves me above all, is the amazing faith, patience and courage of the men. To me it is not a sort of looking-down-on but rather a looking-up-to appreciation of them. I pray and pray and am afraid, but they go quietly and heroically on. God make me less inferior to them.” That is the essence of Tom Kettle, his noble and humble appraisement of a gift which he possessed _par excellence_ himself. And I think he found happiness and peace of heart with those loyal, valorous men whose comrade he was and whose risks he shared. They too, I think, knew and loved the greatness of him, and found in his genius, his radiant simplicity and high courage, their example and inspiration.