barbarians against Ireland." Lieut. Kettle's best-known poem is a sonnet, To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God, which was written and mailed to his family just days before he was killed in action. It reads: "In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown To beauty proud as was your mother's prime, In that desired, delayed, incredible time, You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own, And the dear heart that was your baby throne, To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme And reason: some will call the thing sublime, And some decry it in a knowing tone. So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor, 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." When Francis Ledwidge, who was a member of the Irish Volunteers in Slane, County Meath, learned of the outbreak of the war, he decided against enlisting in the British Army. In response, the Unionist National Volunteers subjected Ledwidge to a show trial, during which they accused him of cowardice and of being pro-German. Soon after, Ledwidge enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Despite his twin beliefs in socialism and Irish republicanism, Ledwidge later wrote, "I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions." Ledwidge published three volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1918, while he served at the Landing at Suvla Bay, on the Macedonian front and on the Western Front. Like Kettle, Ledwidge was also deeply moved by the executions that followed the Easter Rising of 1916 and eulogized the 17 executed Republican leaders in his poems O’Connell Street, Lament for Thomas MacDonagh, Lament for the Poets of 1916, and in the Aisling poem The Dead Kings. During a major rainstorm on the early morning of 31 July 1917, Ledwidge's battalion was laying beech-wood road planks in the boggy soil near the village of Boezinge, Belgium, in preparation for an imminent Allied offensive that would become known as the Battle of Passchendaele. Shortly after the Fusiliers, who were soaked to the skin, were permitted a short break and issued