Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  The citizens of Belgium waited for the Allied armies to stop this terror and rescue them. The initial Allied plan had been for the French to hold back the Kaiser’s army while the British disposed of his fleet and then, with the seas secured and no danger of invasion of England, the British Expeditionary Force, the elite BEF, would march into Belgium and, in a pincer movement with the French, trap the enemy and send it home.

  Within hours and days of delays, misunderstanding and then blunder, it became clear that such plans were over-optimistic. This enemy had been underestimated and misread. To implement the Schlieffen Plan, the paper plan with Paris as its goal, Germany had two million men on the move. Their lines of attack circled from Liège to Mons, from Diest to Antwerp, from Louvain and Charleroi to Brussels, from Ghent to Ypres. The technology of their weaponry was advanced and lethal: trench mortars, poison gas, machine guns, shells, grenades, flame-throwers. And equal to this army’s force was its ruthlessness. Allied military intelligence had miscalculated German intentions and strength. General Joffre, in command of the French First Army, had drawn up his Plan XVII but then encountered German forces far greater than his own. And communication was poor between General Lanrezac, in command of the French Fifth Army, and Field Marshal Sir John French, who was in command of the British Expeditionary Force. They could not or did not attack German divisions according to agreed plans. News of carnage filtered through to Brussels, “After the period of high enthusiasm came the days of anxiety,” Edith Cavell wrote.

  Louvain was destroyed on August 27, 1914. The hôtel de ville

  It grew keener hour by hour, when we heard Liège had fallen, that Namur followed, and that the enemy was coming on in irresistible force. There were sinister tales, too, of burnt and battered houses, of villages razed to the ground, of women and children murdered, of drunken soldiers and raping and looting and annihilation. And still we hoped against hope. “We wait for England” was on the lips of everyone, and till the very last we thought the English troops were between us and the invading army.

  But the British Expeditionary Force had not arrived, and the German army marched toward Brussels, destroying towns and villages in their path. At the School the nurses could smell burning. They knew fighting was taking place but did not know where. “We can hear the cannon and from not far away the smoke can be seen with field glasses,” Edith Cavell wrote.

  On August 18 King Albert, Queen Elisabeth and the Belgian government moved to Antwerp on the Dutch border. The King decreed that Brussels be an undefended city. He wanted no armed resistance. No bloodshed. Edith Cavell wrote to her mother and told her not to be afraid if she heard the German army had arrived in Brussels. “They will only walk through. It is not a fortified town. Besides we are living under the Red Cross.” She said how she longed for English newspapers, for she had seen none since she left. “My dearest love and Grace’s. I will write whenever I can.”

  At the approaches to the city the garde civique, made up of untrained citizens, stood by in postures of defense or crouched night and day in readiness in the trenches they had dug, “but it did not need a soldier to see that they could pose no possible resistance to the great army of the Kaiser. It was a grateful duty to take these brave men hot coffee and food to fortify them against the nights, already chilly, of late summer.”

  Edith Cavell wrote a letter home before the postal service was cut off:

  My dearest Mother and my dear Ones

  When you open this letter that which we have feared has happened and Brussels will have fallen into the hands of the enemy. The Germans are very close here and it is doubtful that the Allied Armies can stop them. We are prepared for the worst. I offered our dear Gracie and the other nurses to go back home. But none wanted to leave. I appreciate their courage and I would like you to tell the Jemmetts that I have done my best to send Gracie back to them, but she refused to leave me. She is calm and courageous. There is £100 deposited in the Pension Fund which I have never touched and which belongs to me. I beg my mother to take it with my greatest affection. It will replace the little quarterly allowance I made her. If I find means to forward you the few jewels I have, will you divide them among Flo and Lil?…

  My most affectionate thoughts are for you dear Mother and for you Flo, Lil, Jack and your children and to Eveline McDonnell. God bless you and keep you in His care.

