Part 10 (1/2)
department of the Central Argentine Railway at Rosario, and, hastening home, got his commission in the Leinster Regiment. For his services at the Front he received the Certificate of the Irish Brigade. It was at Guillamont that Lieutenant Holland won the Victoria Cross. The official account of his exploits is as follows--
”For most conspicuous bravery during a heavy engagement, when, not content with bombing hostile dug-outs within the objective, he fearlessly led his bombers through our own artillery barrage and cleared a great part of the village in front. He started out with twenty-six bombers and finished up with only five, after capturing some fifty prisoners. By this very gallant action he undoubtedly broke the spirit of the enemy, and thus saved us many casualties when the battalion made a further advance. He was far from well at the time, and later had to go to hospital.”
As proof of Lieutenant Holland's dash it is related that the night before the engagement he made a bet of five pounds with a brother officer that he would be first over the parapet when the order came.
He won the bet, the V.C., and, in addition, he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and of St. George of Russia.
CHAPTER XIV
THE WOODEN CROSS
DEATH OF LIEUTENANT T.M. KETTLE OF THE DUBLINS
For all this glory and renown the Irish Brigade had to pay a bitter price. Many a home in Ireland was made forlorn and desolate. The roads of the countryside by which the men went off to the war will be lonely and drear for ever to womenfolk, for never again will they be brightened by the returning foot-steps of son or husband.
One of the most grievous losses which the Brigade sustained was the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Lenox-Conyngham of the Connaught Rangers.
He came of an Ulster soldier family. He was the son of Colonel Sir W.
Fitzwilliam Lenox-Conyngham of Springhill, co. Derry, was born in 1861, and three of his brothers were also serving in the Army with the rank of Colonel. He fell at the head of his battalion, which was foremost in the rush for Guillamont. ”I cannot imagine a more fitting death for him,” writes Captain Stephen Gwynn, M.P., who served under Colonel Lenox-Conyngham since the days the battalion was formed at Fermoy. ”He was never in doubt as to how his men would acquit themselves. To us officers he said things in private which would sound a little arrogant if I quoted them--and yet they have been made good.”
The welfare of the men was always his first concern. Captain Gwynn relates that on the return of the battalion one night, after a dreary day of field operations at home, the company officers, feeling very miserable, were gathered about the door of their mess-room, waiting for dinner, when the Colonel called out that their proper place was in the cook-house, seeing that the men were first served. The incident greatly rejoiced the heart of Captain Gwynn, for, having served in the ranks, he knew that the officer who is best served by the men is he who places their comfort and well-being before his own. In France, whenever any compliment was paid to Colonel Lenox-Conyngham, he could not be content until, with frank generosity, he pa.s.sed it on to the company officers. ”It is you who have done it,” he would say. ”He was right too,” says Captain Gwynn. ”We did the work, and no men were ever less interfered with; but we did it as we had been taught to do it, and because we were kept up to it at every point.”
I can only mention a few typical cases of the officers of the Irish Brigade killed at Guillamont and Guinchy. Lieutenant E.R.F. Becher, of the Munster Fusiliers, was but nineteen, and the only child of E.W.
Becher, Lismore, co. Waterford. He was descended in direct line from Colonel Thomas Becher, who was aide-de-camp to King William at the Battle of the Boyne, and was on that occasion presented by the King with his watch, which is still an heirloom in the family. Captain H.R.
Lloyd of the Royal Irish Regiment was descended from the ensign who carried the colours of the Coldstream Guards at Waterloo. He was educated at Drogheda Grammar School, and was at business in Brazil when the war broke out. Lieutenant J.T. Kennedy of the Inniskillings was editor of the _Northern Standard_, Monaghan. Lieutenant Charles P.
Close of the Dublin Fusiliers was a native of Limerick, and conducted a teaching academy in that city. At the time he volunteered he was the commanding officer of the City Regiment of National Volunteers.
Another officer of the National Volunteers was Lieutenant Hugh Maguire, son of Dr. Conor Maguire of Claremorris. He was a university student when he volunteered for service in response to the national call, and got a commission in the Connaught Rangers, but was temporarily attached to the Inniskillings when he was killed. Another gallant youth was Lieutenant Thomas Maxwell, Dublin Fusiliers, son of Surgeon Patrick W. Maxwell of Dublin, who was in his twenty-first year when he fell while in temporary command of the leading company of his battalion in the taking of Guinchy. Then there is Second-Lieutenant Bevan Nolan. He was the third son of Walter Nolan, Clerk of the Crown for South Tipperary. When the war broke out he was in Canada, and, returning at once, obtained a commission in the Royal Irish Regiment.
He was a very gallant young officer, and most popular with his comrades. In the camp the general verdict was: ”Nolan is destined for the V.C., or to die at the head of his platoon.” He was only twenty-one years of age, and a splendid type of young Tipperary.
