On a day when there was a house-to-house search by 100 German soldiers, the two men fled to the barn in Albert Libiez’s mother’s garden. At 1:00 in the morning two nuns, Sisters Marie and Madeleine, led them to the Convent of the Daughters of Mary at the nearby village of Wasmes. Libiez sent his friend Herman Capiau, an engineer, to advise them. Capiau had acted as a guide to the British Expeditionary Force and helped to set up a field hospital after the debacle of Mons. He told Boger and Meachin their options were to hide in a coal mine, a forest, or a city. They chose the city. Capiau acquired false identification for the disguised men, took them first to Libiez’s town house in Mons and then by train to Brussels. He made several unsuccessful attempts to find lodgings for them, then asked Marie Depage at the Royal Palace hospital if she could help. She suggested he ask Edith Cavell because both men needed medical care as well as refuge.
And so on the afternoon of November 1, 1914 Herman Capiau arrived at the School in rue de la Culture with Colonel Boger bearded and in a black hat, Sergeant Meachin with his shoulders padded to make him look deformed and with a letter to Edith Cavell from Marie Depage telling her that he, Capiau, was to be trusted and asking for her help.
Boger had a temperature and was limping. Edith Cavell took the men in, put them to bed, nursed them, gave them the comfort she could. Dr. Gyselinck operated on Boger’s injured foot. They stayed with her eighteen days. When they were well, she equipped them with Belgian clothes, found them a safe house in avenue Louise, then helped find guides to take them to Holland and safety. The plan was for Boger to go on a coal barge to Holland. Meachin was to travel with a tradesman who had permission to collect a consignment of fish from the Dutch coast. The idea was that the two men should meet again at the Station Hotel in Flushing. Boger got arrested before he left Brussels and spent the remainder of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Meachin got back to England.
Before attempting to leave Brussels, Boger gave his dispatches about events to Sister Millicent White who nursed at the Royal Palace hospital, but planned to return to England. She bandaged the dispatches to her leg and traveled by barge, on a weekend return ticket and false passport, to Antwerp. At one of the locks passengers were searched. Boger’s papers were not found. She reached England after four days and gave his dispatches to the War Office.
Edith Cavell had chosen to stay in Brussels. It was not feasible for her to stand aloof from the suffering and wrongdoing all around her. She was the most law-abiding of women. As a matron and in her ambition to establish a nursing school of excellence she adhered to the need for authority, discipline and even regimentation. But it had to have a moral core, founded in love. Boger and Meachin were the first of the “lost children,” the fugitive soldiers, whom she helped find their way from the battlefields of the Western Front to the Dutch border. She helped with characteristic vigilance, attention to detail and concern for those in need. But previously she conformed. Now she defied. She had been open. Now she was cunning. She had no training for this work. Her life had been institutionalized and maidenly. Now it was as harsh and dark as men could make it. A myriad of ordinary people helped these men. They did not view themselves as heroes. Decent living had been taken from them and they would not acquiesce to this enemy.
The German military countered such resistance by imposing ever-harsher rules and punishments. In Brussels, long proclamations from the Governor General in French and Flemish were posted daily in public places: all men must register at the town hall; no journeys were to be made without military authorization and a declaration of destination and purpose; citizens must declare every resident and visitor; no movement in the streets after 8:00 at night; anyone who used a private car or bicycle would be shot as a spy; anyone found with arms, munitions, or carrier pigeons would be shot. Markets, bars and cafés were searched and meetings forbidden.
By November 1914 the reality of this war was clear. There was to be not victory by Christmas, but a mayhem of slaughter, destruction and hardship that month on month sucked in half the young men of the world. As swathes of soldiers were killed, they were replaced with the living. On walls all over Britain the face of Lord Kitchener, Minister of War, was posted with his swirling mustache and pointing finger: “Your Country Needs You.” Recruiting figures reached 30,000 a day. The war spread from the fields of France and Belgium to the deserts of Egypt and Mesopotamia. In its service sixty million men were mobilized worldwide: two million British soldiers were killed or wounded, six million German soldiers, six million French, five million Austro-Hungarian, seven million Russian, one and a half million Italian … There would be no definitive list of casualties. The carnage would destroy the records, the men, memories.