  I “shall never forget the evening before the Prussians entered the city,” Nurse Jacqueline van Til wrote. “We went up to the roof of the School and saw the sky toward the east fiery red, while clouds of thick black smoke rolled in our direction.” The thunder of guns broke the windows of the School. She sat on the landing and wept. Edith Cavell comforted her, told her not to give way to her feelings, to remember her life belonged not just to herself but to her duty as a nurse. “In the evening came the news that the enemy were at the gates. At midnight bugles were blowing, summoning the Civil Guard to lay down their arms and leave the city.” The 26th Regiment of German Hussars and the 10th Uhlans had arrived at the gates of Brussels. The Burgomaster went out to parley with them. “Many people were up through the dark hours, and all doors and windows were tightly shut. As we went to bed our only consolation was the certainty that in God’s good time right and justice must prevail.” At 2 p.m. on August 20 the janitor of the School, “a stout woman,” burst through the door shouting, “Les Boches sont là.” “The sun shone in mockery on our fallen hopes as in the afternoon the German troops marched in,” Edith Cavell wrote.

  All that day, and the next, columns of troops marched through the city heading south-west toward Paris. Fifty thousand German soldiers with guns, spiked helmets and tired horses passed through Brussels in those two days. The citizens lined the pavements, “sullen and silent.” They could not cross the roads. The army marched in eight columns with Belgian prisoners between them. From rue de la Culture Edith Cavell and the nurses watched this long procession. When a halt for a meal was called and supplies distributed from carts, some of the soldiers were too exhausted to eat and just slept on the pavement. When they took off their boots their feet were bleeding.

  German infantry march into Brussels, watched by civilians. Place Charles Rogier, August 20, 1914

  We were divided between pity for these poor fellows, far from their country and their people, suffering the weariness and fatigue of an arduous campaign, and hate of a cruel and vindictive foe bringing ruin and desolation on hundreds of happy homes and to a prosperous and peaceful land. Some of the Belgians spoke to the invaders in German and found they were very vague as to their whereabouts, and imagined they were already in Paris; they were surprised to be speaking to Belgians, and could not understand what quarrel they had with them. I saw several of the men pick up little children and give them chocolate or seat them on their horses, and some had tears in their eyes at the recollection of the little ones at home.

  These were young men from towns and villages and decent living much like her own, conscripted soldiers, forced into a role which in the name of patriotism, or out of pride or fear, they did not or could not resist. In the afternoon armed officers in motor cars drove across the Grande Place to the hôtel de ville. They lowered the Belgian tricolor and hoisted the German flag.

  That night Edith Cavell talked to her nurses. They were scared. Any wounded soldier, she told them, must be treated, friend or foe. Each man was a father, husband or son. As nurses they must take no part in the quarrel. Their work was for humanity, but they should watch their words and not enter unnecessarily into conversation with patients. The profession of nursing, she said—and not for the first or last time—knew no frontiers.

  22

  OCCUPATION

  “There are two sides to war,” Edith Cavell wrote in an article in the Nursing Mirror in August 1914, “the glory and the misery. We begin to see both. We shall see the latter more clearly as time goes on.”

  Later that summer Belgium was torn to pieces and Brussels cut off from the world. The German military rooted
in as masters, made and enforced punitive rules, took over all the civic buildings and public services and brutalized a peaceful city.

  The supreme authority of this occupation was the Governor General. Appointed by the Kaiser, he was his personal representative. Only the Kaiser, who assumed absolute right over the conquered territories, could overrule him. Neither the German parliament, the Reichstag, its legislative, the Bundesrath, or the Foreign Office in Berlin, had authority over him. He had the power of life and death and his decrees required no countersignature. In peacetime, Belgium was divided into nine provinces each with a Provincial Governor. These were now answerable to the German Governor General in Brussels.

  Second in command to him was the Military Governor. He headed the Kommandantur, the military police, who were at the heart of German repression of Belgian civilians. They took over two ornate ministerial buildings in rue de la Loi. Every morning from the main doors of the Kommandantur building a battalion of armed, helmeted military police emerged: their uniforms gray, their trousers stuffed in their iron-shod boots, rifles with fixed bayonets on their shoulders, black, white and red brassards with the imperial eagle round their jackets, metal discs embossed with POLIZEI on chains round their necks.12 They patrolled the streets in twos and threes, guarded the carrefours and entrances to the city, surveilled and apprehended civilians and returned in the late afternoon bringing people with them, who were charged with any of countless crimes, then taken to the prison at St. Gilles.

