Chapter III: Treitschke and the Professors 230 (2)

“In the Guillemont fighting I caught a glimpse of him for a brief spell. He was in the thick of a hard struggle, which had for its object the dislodgment of the enemy from a redoubt they held close to the village. He was temporarily in command of the company, and he was directing operations with a coolness and daring that marked him out as a born leader of men. He seemed always to know what was the right thing to do, and he was always on the right spot to order the doing of the right thing at the right moment. The men under his command on that occasion fought with a heroism worthy of their leader. They were assailed furiously on both flanks by the foe. They resisted all attempts to force them back, and at the right moment they pressed home a vigorous counter-attack that swept the enemy off the field.

“The next time I saw him his men were again in a tight corner. They were advancing against the strongest part of the enemy’s position in that region. Kettle kept them together wonderfully in spite of the terrible ordeal they had to go through, and they carried the enemy’s position in record time. It was in the hottest corner of the Ginchy fighting that he went down. He was leading his men with a gallantry and judgment that would almost certainly have won him official recognition had he lived, and may do so yet. His beloved Fusiliers were facing a deadly fire and were dashing forward irresistibly to grapple with the foe. Their ranks were smitten by a tempest of fire. Men went down right and left--some never to rise again. Kettle was among the latter. He dropped to earth and made an effort to get up. I think he must have been hit again. Anyhow, he collapsed completely. A wail of anguish went up from his men as soon as they saw that their officer was down. He turned to them and urged them forward to where the Huns were entrenched. They did not need his injunction. They swept forward with a rush. With levelled bayonets they crashed into the foe. There was deadly work, indeed, and the Huns paid dearly for the loss of Kettle.

“When the battle was over his men came back to camp with sore hearts. They seemed to feel his loss more than that of any of the others. The men would talk of nothing else but the loss of their ‘own Captain Tom,’ and his brother officers were quite as sincere, if less effusive, in the display of their grief. His loss will be mourned by all ranks of the Brigade, for he was known outside his own particular battalion, and his place will be hard to fill either in the ranks of his battalion or in the hearts of his men.”

Had he survived Ginchy, he would have been appointed Base Censor and been out of the danger zone. He had refused to take up his appointment till he had seen his comrades through; he wished also to give the lie to his enemies who had delighted to call him a “platform soldier.” Had he survived Ginchy, even though he were covered with wounds and glory, would not the tongues of his revilers, who, he said, always spoke of him “with inverted commas in their voice,” have waged their war of calumny again? But death is very convincing. As the _Freeman_ said, “His victor’s grave at Ginchy is their answer.” He could have no more splendid epitaph than the official War Office announcement that he fell “at the post of honour, leading his men in a victorious charge.”

“It is not the death of the Professor nor of the soldier, nor of the politician, nor even of the poet and the essayist, that causes the heartache we feel,” writes a comrade. “It is the loss of that rare, charming, wondrous personality summed up in those two simple words--Tom Kettle.”

A friend once said of him that he was “infinitely lovable.” His great gifts accompanied by a rare simplicity and charm of manner that broke down all social barriers, compelled affection. He was known to all as “Tom Kettle.” To his men, he was “their own Captain Tom.” Perhaps the greatest proof of his magnetic personality lies in the fact that all classes, the Unionist and Nationalist, the soldier, the Sinn Feiner, and, as the _Freeman_ says, “those wearing the convict garb” of England, united in mourning his death and paying tribute to his memory.

The _Irish Times_, the opponent of all his political ideals, said: “As Irish Unionists we lay our wreath on the grave of a generous Nationalist, a brilliant Irishman, and a loyal soldier of the King.”

“There was in his rich and versatile temperament,” said the _Church of Ireland Gazette_, “nothing of that narrow, obscurantist spirit which is the curse of much of Irish Nationalism.”

