The Irish poet and Redmondite MP, Captain Tom Kettle, served in the British army on the Western Front. He had been appalled by German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, and believed sincerely that he was fighting in the cause of liberty with which England might keep faith. He was a Volunteer, and knew personally many of those involved in the Easter Rising such as Thomas MacDonagh. When he heard of Rising he predicted sadly, (and correctly), that its leaders "will go down to history as heroes and martyrs, and I will go down - if I go down at all - as a bloody British officer".

In his last poem, written for his baby daughter shortly before his death on the Somme in 1916, he wrote of his own motives for fighting:-

"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."

The notion that Tom Kettle, and the thousands of other Irishmen who served in Gallipoli and France, simply fought out of loyalty to the Crown is belittling to their memory. At the time it was only George Russell who recognised the equality of the sacrifices made by the fellow poets Tom Kettle and Thomas MacDonagh, but now at last we can all acknowledge that:-

"High words were equalled by high fate,
You paid the price. You paid the price."