Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  The men who came to her were asked to sign a consent form for an operation. Fictitious illnesses were assigned them, and their names, ages, dates of arrival and departure, and photos of them, were all entered in a ledger. She also kept a war diary. “I am keeping a record for more peaceful times which will interest you later,” she had written to her mother as early as August 30, 1914. In it, in microscopic handwriting, she described the men who lodged with her and the guides who led them to safety. Obliquely, in letters to her mother she would ask for news of their safe arrival in England and say that this news was wanted because the men were relatives of nurses in the School. When the net closed around her and her fellow workers, she burned all evidence that might incriminate or endanger. All that survived of her diary was a fragment for a few days in April 1915. It was sewn into a cushion. Perhaps she hid it there and had left more of it, never recovered, in other secret places. Perhaps it was all that escaped the burning, and a nurse—Sister Wilkins was keen at sewing—stitched it into a cushion.

  After the war Edith’s sister Lilian took the cushion as a keepsake. Thirty years later she gave it to her housekeeper, Mrs. Mead, whose husband wondered at its lumpiness. They opened it, and found the diary fragment. It was for two days in April 1915. It showed what a detailed record Edith Cavell must have kept of her work, and how wide was the network of resistance:

  People are wonderfully generous with their loyal help—I went to a new house & there secured the services of a man who comes up to take our guests to safe houses where they can abide till it is time for departure. A little widow with a big house gives shelter to some & does all the work without a servant, waiting on and cooking for them with the best courage & good will in the world.

  For the citizens of Belgium the reasons for fighting were clear. Many resistance workers were women, ordinary people of any age who, like the young men from the hamlets, villages, towns and cities of the world, got sucked into a war which once under way gained momentum from which there seemed no way out except in victory or defeat.

  Edith Cavell helped Allied soldiers escape from November 1914 until July 1915. Her network had to be interactive, fluid and informed, yet secret and trusted too. Any error or indiscretion might blow its cover. English and French soldiers came to her from Prince Reginald de Croÿ and his sister and the “Girl Guide,” the schoolteacher Louise Thuliez, who went by different names but usually called herself Mlle. Martin. The mining engineer Herman Capiau from Wasmes, and the chemist Georges Derveau of Paturages-les-Mons, manufactured identities for the escaping men. Capiau had boots with a hollow heel made for the soldiers in which he put messages about German activity for the military attaché in the Hague. The soldiers did not know they were carriers, but in Holland General Dupré and Colonel Oppenheimer knew. Philippe Baucq, the barrister, whose nom de guerre was M. Fromage, distributed Petits Mots du Soldat and La Libre Belgique. The barrister Albert Libiez of Mons made a stamp of a non-existent commune, and forged permits and identity cards. The Countess of Belleville shielded men at her home at Montigny sur Roc.

  There was also elision between other networks: a Jesuit priest, Father Piersoul, assisted by a boy, Constant Cayron, helped get men to Holland; the Abbé de Longeville and a M. van Samenliet forged papers, a barrister, Armand Heuze, helped Louise Thuliez … and a myriad of individuals fed fugitive soldiers, gave them money, disguised them, hid them, or knew of someone who knew someone who would take them to the château at Bellignies, the rue de la Culture, or some other safe place.

  German guards at the Dutch-Belgian border, 1914

  Edith Cavell’s diary entry for April 27, 1915 began:

  Yesterday a letter from Monsieur Capiau who has gone to Germany voluntarily to inquire at Essen! with some other Belgian engineers. The letter came thro a young Frenchman who with 7 others had come from N. France to escape and hopes to get over the Dutch frontier in a day or two. The frontier has been absolutely impassable the last few days. Germany and Holland have been on the verge of war over the sinking of the Catwyk. The Dutch refused to allow anyone to cross and had massed their troops & laid mines all along from Maastricht to Antwerp. A sentinel on the Dutch side was posted every 15 metres & all the young men who had left to try & cross were stuck or came back—5 of ours were heard of at Herrenthall yesterday morning & the guide left to bring them back.