Ireland was his one splendid prejudice. In _The Open Secret of Ireland_ he wrote: “We came, we, the invaders,”--an allusion to his Norse ancestry--“to dominate and remained to serve. For Ireland has signed us with the oil and chrism of her human sacrament, and even though we should deny the faith with our lips, she would hold our hearts to the end.” He had a radiant pride in the indomitable spirit of his country that, many times conquered, was always unconquered. “A people such as this is not to be exterminated. An ideal (that of National Autonomy) is not to be destroyed. Imitate in Ireland” (he counsels England) “your own wisdom in dealing with the Colonies, and the same policy will bear the same harvest. For justice given the Colonies gave you friendship, as for injustice stubbornly upheld, they had given you hatred. The analogy with Ireland is complete so far as the cards have been played. The same human elements are there, the same pride, the same anger, the same willingness to forget. Why then should the augury fail?” In his pamphlet on _Home Rule Finance_ he says: “The Irish problem that is now knocking so peremptorily at the door of Westminster is a problem with a past, history is of its very essence and substance; the wave that breaks in suave music on the beach of to-day, has behind it the unspent impulse of fierce storms and vast upheavals. It is not wise, it is not even safe to handle the reorganisation of the political fabric of Ireland in the same ‘practical’ fashion that you would handle the reconstruction of an Oil Company. There is in liberty a certain tonic inspiration, there is in the national idea a deep fountain of courage and energy not to be figured out in dots and decimals; and unless you can call these psychological forces into action your Home Rule Bill will be only ink, paper and disappointment. In one word Home Rule must be a moral as well as a material liquidation of the past.” His pride in Ireland forbade the insult of futile sympathy. “Tears, as we read in Wordsworth, to human suffering are due. If there be anyone with tears at command, he may shed them, with great fitness and no profit at all, over the long martyrdom of Ireland. But let him, at least if he values facts, think twice before he goes on to apply to her that other line which speaks of human hopes defeated and overthrown. No other people in the world has held so staunchly to its inner vision; none other has, with such fiery patience, repelled the hostility of circumstances, and in the end reshaped them after the desire of her heart. Hats off to success, gentlemen! Your modern god may well be troubled at the sight of this enigmatic Ireland which at once despises him and tumbles his faithfullest worshippers in the sand of their own amphitheatre. Yet, so it is. The confederate general, seeing victory suddenly snatched from his hands and not for the first time, by Meagher’s Brigade, exclaimed in immortal profanity, ‘There comes that damned green flag again!’ I have often commended that phrase to Englishmen as admirably expressive of the historical rôle and record of Ireland in British politics. The damned green flag flutters again in their eyes, and if they will but listen to the music that marches with it, they will find that the lamenting fifes are dominated wholly by the drums of victory.” Ireland always moved him to lyric patriotism. His appeal not to rend “the seamless garment of Irish Nationality” is immortal. Mr. Lynd, whom I have quoted so frequently because he has understood my husband as it is given to few to understand another, calls the last lines of his “Reason in Rhyme” his testament to England as his call to Europeanism is his testament to Ireland.

“Bond from the toil of hate we may not cease:
Free, we are free to be your friend.
And when you make your banquet, and we come,
Soldier with equal soldier must we sit
Closing a battle, not forgetting it.
With not a name to hide
This mate and mother of valiant ‘rebels’ dead
Must come with all her history on her head.
We keep the past for pride:
No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb:
No rawest squad of all Death’s volunteers,
No rudest man who died
To tear your flag down in the bitter years
But shall have praise and three times thrice again
When at that table men shall drink with men.”

“It was to the standard of the intellect in a gloomy world that he always gaily rallied,” Mr. Lynd observes with truth. He saw the unbridgeable gulf which exists between aspiration and achievement. Heine once said bitterly: “You want to give the woman you love the sun, moon and stars, and all you can give her is a house on a terrace.” He, like Heine, knew this sense of defeat, and it is this which made him regard “optimism as an attractive form of mental disease.” As he says of Hamlet, “he passed through life annotating it with a gloss of melancholy speculation.”

He felt the “weary weight of all this unintelligible world.” “The twentieth century,” he wrote in an article, “which cuts such a fine figure in encyclopædias is most familiarly known to the majority of its children as a new sort of headache.” But he was a fighting pessimist that called for the best. “Impossibilism is a poor word and an unmanly doctrine. We have got to keep moving on and, since that is so, we had better put as good thought as we can into our itinerary. The task of civilisation was never easy. Freedom--the phrase belongs to Fichte or someone of his circle--has always been a battle and a march: it is of the nature of both that they should appear to the participants, during the heat of movement, as planless and chaotic.”

Perhaps the finest definition of his philosophy of life may be found in an essay in _The Day’s Burden_. “A wise man soon grows disillusioned of disillusionment. The first lilac freshness of life will indeed never return. The graves are sealed, and no hand will open them to give us back dead comrades or dead dreams. As we look out on the burdened march of humanity, as we look in on the leashed but straining passions of our unpurified hearts, we can but bow our heads and accept the discipline of pessimism. Bricriu must have his hour as well as Cuchullin. But the cynical mood is one that can be resisted. Cynicism, however exercisable in literature, is in life the last treachery, the irredeemable defeat.... But we must continue loyal to the instinct which makes us hope much, we must believe in all the Utopias.”

Pessimism is indeed written on his banner, but it is a pessimism which achieves. “Is not the whole Christian conception of life rooted in pessimism,” he argues, “as becomes a philosophy expressive of a world in which the ideal can never quite overcome the crumbling incoherence of matter? May we not say of all good causes what Arnold said only of the proud and defeated Celts: ‘They always went down to battle, but they always fell’!”