Violent threats and punishments did not cow those for whom a sense of freedom and justice remained clear. For many it was a small part to play—to help “lost children” caught in this madness and get them over the frontier into Holland where they would be safe from reprisal from the occupying power and free to rejoin their regiments if they wished.
Edith Cavell became a principal agent in Brussels of such help, the hub for two escape movements, one from the Belgian Borinage district, the other from the French Etapen. She was at pains not to involve her other nurses in any punishable way. Sister White involved herself before returning to England. Sister Elisabeth Wilkins knew some details of what was going on. Edith Cavell’s focus was always that normal life must be restored. She and her nurses must move into the new Training School with all its modern facilities. The good cause must continue. War was an evil chapter which later, not sooner, must end.
24
yorc
On the Franco-Belgian frontier, between Valenciennes, Mons and Maubeuge, Prince Reginald and Princess Marie de Croÿ and their English grandmother lived in their family home, the château Bellignies. They were brother and sister, cousins of the Belgian king, and as with many European aristocrats had familial links with Germany, Prussia and France. The Prince had been Secretary of the Belgian Embassy in London for ten years; the Princess was a trained nurse. When Germany invaded Belgium they offered their home as a field hospital. They prepared rooms, stored provisions and flew the Red Cross flag. On August 21, as the British Expeditionary Force marched to Mons, they gave hospitality and maps to a company of the Middlesex Regiment. In the evening sunlight, on the quiet lawn of the château, the de Croÿs ate a meal with the soldiers. They admired the beauty of the horses, the perfection of their harnessing.
The château at Bellignies
On August 23 and 22 they heard the thunder of gunfire. On the 24th neighbors told them of wounded and dying British soldiers lying all along the roadside and in farmhouses. The Prince went out with his driver to find them. Soon the beds in the château were full. He and his sister took those in need of intensive care to the hospital in the nearby small town of Bavay.
Next morning they heard that the British army was marching southward, up the hill instead of down. The Princess went out to speak to the retreating British soldiers. Regiments were mixed up and no one seemed clear about what was happening. She asked an officer if the enemy was coming and told him the château was full of wounded British soldiers. He said the German army would arrive in hours and she must get the wounded men out. All day she and her brother wrapped the men in blankets and lifted them onto the carts of the hordes of refugees moving south. The lanes were filled with traumatized villagers. Some said their houses had been ransacked and food demanded from them at gunpoint. Badly wounded soldiers were left in the hospital at Bavay. Four were too ill to be moved from the château.
From then on, the Prince worked tirelessly in opposition to the German army. He and his sister hid the Allied soldiers’ weaponry in a deep unused well, buried the family silver and sent the chauffeur in the family car to help refugees. At 8:00 next morning the Princess heard horses and saw two Uhlans, lances stretched before them, at the château gates. “Nothing can describe the feeling of revolt, of nausea almost, that the first sight
of the enemy in one’s country provokes,” she wrote in her memoir. Behind the Uhlans was the German army. They told the de Croÿs they must give lodging to their officers. Long gray cars brought General von Kluck, his nephew and aide-de-camp Prince Georg of Saxe-Meiningen, the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein and a host of officers. They filled the château. They took the bandages off the English soldiers to check they were not feigning wounds. They feared being poisoned and the Croÿs had to taste their food before they would eat it. They set up an office with telephones and typewriters. Their take on the war was that King George V had instigated it.
All around was the roar of shells, gunfire and airplanes as the German army strafed the retreating British and captured towns and villages. The de Croÿs saw prisoners dragged down the lanes. In the gardens of the château, German soldiers set up camp and cooked rabbits and chickens looted from nearby farms. On August 26 they struck camp and left, saying the English army was in full retreat. But then a General von Bauer, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and thirty-five officers arrived. The Duke gave the English soldiers cigarettes and copies of the Daily Mirror, and told the Princess he hated this war and that his best friends were English and French.