The greatest loss in individual brain-power which Ireland suffered was through the death of that brilliant man of letters and economist, Lieutenant T.M. Kettle of the Dublin Fusiliers. He was a son of Andrew J. Kettle, a Dublin farmer, one of the founders of the Land League, and a member of the executive who in 1881, on the arrest of the leaders, Parnell, Davitt and Dillon, signed the No-Rent Manifesto addressed to the tenants. In the House of Commons, where he sat as a Nationalist from 1906 to 1910, young Kettle made a reputation for eloquence and humour of quite a fresh vein. He resigned on his appointment as Professor of National Economics in the National University of Ireland. He was married to Margaret, daughter of David Sheehy, M.P., whose sister is the widow of Sheehy Skeffington, shot by the military in the Dublin Rebellion.
In public life Kettle was a vivid figure, and very Irish. At first he belonged to the extreme, or irreconcilable section of Nationalists, noted for a cast of thought or bias of reasoning which finds that no good for Ireland can come out of England. When England was fighting the Boers he distributed anti-recruiting leaflets in the streets of Dublin. To his const.i.tuents in East Tyrone he once declared that Ireland had no national independence to protect against foreign invasion. ”I confess,” he added, referring to the over-taxation of Ireland, ”I see many reasons for preferring German invasion to British methods of finance in Ireland.” But increased knowledge brought wider views. As a result of his experiences in Parliament, where he found in all parties a genuine desire to do what was best for Ireland according to their lights, he approached the consideration of Irish questions with a remarkably tolerant, broad-minded and practical spirit. When the war broke out there was no more powerful champion of the Allies.
The invasion of Belgium, which he had witnessed as a newspaper correspondent, moved him to an intense hatred of Germany, and, throwing himself with all his energy into the recruiting campaign in Ireland, he addressed no fewer than two hundred meetings, bringing thousands of his countrymen to the Colours. One of his epigrammatic and pointed sayings--suggested by the ill-favour of absentee landlordism of old in Ireland--was: ”Nowadays the absentee is the man who stays at home.”
In a letter written to a friend on the night his battalion was moving up to the Somme, Kettle said he had had two chances of leaving--one on account of sickness and the other to take a Staff appointment. ”I have chosen to stay with my comrades,” he writes. ”The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination. Nor did I ever think that valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers.” On the eve of his death he wrote to his wife another fine tribute to his battalion. ”I have never,” he says, ”seen anything in my life so beautiful as the clean and, so to say, radiant manner of my Dublin Fusiliers. There is something divine in men like that.”
Kettle fell in the storming of Guinchy. His friend and comrade, Lieutenant James Emmet Dalton, M.C., states that they were both in the trenches in Trones Wood opposite Guillamont, on the morning of September 8th, discussing the loss of two hundred men and seven officers which the battalion had sustained the day before from German sh.e.l.l fire, when an orderly arrived with a note for each of them, saying, ”Be in readiness. Battalion will take up A and B position in front of Guinchy to-night at 12 midnight.” Lieutenant Dalton continues: ”I was with Tom when he advanced to the position that night, and the stench of the dead that covered our road was so awful that we both used some foot-powder on our faces. When we reached our objective we dug ourselves in, and then, at five o'clock p.m. on the 9th, we attacked Guinchy. I was just behind Tom when we went over the top. He was in a bent position, and a bullet got over a steel waistcoat that he wore and entered his heart. Well, he only lasted about one minute, and he had my crucifix in his hands. Then Boyd took all the papers and things out of Tom's pockets in order to keep them for Mrs. Kettle, but poor Boyd was blown to atoms in a few minutes.
The Welsh Guards buried Mr. Kettle's remains. Tom's death has been a big blow to the regiment, and I am afraid that I could not put in words my feelings on the subject.” In another letter Lieutenant Dalton says: ”Mr. Kettle died a grand and holy death--the death of a soldier and a true Christian.”
Lieutenant Kettle left his political testament in a letter to his wife and in verses addressed to his little daughter. The letter, written a few days before his death, with directions that it was to be sent to Mrs. Kettle if he were killed, says--
”Had I lived I had meant to call my next book on the relations of Ireland and England _The Two Fools; A Tragedy of Errors_. It has needed all the folly of England and all the folly of Ireland to produce the situation in which our unhappy country is now involved. I have mixed much with Englishmen and with Protestant Ulstermen, and I know that there is no real or abiding reason for the gulfs, salter than the sea, that now dismember the natural alliance of both of them with us Irish Nationalists. It needs only a Fiat Lux of a kind very easily compa.s.sed to replace the unnatural by the natural. In the name, and by the seal, of the blood given in the last two years I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland, a thing essential in itself, and essential as a prologue to the reconstruction of the Empire. Ulster will agree. And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in Ireland, and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this war has taught us anything it is that great things can be done only in a great way.”
The lines, ”To my daughter Betty--The Gift of Love,” were written ”In the field before Guillamont, Somme, September 4, 1916--
”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 breast that was your baby's throne, To dice with death, and, oh! they'll give you rhyme And reason; one will call the thing sublime, And one decry it in a knowing tone.