  Probably Capiau, who spoke German, had got to Essen “to inquire” in his capacity as a mining engineer. Information useful to the Allies was communicated by smuggled letter and word of mouth. The Catwyk, a Dutch ship with a cargo of grain, was torpedoed on April 14, 1915. The Kaiser sent a personal message to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands saying full compensation would be paid if, as claimed, it had been sunk by a German submarine. His intervention kept Holland out of the war. It also kept a vital escape route open for Allied soldiers.

  Within Edith Cavell’s resistance group, Reginald de Croÿ and Louise Thuliez focused on helping men escape from the region in the north of France round Engle-Fontaine, Maroilles and Bavay. Libiez and Philippe Baucq focused on men from the Borinage, the mining district near Mons.

  When the first two wounded English soldiers arrived at Edith Cavell’s door in rue de la Culture, brought to her by Herman Capiau, she had not known what to do with them. She had put them to bed as patients. They stayed with her a fortnight while she found safe houses, roads to the frontier, guides prepared to risk their lives to lead them there. As she became more experienced, more entrenched in subterfuge, wily at disguise, coded exchange, and the art of concealment, and knew—or thought she knew—who to trust, the procedure speeded up and soldiers stayed with her only for a day or at most a week.

  Usually she personally took the men to a handover point where a guide waited. The agreed time was often between 5:00 and 7:00 in the morning. Six appointed places in Brussels were: behind St. Mary’s church; in the waiting room for trams at Place Rogier; opposite the Hôtel de l’Esperance in the Place de la Constitution; under the clock of the École Normale in Place Rouppe; behind the Cinquantenaire at the end of the Chaussée de Tervueren; in the Square Ambiorix.

  She became acquainted with the city’s side streets and unpatrolled byways. She appeared as a middle-aged woman walking her dog. Jack liked the exercise. The disguised soldiers followed at a discreet distance. She grew adept at circuitous routes, the sudden boarding or getting off a tram, at seeming nonchalant, at watching reflected images of people in plate-glass windows, at taking special note of the road sweeper, postman or builder, who might be a spy. She acquired aspects of the villain’s cunning and guile and applied these to her staunch adherence to virtue.

  In her surviving fragment of diary she gave a description of one of her guides and carriers of information: a boy, as she called him, of twenty-three, Charles Vanderlinden, one of a family of nine brothers, “all strong and fighters.”

  This fellow is a fine type—about 5ft 6 or 7, slightly made but very strong and muscular. He amused himself when small with boxing a great sack of sand or corn which swung forward and butted him in the face if he failed to hit in the right place. He afterwards got some lessons in boxing & obliged me with a description of the right way to catch a man’s head under the arm & “crack” his neck or to give him a back-handed blow and destroy the trachea or larynx. He is also a poacher in time of peace & sets lassoes in rows so that hares racing to their feeding grounds are bound to be caught in one of them. He & 3 friends will catch from 20 to 30 in 2 or 3 days. The gamekeeper’s dogs they hang to the trees when they get the chance. He is nearly always sober but when on the drink will be drunk for 10 days at a stretch. He & his brothers, men equally strong and pugilistic, would fight at times, but when they entered a café together no one dare say a word to any of them. He has one blind eye smashed in a fight with a boxer.

  He has travelled far, oftener on foot than otherwise & has many trades to which he can turn his hand—he is extremely intelligent & has a good memory—he has ideas of justice & straight dealing
& is very anxious to repay any money given to him. He boasts in the most open manner & enjoys to talk of himself & his prowess. Withal he is, at least here, a gentleman and well-behaved in the house & gives us no trouble, also his conversation is clean and pleasing. He has crossed the line once & taken his news & been back for more which he has started again to deliver. He is very scornful over the young men with no pluck & has a grand contempt for the Gs. He is a repoussé—unwillingly on account of his eye, he can swim & walk great distances, also knows how to pass a leisure day sound asleep on our garden grass. He wears grey corduroys, a rough tweed jacket & a striped grey muffler, a cap & had running shoes which he exchanges for sabots when necessary in the country. He wears his trousers tied in at the ankle & under the tie places his letters—or ours. He will be caught one day & if so will be shot but he will make a first class bid for freedom.