There is no need to comment on him as a man of letters. A master of exquisite prose, he had in perfection what he himself calls “the incommunicable gift of phrase” and “the avid intellect which must needs think out of things everything to be found in them.” What he wrote of Anatole France, might fittingly be applied to himself. “A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams as a thunder-cloud is stabbed by lightning is a type of spiritual life far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of consummate prose is an attitude and an achievement, that will help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our century.” His defence of the use of the epigram and its purpose is vigorous and arresting: “The epigrammatist, too, and the whole tribe of image-makers dwell under a disfavour far too austere. We must distinguish. There is in such images an earned and an unearned increment of applause. The sudden, vast, dazzling, and deep-shadowed view of traversed altitudes that breaks on the vision of a climber, who, after long effort, has reached the mountain-top, is not to be grudged him. And the image that closes up in a little room the infinite riches of an argument carefully pursued is not only legitimate but admirable.”

His writings abound in fine images and epigrams which seem to come naturally to his pen. Galway is to him the “Bruges-la-Morte” of western Ireland; again “the opulent loneliness of the Golden Vale,” is a picture in words. He referred to Irish emigrants as “landless men from a manless land”; England, he said, found Ireland a nation and left her a question. Loyalty he described as the bloom on the face of freedom. Mr. Healy, whose wit he admired and whose politics he deplored, he called “a brilliant calamity.” “It is with ideas,” he wrote, “as with umbrellas, if left lying about they are peculiarly liable to change of ownership.” Describing a man of poor parents who had achieved greatness, he said: “He was of humble origin like the violin string.” A very stupid book, published one winter, he referred to “as very suitable for the Christmas fire.” Of the Royal Irish Constabulary he said: “It was formerly an army of occupation. Now, owing to the all but complete disappearance of crime, it is an army of no occupation.” Cleverness he defined as a sort of perfumed malice, the perfume predominating in literature, the malice in life. The inevitableness of Home Rule, he declared, resided in the fact that it is a biped among ideas. “It marches to triumph on two feet, an Irish and Imperial foot.” And surely this is one of his finest epigrams: “Life is a cheap table d’hôte in a rather dirty restaurant, with time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.” Sufferers from the influenza will appreciate his description of that malady. “Other illnesses are positive, influenza is negative. It makes one an absentee from oneself.” Talking of Mr. George Moore, he described him as “suffering from the sick imagination of the growing boy.” The grazing system he declared must be exterminated root and branch, _brute and ranch_. In his _Home Rule Finance_, he says: “Home Rule may be a divorce between two administrations, it will be a marriage between two nations. You are in any case free to choose for your inspiration between alimony and matrimony, the emphasis in either case is on the last syllable.”

Few think of him as a poet, and yet his poetry has as unique and distinguished a _cachet_ as his prose. In political poetry and battle song he equalled the best. His “Epitaph on the House of Lords” ranks beside Chesterton’s memorable poem on the same subject. His battle song entitled “The Last Crusade” embodies in perfect lyric form his vision of the war--

“Then lift the flag of the last Crusade!
And fill the ranks of the Last Brigade!
March on to the fields where the world’s re-made,
And the ancient Dreams come true!”

A sonnet written to his little daughter on the battlefield has been declared by a literary critic as sufficient to found the reputation of a poet.

“TO MY DAUGHTER BETTY, THE GIFT OF GOD.

“In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime,
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
“You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To dice with death. And, oh! they’ll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
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.

“_In the field, before Guillemont, Somme,
September 4, 1916._”

“Ballade Autumnal” is in Villon’s perfect manner, and his replies to Kipling and Watson will be remembered in Ireland for all time. In a volume entitled _Poems and Parodies_, his verses have been collected and published.

Style in writing was a thing he regarded as of paramount importance. Though a prolific writer for newspapers, he was no believer in the theory of dashing off an article. On the contrary, he maintained that one of the drawbacks incidental to anything hastily written is that it is bound to be too serious. To write well, you must labour infinitely, otherwise one’s work is sure to bear traces of what he called the “heavy paw.” In the _Nationist_, when the slipshod work of some popular writer was being reviewed he observed, “At least _we_ are stylists.”

In the same degree as he loved the expert, he abhorred the quack, the charlatan, the pseudo-writer of prose or poetry. I remember one night a popular novelist and writer of magazine stories, who had achieved fame and money without achieving literature, was telling with great unction of his success. He told how his recent book had been translated not only into French, Italian, Spanish, but even into a Dutch dialect. My husband, flicking the ash from a cigarette, said in a very urbane voice: “That is very interesting. I dare say then it will soon be translated into English.”

In speaking, too, while his notes were scanty, in fact mere headings, he always thought out beforehand both the matter and form. As he put it, he favoured “carefully prepared impromptus.”

