Page:The ways of war - Kettle - 1917.pdf/53

 have front places at the performances. So you see, even I have no particular certainty of coming back. I passed through, as everybody of sense does, a sharp agony of separation. If I were an English poet like that over-praised Rupert Brooke, I should call it, no doubt, the Gethsemane before the climb up the Windy Hill, but phrase-making seems now a very dead thing to me—but now it is almost over and I feel calm.... I hope to come back. If not, I believe that to sleep here in the France I have loved is no harsh fate, and that so passing out into the silence, I shall help towards the Irish settlement. Give my love to my colleagues—the Irish people have no need of it."

But the moral and physical strain on a man, bred as he was, was terrible, and in spite of his fine efforts at insouciance there is a note of nostalgia. "Physically I am having a heavy time. I am doing my best, but I see better men than me dropping out day by day and wonder if I shall ever have the luck or grace to come home." And again: "The heat is bad, as are the insects and rats, but the moral strain is positively terrible. It is not that I am not happy in a way—a poor way—but my heart does long for a chance to come home." And in another letter of farewell to a friend he says: "I am not happy to die, the sacrifice is over-great, but I am, content." Some critics have hinted that he died in France because he had not the heart to live in Ireland. Some even went