When that group moved on, other regiments of German soldiers arrived. All seemed confused as to quite what this war was about. They stayed for a while, moved on, were replaced. Wounded German soldiers were brought to the château to be nursed. “As soon as they are well enough to leave their beds they go into the room where the English are and chat together, one German acting as interpreter,” the Princess de Croÿ wrote.
There was fighting in the nearby towns of Bavay and Maubeuge. Villages that resisted occupation were torched. The whole area was occupied by the enemy and the countryside swarmed with refugees. When, after some weeks, occupation was complete, German soldiers moved out of the château and it became a Red Cross hospital again.
Villagers brought news. A farm worker digging potatoes in a field had found two English soldiers hiding in a hedgerow. The brewer’s sister, Mademoiselle Carpentier, found two more in a lane near her house and hid them. In late September two girls from the village of St. Waast, 3 kilometers away, called and asked to speak to Reginald de Croÿ. One was Henriette Moriamé, the brewer’s sister and a devout Catholic; the other, Louise Thuliez, was a schoolteacher in Lille, at home on holiday in the village when war broke out. They wanted to know what they should do with seven English soldiers they had originally nursed for slight wounds in August, and kept hidden ever since. There were notices everywhere ordering all inhabitants to declare Allied soldiers or be shot.
The Prince said he would try to find a safe hiding place for them, and in the meantime they should tell other villagers that the men had run away. Near the château was the forest of Mormal—30,000 acres of woodland. Deep in it were gamekeepers’ houses and woodmen’s cottages. The Prince thought the soldiers would be safe in one of those. The girls guided them out there one night. The Prince paid their expenses. Word got around and more men arrived at the château. The girls went on long walking tours, looking for stray men in fields and woodland and in all the ravaged villages and towns. The Princess de Croÿ called them the Girl Guides. They asked the mayors, trades-people, abbots and nuns. They would walk 30 kilometers in a day and a night. At times the Prince joined them. They found men buried half alive in mud, and dead men lying in fields. They took details when they could: pay books, identity discs, letters, prayer books, photos, a rosary. They wanted to notify those close to the dead, tell their regiments, bury them, offer respect. Such details were published in a clandestine newsletter, Les Petits Mots du Soldat, which recorded and disseminated news about Allied soldiers.
One day the girls found a large group of English and French soldiers in woodland near the village of Englefontaine. One was an officer. The Princess loaded a donkey cart with provisions, books and rifle cartridges and set off with the girls to take help to the men. The village was no more than a long straggling street surrounded by woods. Hidden deep in the woods was a clog maker’s cottage. There, she met Lieutenant Bushell, of the 2nd Dragoon Guards. He asked her to bring him guns. He told of how he had been cut off from his regiment, lain three days and nights in a railway embankment, and crept to a cottage whose owner hid him. He had then gone into the forest and grouped fifty men around him: men from the 11th Hussars, the Sutherland Highlanders, the Gordon Highlanders, the Scots Grays, the Munster Fusiliers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.
They made a dugout covered in brambles to house themselves. A few villagers knew of them and brought food. The Princess arranged for provisions to be left daily for them at an agreed spot. The men left messages there. A farm girl would arrive at the château, unfurl her hair and deliver these.
And so a network of clandestine help for these lost soldiers grew up, an ever-changing web of provision and communication: of the bringing of bread and clothes, of shelter for a night, of misdirecting the enemy, guiding fugitive soldiers across unfamiliar terrain, forging passports, concealing weapons, sending messages in the braids of hair or the false heel of a shoe, disseminating underground newspapers … This was resistance, this was citizenship. There was no way an occupying army as hated as this one could stamp it out.
The château became the headquarters of one cell of this resistance movement. Fugitive French and British soldiers who arrived there, often wounded and traumatized, were given civilian disguise and false identities. The Princess photographed them using an old camera and a stock of large plates she had, which she cut into small pieces with a diamond. The Prince obtained blank identity cards from the Belgian clerk in the Bureau de Population in Mons. The clerk would take these when his German supervisor was at lunch. Georges Derveau, a chemist from Paturages, contrived an official-looking stamp for the cards, bearing the name of a fictitious commune.