Friends will remember him at his best as a conversationalist. As a raconteur he was inimitable, and, as a critic says, “It was not so much the point of his tale that counted. The divagations from the text in which he loved to indulge were the delight of his auditors.” “What Doctor Johnson said of Burke,” observes another critic, “was essentially true of Kettle, ‘that you could not have stood under an archway in his company to escape a passing shower without realising that he was a great man.’”

He had the literary man’s constitutional distaste for writing or answering letters. A friend once said chaffingly to him that he might write “The Life and Letters of T. M. Kettle.” “Well,” retorted Tom, “you may write my life, but there won’t be any letters, for I never write any.” He was also unpunctual in keeping appointments, and finding the telephone very useful, he said it should be called not “telephone,” but “tell-a-fib,” as that was its chief function.

He was intensely Catholic and always flaunted the banner of his religion. “Religion,” he writes in this volume, “is one of the ideal forces that make men good citizens and gallant soldiers.” And again, “If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will they fight on an empty soul.” Perhaps because he loved his faith, so he could afford to take it humorously at times. I remember once his throwing off in an epigram the difference between the Catholic and Protestant religions. “The Catholics take their beliefs table d’hôte,” he said, “and the Protestants theirs à la carte.” What chiefly appealed to him in Catholicity was its mystery and its gospel of mercy. If he often quoted Heine’s well-known semi-cynical “Dieu me pardonnera, c’est son métier,” it was because he felt an amazed gratitude that a God should choose such an original profession. He greatly liked the society of Irish priests. He used to say they were gentlemen first, and priests after. They, too, loved him, and took his gentle chaff as it was meant. I remember how a priest friend of his enjoyed a sermon for golfers which Tom composed for him. Needless to say it was never preached. In it golfers were enjoined to “get out of the bunker of mortal sin with the niblick of Confession.” During the Dublin strike an anti-cleric was railing against the priests, who had intervened to prevent the deportation of the children. Tom completely won him over with the original argument “that the priests were acting as members of a spiritual trade union.” Writing of the great Catholic poet, Francis Thompson, he puts in a lyric plea for his religion: “The superiority of the Catholic poet is that he reinforces the natural will by waters falling an infinite height from the infinite ocean of spirit. He has two worlds against one. If we place our Fortunate Islands solely within the walls of space and time, they will dissolve into a mocking dream; for there will always be pain that no wisdom can assuage. They must lie on the edge of the horizon with the glimmer of a strange sea about their shores and their mountain peaks hidden among the clouds.” He had a wonderful spiritual humility. What he found admirable in Russian literature was “an immense and desolating sob of humility and self-reproach.” He abjured the self-righteous who, he used to say, went round as if they were “live monuments erected by God in honour of the Ten Commandments.” He was, indeed, over generous in the praise of qualities in others which he had superlatively himself. Anyone with a gift, a “plus” man at golf, a Feis Gold Medallist, an expert gardener--just the distinguishing _cachet_ of excellence won his admiration. Witness how he lauds the valour of his Dublin Fusiliers, and yet his courage was no newly acquired virtue. I remember several years ago he went to a political meeting at Newcastle West. A faction party took possession of the platform. The intending speakers were for abandoning the meeting, but Tom declined to give in without at least a fight, and led the attack on the platform. After a nasty struggle they captured their objective. Mr. Gwynn, who was one of the speakers, was so impressed with my husband’s daring that he wrote me his admiration, saying that he led the attack “with nothing but an umbrella and a University degree.” His moral courage, too, never failed. When occasion demanded it, he could always be counted on to say “the dire full-throated thing.”

For the memory of Parnell he had a deep reverence. This is his vision of him--

“A flaming coal
Lit at the stars and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The Scandal of Content.”

A life, or rather an impressionist study, of “the Chief’s” career was a work he frequently projected but unfortunately never accomplished. The plinth at the back of Parnell’s Statue in O’Connell Street should, he maintained, have been broken to symbolise the wrecking of Parnell’s career. “Parnell,” he wrote, “died with half his music in him.” Once in a discussion on the eighties he remarked: “What is the history of the eighties? It is the history of two Irishmen--Oscar Wilde and Parnell.” For G. K. Chesterton my husband had a great admiration. In _The Open Secret of Ireland_, he refers to him as wielding “the wisest pen in contemporary English letters. There is in his mere sanity a touch of magic so potent that although incapable of dullness he has achieved authority, and although convinced that faith is more romantic than doubt or even sin, he has got himself published and read.” The only flaw he found in Mr. Chesterton was that he was not a suffragist. My husband was, of course, an ardent supporter of the Women’s Movement, and wrote a brilliant pamphlet entitled _Why Bully Women?_ Mr. Chesterton paid him a noble tribute in the course of an article in the _Observer_: “The former case, that of the man of letters who becomes by strength of will a man of war, is better exemplified in a man like Professor Kettle, whose fall in battle ought to crush the slanderers of Ireland as the fall of a tower could crush nettles.”

