Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/27

 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.

"Unless you hate war, as such, you cannot really hate Prussia. If you admit war as an essential part of civilisation, then what you are hating is merely Prussian efficiency."

And with this mission of universal peace mingled his dream of a reconciled Ulster. He knew that there was no abiding cause of disunion between North and South, and hoped that out of