Alas, alas for England, They have no graves as yet. Ireland The fact that 49,400 Irish soldiers in the British Army gave their lives fighting in the Great War remains controversial in Ireland. This is because the Easter Rising of 1916 took place during the war and the Irish War of Independence began only a few months after the 11 November Armistice. For this reason, Irish republicanism has traditionally viewed Irishmen who serve in the British military as traitors. This view became even more prevalent after 1949, when Ireland voted to become a Republic and to leave the Commonwealth. For this reason, Ireland's war poets were long neglected. One of them was Tom Kettle, a former member of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers and M.P. for the Irish Parliamentary Party. Despite his outrage over the Rape of Belgium, Kettle was very critical of the war at first. Comparing the Anglo-Irish landlord class to the aristocratic big estate owners who similarly dominated the Kingdom of Prussia, Kettle wrote, "England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland." Later, when he was serving as a Lieutenant with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front, Kettle learned of the Easter Rising of 1916. After also learning of the executions of Roger Casement and sixteen of the Rising's other leaders, including every one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, Kettle wrote, "These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer." Mere months later, on 9 September 1916, Lieut. Kettle was shot in the chest during the Battle of Ginchy, in which the 16th (Irish) Division successfully captured and held the French village of the same name, which the Imperial German Army had been using as an artillery observation post during the Battle of the Somme. Lieut. Kettle's body was never found. G. K. Chesterton later wrote, "Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of the channel [...] He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before has used the