  Her description of him and admiration of him was not Victorian-maiden-ladyish. She took to this one-eyed binge drinker, boxer and poacher that he was, with his ideas of justice and straight dealing, his fearlessness and contempt for the invaders. He would have been one more to add to her family had he so desired.

  Another of her guides, Victor Gilles—that was his nom de guerre, a joke about the name of the prison at St. Gilles, where he might well end up if caught—was introduced to her by Herman Capiau. He had been “a simple postman in a little country village,” then worked in a field hospital—an ambulance—in Mons at the beginning of the war. He was “a big fellow,” she said, powerfully built. “He dines & sups here occasionally & has quite good table manners learned from the ladies of the ambulance with whom he took meals.”

  At the big house of the “little widow” who shielded fugitive soldiers, Edith Cavell met Nellie Hozier, the younger sister of Winston Churchill’s wife. “She speaks French like a Parisienne and made great friends of the common people.” She had gone to Belgium at the beginning of the war to nurse with the Red Cross. In her diary Edith Cavell wrote of how Nellie Hozier sent Victor Gilles to England with letters asking for money for resistance work, and how, on the evening of his arrival at Admiralty House, Churchill spent “his one leisure hour with him smoking in the library.”

  Raising money was a constant need. Many of the men who came to the School had none at all. Herman Capiau, Prince Reginald, Louise Thuliez, Louis Séverin, Philippe Baucq—all collected and gave money. Edith Cavell gave most of her salary and was always appealing for funds. She made sure each soldier had 25 francs before he went on his journey.

  Often there were too many men “in transit” for her to house at the School. Nor did she want to endanger the nurses. She kept a list of safe houses where she could lodge men at short notice: with Ada Bodart at 7 rue Taciturne then at 19 rue Emile Wittmann; with Marie Mauton at 12 rue d’Angleterre; with Philippe Rasquin at his café at 137 rue Haute; with Madame Sovet at her café at 16 boulevard de la Senne; with Louis Séverin at his house at 138 avenue Longchamp.

  “On Monday night over 8000 blessés were brought into Brussels all Germans M. Victor tells me,” she wrote in her diary on April 27, 1915. “The Gare de Schaerbeek was cleared of the public to let them thro. All the Dutch newspapers were burned at the Gare du Midi. None from France or England have come thro for some days. The Gs post a victory on the Yser—but rumour ascribes it to the Belgian and English armies aided by the Hindus.”

  She described M. Victor as “a tradesman of 60 or thereabouts with a pale & puffy face, bald-headed, fat & short. He has a benevolent smile & spends his days in going from place to place to look after our guests. He too holds the Gs in contempt & does his best for the patrie.”

  The citizens of Brussels were demoralized by being denied access to news, and by constant German bulletins posted on walls claiming victories. But neither side could claim victory in this “battle of the frontiers.” Vicious attack and counter-attack did not break the deadlock. The river Yser and the flat sodden coastal area around it thwarted the German plan to capture Ypres. The previous October, King Albert, in the first battle of Ypres, had given orders to open the river’s sluices and let the sea flood the area. It created an impassable zone 15 kilometers long between Nieuport and Dixmude.

  The German army, that April, in the second battle of Ypres, used chlorine gas attacks on the British, French, Canadian, Algerian and African soldiers in the trenches of the Ypres Salient. Six thousand cylinders of it caused agonizing death by asphyxiation. They used it after suffering heavy casualties in fighting at Neuve Chapelle: 11,652 British soldiers killed, wounded, missing or prisoners, and 8,600 German soldiers.

  As stalemate and carnage continued, in Brussels surveillance was everywhere: “Today a great airship passed low over the houses & displaying No. 179—was plainly visible as also the men in the car, crowds rushed out to see it. There are now 2 captive balloons which survey the city from different sides.”