Another book projected but unachieved was on Dublin. His idea was to, follow the method of E. V. Lucas in his _Wanderer in London_. For Dublin city he had a great love and pride: “Of no mean city am I,” he often quoted proudly of his native city. For its poor he had a tremendous pity. The city beggars always found him an easy victim. I remember one night on coming out of a theatre, an urchin of about five years came clamouring after him. I began the usual stunt on the parental iniquity that allowed youngsters to go out begging at eleven at night; but Tom, unheeding, was already chatting with the boy. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Patsy Murphy, sir.” “Well, Patsy, which would you rather, a shilling or a halfpenny?” “A halfpenny, sir,” was the amazing reply. “Now tell me why?” questioned my husband, interested. “Well,” said the kid, “I might get the halfpenny but I’d never get the shilling.” His naïve philosophy got him both on this occasion.

In a speech on Dublin he said: “We cannot ignore the slums, for the slums are Dublin and Dublin is the slums.” On the same occasion he remarked: “Dublin is in one respect like every other city. It is convinced that it possesses the most beautiful women and the worst corporation.”

In a letter written from the boat on his way to France, with already a prophetic sense of death waiting for him on the battlefield, he wrote: “I have never felt my own essay ‘On Saying Good-bye’ more profoundly aux tréfonds de mon cœur.”

I shall quote the conclusion of the essay--

“There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors. The old woman” (an old woman previously mentioned who complained that “the only bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong end“)--”the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours. Time and Space: and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us. ‘However amusing the comedy may have been,’ wrote Pascal, ‘there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over, for ever.’ Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, à Dieu. Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to another, why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its forerunners?”

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.

Worse, if possible, is the malign transformation of the mind of mankind. Dr. Jekyll has been wholly submerged in Mr. Hyde. Killing has become an hourly commonplace--for the aggressor as the mere practice of his trade, for the assailed as a necessity of defence and victory. The material apparatus of butchery and destruction has proven to be far more tremendous in its effects than even its planners had imagined. The fabric of settled life has disappeared not by single houses, but by whole towns. Cathedrals are mere dust and shards of stained glass. Strong forts have all but vanished under the Thor’s hammer of a single bombardment. The very earth, that a few months ago gave us food and iron and coal, is wealed, pitted, scarred, mounded, entrenched into the semblance of some devil’s nightmare.

All this came upon a world which was more favourable to the hopes of honest, Christian men than any save the Golden Ages of fable. Being myself a plain, Christian man, I am not going to suggest that in 1914 the Earthly Paradise had arrived or was in sight. Coventry Patmore is entirely right when he says that belief in the perfectibility of man on earth is the last proof of weakmindedness. If we fall to rise, it is also true that we rise to fall. It is, perhaps, the chief gain of the agony of war that men have come once more to recognise that in their proudest exaltations sin stands chuckling at their elbows; that moral evil is a reality, and that the opposite notion was a spider-web spun by German metaphysics out of its own entrails. But with these limitations the world before the war promised well for all reasonable human hopes. The old materialism was all but dead. It is true that a few antiquated German heresiarchs like Professor Haeckel still expounded a thing called Monism in sixpenny editions. It is true that a tribe of German professors were still engaged (with much aid and abetment from English savants and publishers) in an attempt to shred into myth those plain historical documents, the Gospels. But on the whole the reigning philosophy was that of Bergson, a philosophy of life, Latin and lucid, which was a distinct return to St. Thomas Aquinas, to Aristotle, and to the common daylight. And in the region of Higher Criticism people were asking themselves very earnestly whether savants like Harnack and the rest, having regard to their general flat-footedness of apprehension, were likely to be good judges of any evidence of anything whatever, human or divine.

In the field of social problems the outlook was of the hopefullest. The conscience of men had been aroused more sharply than ever before to the mass of evil in our society which was inevitable only as a fruit of selfish apathy, and could be exterminated by sound knowledge and strong action. The very loud clamour of the indecently rich was in itself the best proof that the main cause had been bull’s-eyed, and the best guarantee of approaching change. On the other hand the emptiness of the old Socialism, its inadequacy not only to the spiritual but to the bodily business of life, had emerged into clear vision. Property for every man, and not too much property for any man, had become the watchword of sensible men. Trusts, combines, and private conspiracies of every kind, economic and political, were growing more nervous and by consequence more honest under a growing acuteness of scrutiny. Conservatism, which, for all its faults, had kept the roots of life from being torn up, and Democracy, which, for all its, had been like the sap in the tree forcing itself out into new forms of life, were coming to understand that they were not enemies but allies. If you refused all change it was death; if you changed everything at once it was equally death.

