The Ways of War is Kettle's autobiographical work which is based on the letters he was sending from the battlefield to his wife Mary. Kettle was one of the most brilliant figures both in the Young Ireland and Young Europe of his time. Tom Kettle, an Irish economist, journalist, barrister, writer, war poet, soldier and Home Rule politician joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Tom was enlisted for service in the British Army, with which he was killed in action on the Western Front in the Autumn of 1916. The opening chapters of the book reveal him as a Nationalist concerned about the liberty not only of Ireland but of every nation, small and great. After the chapters describing the inevitable sympathy of an Irishman with Serbia and Belgium—little nations attacked by two Imperial bullies—comes an account of the tragic scenes Kettle himself witnessed in Belgium, where he served as a war-correspondent in the early days of the war. The book closes with «Trade or Honour?»—an appeal to the Allies to preserve high and disinterested motives in ending the war as in beginning it, and to turn a deaf ear to those political hucksters to whom gain means more than freedom. Thus «The Ways of War» is a book, not only of patriotism, but of international idealism. Above all, it is a passionate human document—the «apologia pro vita sua» of a soldier who died for freedom.
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Tom Kettle. The Ways of War
The Ways of War
Table of Contents
PREFATORY NOTE
MEMOIR
WHY IRELAND FOUGHT
I. Prelude
II. The Bullying of Serbia
III. The Crime Against Belgium
UNDER THE HEEL OF THE HUN
I. A World Adrift
II. “Europe against the Barbarians”
III. Termonde
What Termonde was
Culture and the Sick
Organised Infamy
“He must be Hanged”
Irish Horses
IV. Malines
V. In Ostend
TREATING BELGIUM DECENTLY
BELGIUM IN PEACE. WORK OF THREE GENERATIONS—COMPARISONS WITH IRELAND—SOME MEMORIES
“G.H.Q.”
“ZUR ERINNERUNG” A LETTER TO AN AUSTRIAN FELLOW-STUDENT
SILHOUETTES FROM THE FRONT
I. The Way to the Trenches
II. The Long Endurance
III. Rhapsody on Rats
THE NEW FRANCE
THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE
THE GOSPEL OF THE DEVIL
I. Bismarck
II. Nietzsche
III. Treitschke and the Professors
TRADE OR HONOUR?
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Tom Kettle
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In 1897 he went to University College. In a year or so, he became Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society and obtained the Gold Medal for Oratory. His great gifts were already conspicuous. A fellow-student wrote of him: “Amongst them all, Kettle stood supreme. Already that facility for grasping a complicated subject and condensing it in a happy phrase, that bright, eager mind so ready to take issue on behalf of a good cause, that intellectual supremacy which was so pre-eminently his, had marked him out for far-reaching influence and a distinguished career.”
His University course was interrupted by a breakdown in health which necessitated his withdrawal from collegiate life for nearly a year. Over-study had strained his nervous system, and he never quite regained normal health. In 1904 a brother, a veritable twin-soul, to whom he was deeply attached, and of whom he had high hopes, died. This was an everlasting grief to him. This sorrow, together with his shattered nerves, was responsible for his somewhat tragic and melancholy temperament. In 1904 he went to the Tyrol to recuperate, and in that wander-year, Europe laid her spell on him. He was a fine linguist and, being an omnivorous reader, was soon intimately acquainted with the best European literature.
