Yet power he had—­power over the heart and mind of Ireland—­the power which was given him by the response to his appeal.  From January onwards the Sixteenth Division grew steadily and strongly.  Recruiting began to get on a better basis.  The appointment of Sir Hedley Le Bas in charge of this propaganda brought about a healthy change in methods.  Appeals were used devised for Ireland, and not, as heretofore, simple replicas of the English article.  Heart-breaking instances of stupidity were still of daily occurrence, but imagination and insight began to have some play; and there was no longer the complete separation which had existed between the effort of Redmond and his colleagues and the effort of men like Lord Meath.  In January Willie Redmond was posted to his battalion, the 6th Royal Irish, at Fermoy, where the 47th Brigade had its headquarters.  In his case, as in my own, there had been much avoidable and most undesirable delay; but his presence with the Division was worth an immense deal.  There was delay also about his younger namesake, John Redmond’s son—­who was for a long time refused a commission in the Division in whose formation his father had played so great a part.

Naturally, trained speakers who had joined the Division were utilized for recruiting purposes.  Willie Redmond did comparatively little of this work.  It is no light job to take over command of a company, if you mean really to command it; and with him, from the moment he joined everything came second to his military duty.  But private soldiers have a less exacting time, and there was scarcely one week of my three months in the 7th Leinsters in which I did not spend the Saturday and Sunday on this business—­generally in company with the most brilliant speaker, taking all in all, that I have ever heard.  Kettle, then a lieutenant in the battalion, was wit, essayist, poet and orator:  whether he was most a wit or most an orator might be argued for a night without conclusion; but as talker or as speaker he had few equals.  He was the son of a veteran Nationalist, who had taken a lead in Parnell’s day; but the farmer’s son had become the most characteristic product of Ireland’s capital, which, rich or poor, squalid or splendid, is a metropolis—­a centre of many interests, a forcing-house of many ideas.  Nothing in Ireland is less English than Dublin, and its tone differs from that of England in having active sympathy with the continental mind.

Kettle was always to some extent in revolt against the theories of the Gaelic League, which he thought tended to make Ireland insular morally as well as materially.  He was a good European because he was a good Irishman; and because he was both, he was, though largely educated in Germany, a fierce partisan of France.

More than all this, he had seen with his own eyes the actual martyrdom of Belgium.  Sent out by Redmond to purchase rifles, he was in the country when Antwerp was occupied, and he wrote with passion of what he heard, of what he saw.  Louvain to him was more than a mere name.  All the Catholic in him, and all the Irish Catholic, for Ireland’s association with Louvain was long and intimate, rose up in fury; he went through Ireland carrying the fiery cross.