There were, indeed, obvious blots. Men, and not irresponsible men, were playing with fire in these countries. The King’s conference at Buckingham Palace was known to have failed just twelve days before Armageddon. We were committed to the monstrous doctrine that only through the criminal madness of civil war could the political future of Ireland be settled. Women, or some women, were already at guerilla war with men, or with some men, and the failure to find a way out was a grave reproach to statesmanship. Perhaps our most damning defect of that vanished time before the war was our entire lack of the sense of proportion. All the little fishes of controversy talked like whales. The galled jade did not _wince_, it trumpeted and charged like a wounded bull-elephant. If you put another penny on the income tax the rich howled out in chorus that Dick Turpin had got himself into the Exchequer, that all industry would come to an end, that the stately homes of England would fall into decay, and that all capital would emigrate to Kamchatka. If a bilious works manager spoke crossly to a similarly indisposed Trade Union workman, there was grave danger that in a week we should have a national crisis and a national strike.

The scene has changed. There must be many a man who, looking out on the spectacle of blood and disaster which now passes for Europe, exclaims: “If I had only known!” There is many a home, deep in the mourning of this titanic tragedy, in which they sigh: “If we could only bring back that 1914 in which we were not wise!”

These are not vain regrets; they have the germ of future wisdom. But they are not our immediate business. Enough for the present to remember that we were playing with unrealities while this crime of all history was being prepared.

All our civilisation of that time, however disturbed, had in it a principle of growth and reconciliation. The temper of these countries might have permitted inflammatory verbiage, and even scattered anarchical outbursts, but it would have revolted to sanity at the first actual shedding of blood.

And now every landmark has been submerged in an Atlantic of blood. There has been forced upon us a dispensation in which our very souls are steeped in blood. The horizon of the future, such horizon as is discernible, is visible only through a mist of blood. Now this was not a war demanded by the peoples of the world. It was not, like the Great Revolution, created by the universal uprising of oppressed men, to be marred and to pass over into murder, lust and tyranny. It was not like the old wars of religion. The sort of religion that tortures its enemies and puts them to death no longer flourishes under the standard of the Cross. It does flourish under that of the Crescent, as the corpses of eight hundred thousand slain Armenians terribly testify. There was indeed before the war one people in Europe, but only one, whose leaders preached war as a national duty and function. How far the militarism of his rulers had penetrated to the common man in Germany must remain something of a question. Personally, I do not think that the peasant who knelt by the wayside crucifix in the Tyrol, or the comfortable, stout farmer in Bavaria or Würtemberg, or the miner in Westphalia, or any typical Rhinelander wanted to dip his hands in blood. He bore with rulers who did so want. In the rest of Europe the atmosphere was one of profound peace. That it was so in France even German witnesses testify.

It will be said that all such considerations are now empty, that we have experienced war and realise all that it means, and that it is the part of wisdom to banish such memories from the human imagination. This sort of plea is, indeed, likely to be popular; it has all the qualities of popularity--that is to say, it is feeble, edifying, and free from all the roughness of truth. But it is precisely the truth in all its roughness of which we stand in need. Our duty is not to banish the memories of war as we have experienced it, but to burn them in beyond effacement, every line and trait, every dot and detail. Civilised men, in the mass, have not yet begun to understand the baseness and the magnitude of this adventure in de-civilisation. There is no calculus of suffering that can sum up the agonies endured since the sentence of blood was daubed on the lintel of every cottage in Europe. The story of war is not yet realised because it has not yet been told; there has not been time for the telling even to begin. It is the part of wisdom to see that it is not slurred over, but written and remembered.

We shall have the usual fluttered imputations of “rhetoric” and “extravagance,” the usual “scientific historians” with their deprecating gesture, against “the introduction of feeling” into any narrative. Such people, I suppose, have their place in the world. This is a scientific age, and the function of science may be exhausted when it has counted the corpses on a battlefield, unless indeed it goes on to append an estimate of their manurial value. It can render both these accounts without admitting a hint of emotion into its voice. But to the conscience the killing of men remains the most terrible of all acts. A mutilated corpse not only overwhelms it with horror, but also suggests at once that there is a murderer somewhere on the earth who must be sought out and punished. Passion will break into the voice, and anger into the veins at such a confrontation, for to be above passion is to be below humanity. I have no apology, then, to make for any “emotional” phrase or sentence in this book. It is in the main a narrative of facts--verified by evidence which stands unshaken by criticism--but I confess that, being no more than human, I have slipped into the luxury of occasional indignation.