  In nearby boulevard de Berlaimont a block of buildings was occupied by officials of the secret police, the Geheime Politische Polizei. Within a year there were thousands of these plain-clothes individuals milling about among the civilian population, spying on them. They kept dossiers on anyone of the slightest importance. Their ambition was to ensnare.

  After the German invasion, Belgian officials without authority, in the civil departments of government, kept their jobs though under enemy supervision. Railway and postal workers refused to work for the Germans and were replaced, but the Ministries of Justice, Arts, Sciences and Finance, though constrained and subjugated, continued to function with Belgian bureacrats. By doing so they helped their nation survive complete catastrophe.

  Neutral countries retained a scant diplomatic presence. At the American Legation Brand Whitlock was the minister. He had an assistant, Hugh Gibson, two secretaries, and a Belgian legal adviser, Gaston de Leval. Whitlock, an unhurried individual who wrote novels and memoirs, before the war had served four times as mayor of Toledo in Ohio. In occupied Belgium, food and clothes were sent from America to alleviate the suffering of the civilian population. Its distribution was organized by the Legation. In so far as he could, Brand Whitlock represented the interests of English nationals remaining in the country. The Marquis de Villalobar, a more energetic diplomat who was unafraid to break with protocol, attempted to represent the interests of French nationals there.

  The Politische Abteiling was the only German office in occupied Brussels which dealt with requests from foreign diplomats. It was not, in itself, a military department, though it was under the rule of the Governor General and was headed by a trusted adviser to him, Baron von der Lancken-Wakenitz.

  His Excellency Field-Marshal Baron von der Goltz Pasha was the first Governor General. He was an old man, big, with a mottled scarred face and round gleaming spectacles. He wore a blue much-decorated uniform, a black helmet and an enormous sword. He liked to travel to the battlefields in order to observe the bloodshed. While watching fighting at Antwerp, he got slightly wounded on his face. “He went to battles as an office-boy goes to baseball games,” Brand Whitlock said. His first affiche, posted on the city’s walls, proclaimed his accession to power, said that the German armies were advancing victoriously in France and threatened dire consequences to anyone who committed any act inimical to the German cause. “It is the hard necessity of war that punishment for hostile acts falls not only on the guilty but also on the innocent,” he told the Belgians. With Louvain, Dinant, Aerschot and hundreds of other towns and villages smoking and in ruins, such warnings were not taken lightly. When the much-loved Burgomaster, Adolphe Max, ventured a defiant affiche of his own, he was packed off to prison at Glatz in Silesia. Thereafter these posters played as large a part in Brussels life as had newspapers before the war. They did not provide reliable news, but they made German intentions clear.

  The streets were patrolled by sentries, soldiers and spies. Citizens were watched, stopped, asked for identification and had their houses searched. There was night curfew. Travel by train was disallowed without a German pass. Cars and bicycles were forbidden. The post was erratic and all letters had to be left unsealed to be read by censors. Food became scarce and dear and the sale of alcohol was prohibited. Belgians who defiantly went on flying the national flag from windows and roofs were arrested. It became an offense even to wear little buttons with pictures of the King and Queen. Phone links were cut and Dutch and foreign newspapers banned.

  Edith Cavell wrote home that she would “give anything for an English newspaper.” But in Norwich that August her mother read the Eastern Daily Press with horror:

  DEADLY STRUGGLE IN FULL SWING * A FRONT

  OF 250 MILES * 2,000,000 FIGHTING MEN * FALL

  OF NAMUR * WHOLE GERMAN ARMY ENGAGED *

  FIERCE CONFLICT ROUND CHARLEROI * BATTLE

  FRONT FROM MONS TO LUXEMBOURG

  Maps showed shifting battle lines. Photographs showed Belgian towns destroyed and German soldiers marching into Brussels. There were gruesome accounts of peasants beaten to death with rifle butts, the house of a railway watchman torched, of how an old man at the village of Neerhespen had his arm sliced and was burned alive, of corpses being hacked with swords, of young girls raped and little children “outraged” at Orsmael, of doctors and stretcher bearers wearing the Red Cross being shot …

  “My darling Edith,” Mrs. Cavell wrote on August 21,

  It is almost against hope that I am writing for news of you and Gracie—if at all possible do let me have a line or wire—no news is intolerable, one conjectures all sorts of things—my anxiety is terrible but I am afraid yours must be much worse.