The Red Cross hospital at Bavay was put under German guard. A British officer, Captain Preston of the Royal Artillery, escaped from it one night in October. He came to the château, threw gravel at a window and woke the de Croÿs. They hid him in the old tower, the walls of which were 9 feet thick. They rigged up an alarm system to alert him to danger and conveyed messages to and from him and the men in the forest.
At the beginning of the war it was relatively easy for Belgian civilians to leave the country. The Prince de Croÿ, who had high-level diplomatic connections, managed often to get to Holland and London. He collected money from the British government for resistance work, and gathered and imparted information about the dead, the missing, and the progress of the war. On a twenty-four-hour visit to London in November 1914 he was besieged with pleas for news of missing relatives and friends and requests to pass on messages. He made long coded lists of these and gave them to a spy, with the promise of reward if the list was handed back to him in Brussels. Which it was. One of the requests was from a Mrs. Boger who had heard that her husband, a colonel wounded at Mons, had been nursed in an English hospital in Brussels. De Croÿ learned of an English matron at the head of Dr. Depage’s clinic in rue de la Culture.
Throughout the country, cells of resistance, balancing prudence and risk, interlaced, but so did German surveillance. German patrols divided the Mormal forest into numbered squares and searched these systematically. The men hiding there knew they would be flushed out. Four of the English soldiers were captured. In December the others feared snow would make their footprints visible. One night the Girl Guides brought thirty of them, including their leader, Lieutenant Bushell, in two groups to the château. Henriette Moriamé led one group, Louise Thuliez the other. The men put socks over their boots so as to make no noise as they walked. English army boots had a recognizable imprint. The gardener at the château raked away such signs.
The Princess had difficulty feeding and concealing so many men. She gave them vegetables from the garden, the butcher gave meat, the baker delivered fifteen loaves of bread each night, but it was all too risky. Captain Preston said the m
en must give themselves up. They could not continually endanger the lives of their helpers. At Lille, citizens had been shot for hiding an English pilot. He and Lieutenant Bushell, because they were officers, would stay in hiding. They moved to the home of a neighbor of the de Croÿs, Baron de Witte, in the Château de Gussignies.
For two days Louise Thuliez and Henriette Moriamé tramped more than 40 kilometers looking for a break in enemy lines to get the other men over the Belgian border into Holland. They failed to find a safe route. The men surrendered from the Red Cross hospital in Bavay. The Germans fined all the forest villages, took the Mayor of Bavay hostage until the fines were paid and sent the soldiers to a prisoner-of-war camp at Wittenberg for the duration of the war.
Too late for those men came news that there was indeed a way of escape across the Dutch border. It came from the Countess Jeanne de Belleville, a friend of the de Croÿs, who lived at the village of Montigny sur Roc. She, her sister, and their nephew Eric de Belleville, had looked after more than 400 English wounded, in the convent at Audregnies, after the retreat from Mons. Her nephew then wanted to get through to join the French army. She found that the Abbot of Longueville led men to the Dutch border from Brussels. “The Countess was French,” Louise Thuliez wrote of her: “she had blue eyes and curly grey hair, an aquiline nose and rapid, energetic walk. She seemed indefatigable. Everything about her breathed simplicity and goodness. Her natural gaiety was such that in the most tragic moments of our adventure she remained smiling and undaunted.” Captain Preston and Lieutenant Bushell decided to try to escape with the Abbot’s help. Reginald de Croÿ went to Mons and got false identity cards, passports and papers for them. On December 29 the officers set off to meet him there guided by Louise Thuliez and the de Croÿs’ maid, Charlotte Matha, who knew the area well. They met the Prince at the Church of St. Waudru in Mons as prearranged. On their new cards the men, who spoke no French, were Belgian hairdressers’ assistants. On the tram from Mons to Brussels they got off when the German inspector got on at Enghien, then got on again when he had finished. From Brussels the Abbot of Longueville guided them to the Dutch border. This time they were disguised as carpenters and carrying tools. Both returned to active service: Captain Preston in Mesopotamia and Lieutenant Bushell in France.
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