When I call this war a crime I use the word in its fullest and simplest sense, an evil act issuing from the deliberate choice of certain human wills. There is a sort of pietism, hardly distinguishable from atheism, to which war appears as a sort of natural calamity, produced by overmastering external conditions. You will hear people of this school of thoughtlessness chattering away as if the earthquake of Lisbon, the cholera outbreak of 1839, and the war of 1914 all belonged to the same category of evil. But the first was plainly beyond the reach of human power; the second was an evil imposed from without which might have been nullified by a wise organization of medical knowledge; and the third was, on the part of its authors, just as plainly a thing of deliberate human choice. Another type of mind, numerously represented, considers that it has settled everything philosophically when to war it has added the label “inevitable.” Everything is apparently involved in a sort of gelatinous determinism; everybody is somewhat to blame for everything, and nobody is very definitely to blame for anything. According to this notion because Germany is rather big, and the British Empire, France, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary are also rather big, and because they all manufacture goods and sell them, the fabric of civilisation is to blow up in minute fragments from time to time under the explosion of an “inevitable war.” No casual connection is indicated. Before thought begins these two doctrines must be dismissed. War is not a calamity of nature, and there are no “inevitable wars.” Or rather the only war inevitable is a war against aggression, and aggression itself is never inevitable.

If any fault has ever been urged against Belgium it was that of a too great and apathetic complacency. The average Englishman--bating the unreal fever-frenzy regarding Ireland--so little planned attack on anyone that events have proved his complete unpreparedness, an unpreparedness common and creditable to all the Allies. Russia wanted no war, Italy wanted none, Serbia, ravaged with disease, wanted none. Yet suddenly there was launched upon us this abomination of desolation.

Who launched it? Who was guilty of this crime above all crimes? The author of it, whether a ruler, a junta, or a whole nation, comes before history stained with an infamy to which no language can reach. If his assassin’s stroke is not beaten down into the dust it is all over with Europe and civilisation. Who, then, was the criminal? There is an invertebrate view according to which everybody is equally blameable and blameless for everything. The holders of this view have never gone quite so far as to take up the New Testament story, and argue that Judas Iscariot was a misunderstood man; but, were they logical, they would do so. Since they are not logical they must not be allowed to apply their mechanical and deterministic formula to the tragedy of world-history. No nation in this war is without a blot, and many blots on its past, not even Ireland. Any people that claims complete worthiness to bear the sword and shield of justice is a people intoxicated with vanity. The participants in this struggle are, like the participants and witnesses in a murder-trial, human. That does not prevent a jury adjudging the supreme guilt of blood to that one of the many imperfect individuals on whom it lies.

The Great War was in its origin a Great Crime, and the documents are there to prove it. That is one advantage we possess formerly forbidden to public opinion. The Press and popular education have done much harm, but this solid good stands to their credit: they have made it impossible, as in old times, to order war in secret councils for motives undisclosed, or not disclosed till long after the events. Every belligerent Government has found itself under the necessity of issuing to the world diplomatic correspondence relating to the outbreak of the war. All the publications of the Powers engaged will be found in a single volume, _Collected Diplomatic Documents relating to the Outbreak of the European War_ (E. Ponsonby, 1_s._ net). To that volume frequent reference will be made in these pages. One omission must be noted, a hiatus more significant and sinister than any printed evidence. The influence exercised by Berlin on Vienna must be, for the historian, the central pivot of all _ante-bellum_ negotiations. But in neither of the books published by the Germanic Powers is there any real disclosure of what passed between Berlin and Vienna during that fateful period. Allegations of atrocities, too, no longer rest merely on the evidence of private persons. Formal Commissions, composed of lawyers and statesmen of international reputation, have sifted the whole mass of charges, eliminated hearsay, and committed themselves to a verdict that nothing can shake. That great prince of the Church, Cardinal Mercier, and his Bishops, have issued documents with every solemnity of form and occasion which in the early days of the struggle were not available. A whole library of comment, in which the ablest minds not only of the United Kingdom and France but also of the United States and Germany itself have collaborated in a reasoned examination of the issues at stake, is at our disposal.

The evidence in the whole case is indeed at once so clear and so voluminous that one might well have supposed any further survey of it to be superfluous. That is not so. It is a far from frequent experience to find a man in Ireland, even among those who assume to themselves a new leadership of opinion, who has made an honest study of documents within reach of all the world. You will still hear “intellectuals” explaining at length that they “don’t believe the Germans committed any atrocities in Belgium.” You will hear facile sneers at the notion that attacks of Great Powers on small nationalities had anything to do with the war. The sooner the unworthiness of this familiar attitude is recognised by everybody in Ireland the better.

No man has the right to offer an opinion on any subject that is a matter of evidence until he has read the evidence. Upon anyone who has read it in this instance the twin _niaiseries_ just cited make the impression merely of blank unreason. What would one make of a man, and a writer to boot, who began modern French history by dismissing the alleged existence of Napoleon with a shrug and a gibe? Or who “didn’t believe” that there ever were evictions in Ireland? The parallel is exact. The evidence in proof of the first pair of propositions differs from that in proof of the second pair only in being fresher and more abundant. Going upon that evidence, any branch of which can be pursued in detail by any enquirer, I propose to establish this following argument.