  If you are both safe and well in the midst of all the horrors of war and invasion I shall be truly thankful—I pray for you continually, that God will grant you his loving protection—I go to Sheringham next Monday to spend a few days or a week with L & L13—so if you can possibly send a line, address to me there Erpingham House

  Cliff Road

  Sheringham

  I cannot write on any other topic my heart is full of the one thing.

  My dearest love to you both dear child

  Your loving Mother

  Her letter arrived at rue de la Culture seven months later, on March 11, 1915.

  Edith Cavell was always anxious to reassure her eighty-year-old widowed mother. She heard of Belgians who knew of ways to smuggle letters in and out of neutral Holland. She gave her mother a variety of addresses: a Mme. Leon Delhey in Amsterdam, someone in Mons, someone in Vecht, someone in Ninove. “Some letters get destroyed,” she told her. “Some come without an envelope. Don’t send money.” Her “special” postman called on Tuesdays. Letters were costly to send and receive and often did not arrive. She paid nine francs for a letter only to find it was “from a wearisome person” and of no interest.

  “I hope news of the safety of Brussels has been published in the newspapers,” she wrote on August 30.

  I cannot give you details of things here as this letter might fall into the wrong hands. We are almost without news of what is going on … We know for certain that there is fighting near at hand … We have a few German wounded in our hospital but here there are none and the Allies are not brought to Brussels. There has been terrible loss of life on both sides and destruction of towns and beautiful buildings that can never be rebuilt. I am keeping a record for more peaceful times which will interest you later. We are still able to get food tho’ prices are higher
and we have reduced the scale of living a little. We go on quietly with our usual work and hope for the best …

  The days are very fine & warm & mornings misty—looking over the plains this peaceful Sunday morning, one cannot imagine how near are the terrible dogs of war nor how ruthlessly that peace may be broken. Do not fear for us we are well out of the town as you know. And are not afraid. With my dearest love to you all,

  Ever your loving daughter

  Edith

  Though her letters spoke of danger: the wrong hands, secrecy, the denial of information, battle close by, terrible loss of life, the destruction of towns, expensive food, the “terrible dogs of war,” they spoke also of her optimism. The record she kept for more peaceful times she was later obliged to destroy. Only a fragment of it survived. But she always expected to show it to her mother, to be reunited with her, that, as she put it, “in God’s good time” peace would come and goodness prevail.

  Her initial fear had been that there would be too many men to nurse, too many to feed. As news came of carnage in Belgian towns and villages in the German army’s push toward Paris, and of battles at Liège, Namur and Louvain, she thought the wounded would arrive in thousands. But only at first were any patients brought to her care. Groups arrived by train of mainly walking-wounded German soldiers. As ever she reminded her nurses that every wounded man deserved their best attention. They complained that she expected them to be like her, and to work until too tired to stand. “I often saw one or other of my companions lying exhausted in her bed in her off-duty time, sometimes weeping,” Nurse Moore wrote. “Why did we stay? We were none of us used to that sort of life.”

  The German soldiers, she said, at first were “sulky and undoubtedly apprehensive,” but attitudes changed to gratitude and there was even laughter: “One nurse was struggling to remove the muddy boots from a man near the middle of the ward; he pulled and she pulled until her chair fell backward and she toppled over with his boot in the air.” But as suddenly as beds filled, they emptied. As the line of fighting moved, field hospitals were set up near the shifting scenes of battle. In Brussels, the German military turned buildings they commandeered into hospitals for their own wounded and supplied their own staff. Captured Allied wounded were sent on by train to prison hospitals in Germany or to prisoner-of-war camps there.