This war originated in an attempt by Austria-Hungary, a large Empire, to destroy the independence of Serbia, a small nation.

It grew to its present dimensions because Germany, and under German pressure Austria-Hungary, rejected every proposal making for peace suggested by the present Allied Powers but especially by the United Kingdom through Sir Edward Grey.

Germany offered bribes to the United Kingdom, and to Belgium herself, to induce them to consent to a violation of the European treaty which protected Belgian independence and enforced Belgian neutrality.

Having broken like an armed burglar into Belgium, Germany was there guilty of a systematic campaign of murder, pillage, outrage, and destruction, justified, planned and ordered by her military and intellectual leaders. Such a campaign was inherent in her philosophy of politics, and of war. She stood for the gospel of force; and the sacrament of cruelty. To link with her in any wise a nation like Ireland that has always stood for spiritual freedom is an act of treason and blasphemy against our whole past.

The Allied Powers did not come into the war, and will not come before history, sinless. The past of both Great Britain and France was deeply stained with domination, that is to say, with Prussianism. Much of it was still apparent in some of their politics. But they had begun to cleanse themselves. The working out of the democratic formula would have in due course completed that process, and will complete it. Prussia, on the contrary, had adopted her vice as the highest virtue. Her philosophy did not correct her appetites, it canonised them. Therefore, speaking of main ideas, the triumph of Prussia must mean the triumph of force: the triumph of the Allies must mean the triumph of law.

In such a conflict to counsel Ireland to stand neutral in judgment, is as if one were to counsel a Christian to stand neutral in judgment between Nero and St. Peter. To counsel her to stand neutral in action would have been to abandon all her old valour and decision, and to establish in their places the new cardinal virtues of comfort and cowardice. In such matters you cannot compromise. Neutrality is already a decision, a decision of adherence to the evil side. To trim is to betray. It will be an ill end of all our “idealistic” movements when their success so transforms the young men of this nation that in this world they shall be content to be neutral, and that nothing will offer them in the next save to be blown about by the winds.

Used with the wisdom which is sown in tears and blood, this tragedy of Europe may be and must be the prologue to the two reconciliations of which all statesmen have dreamed, the reconciliation of Protestant Ulster with Ireland, and the reconciliation of Ireland with Great Britain.

In this book--pieced together amid preoccupations of a very different kind--I have reprinted certain articles on various aspects of the war published in its earlier stages. I have done so not out of vanity, the reader may rest assured, but to repel an imputation. It has been charged against us who have taken our stand with the Allies that we were merely dancing to the tune of Imperialism, that our ideas came to us from London, that we hated Prussia and Prussianism not honestly but simply to order. Our recruiting appeals have been twisted from their plain utterance and obvious meaning. Wordy young men, with no very notable public services to their record, have “stigmatised” (a word in which they delight) us all from Mr. Redmond down as renegades to Irish Nationalism. What we have said and done is to be remembered and is to rise up in judgment against us in the new Ireland that is coming. I do not know whether anybody else is pained or alarmed, but my withers are unwrung. Since I knew Prussian “culture” at close quarters I have loathed it, and written my loathing. The outbreak of war caught me in Belgium, where I was running arms for the National Volunteers, and on the 6th of August, 1914, I wrote from Brussels in the _Daily News_ that it was a war of “civilisation against barbarians.” I assisted for many overwhelming weeks at the agony of the valiant Belgian nation. I have written no word and spoken none that was not the word of an Irish Nationalist, who had been at the trouble of thinking for himself. Ireland was my centre of reference as it was that of Mr. Redmond, Mr. T. P. O’Connor, Mr. Dillon, and Mr. Devlin in their speeches, and of Mr. Hugh A. Law in his clear and noble pamphlet, _Why is Ireland at War?_

It is true that we have all made two assumptions. We assumed that Ireland had a duty not only to herself but to the world; we assumed further that, whatever befell, the path taken by her must be the path of honour and justice. If these postulates are rejected there is no more to be said: the future must in that case undoubtedly belong to the friends of the burners of Louvain.

II.--THE BULLYING OF SERBIA

The first declaration of war in this world-conflict was that of Austria-Hungary against Serbia on the 27th of July, 1914. The first shots fired in the war were those fired by Austrian monitors on the Danube into Belgrade on the 29th of July, 1914. Austria-Hungary is or was then a great Empire with a population of 50,000,000 and an army of 2,500,000; Serbia is or was then a peasant State with a population of 5,000,000 and an army of 230,000.