  And at ground level Edith Cavell was watched:

  “Monsieur Fromage brought me word from the town authorities that the house is watched and several attempts I think have been made to catch me in default—several suspicious persons have been to ask for help to leave the country either in the form of money, lodging or guides. People have been taken in this way several times. Today a doctor was had up because a guide who was caught carried a letter on him for post in Holland, he also had one for me, but as yet I have heard nothing of this. A young girl of 22, the Countess d’Ursel14, has been taken and is condemned to one year’s fortress in Germany. She has been allowed to return home for a week first, perhaps with the idea of allowing her to escape & then making her family pay a heavy fine. Charles is here with plans which he has tried to use but was obliged to return, he tries again in a day or two acting as guide to four young Belgians. People are wonderfully generous with their loyal help …”

  She observed as her own peril grew. With every fugitive soldier, recruit, or guide who came through the door, her complicity in resistance work deepened. Goodness had changed its hue. Just as soldiers showed valor in the face of bombardment, destruction and bloodshed, so Edith Cavell saw generosity and kindness all around her; in the widow who opened her house to fugitive soldiers, in the one-eyed boxer who risked his life getting men and information across the border, in the big postman with his ladylike table manners. All showed the qualities she had tried to apply in her nursing life and to inspire in her students: altruism, courage, attention to detail, working for others without counting the cost. The difference was the context: the civilized structures of peacetime, as opposed to the madness and squalor of war.

  29

  THE MEN SHE HELPED

  Edith Cavell had traveled far, in the company she kept, from Swardeston teas on the lawn with the Blewitt sisters, or from running her finger over the iron bedsteads and telling her nurses the dusting should be finished by ten. The niceties of peacetime were behind her. She could not now be open about her work, easy with the truth, trusting of whoever came to the door. Suspicion was crucial for survival. Her adopted country had been torn apart. The men who shared her house were soldiers paid to kill. Their gamble ahead was to be a prisoner of war, blown up by a land mine at the Dutch border, or to escape. Killing the enemy or avoiding the enemy was the only way out now things had gone this far.

  It was not Edith Cavell’s prime concern that the soldiers she helped should rejoin their regiments or re-enlist. Every setback to the German military was good news to her, but in getting English and French soldiers to Holland, her objective was for them to reach safety and be out of harm’s way. None the less as the months passed the scope of her work widened. In service to Belgian patriots she became the hub in Brussels of an escape network: for British and French soldiers separated from their regiments, for Belgians who wanted to enlist, for men carrying information of use to the Allies.

  It took three attempts to get Sergeant Jesse Tunmore and Private Lewis to Holland. They had arrived on December 23. Lewis had severe shell shock. They had fought at the Battle of Mons the
previous August and, like Colonel Boger, been taken to the convent hospital at the village of Wihéries, then escaped the German guard. The miner Auguste Joly, Louise Thuliez’s brother-in-law, gave them food and civilian clothes, for months kept them hidden in safe houses, then helped them reach Edith Cavell in Brussels.

  Though she found them guides, their first two escape attempts failed. Their papers aroused suspicion with the border guards so they returned to her. At the School only Sister Wilkins and José, her Rumanian house manager, were in her confidence. José suggested Tunmore disguise himself as a Rumanian. It would then be unsurprising if he spoke a bit of English, but no French or German. He helped him into the role. Edith Cavell took identity card photographs of the two disguised soldiers on her box Kodak. In the New Year she set off with them at 5:30 in the morning and guided them to the Louvain road. They got to Holland via Louvain, Diest and the border town of Over-pelt.

  From Harwich in England on January 20, 1915 Tunmore wrote, as Edith Cavell had requested, to her mother at 24 College Road, Norwich:

  I am writing to you to say that your daughter the Matron of the Nurses’ School in Brussels, Belgium, is quite well. I am a soldier of the 1st Norfolk Regiment & she has done a lot for me in helping me to escape over the frontier to Holland. I was a prisoner in the hands of the Germans near Mons. I managed to get away and reached Brussels, where your daughter worked very hard for me as regards to get me money, finding chances for me. One chance was by going off as Roumanian, but I had not got a passport, but got as far as St. Nicholas near Antwerp. I cannot express enough thanks for all she done for me, she worked very hard for us indeed, but the 12th of this month all French, Russians, Japanese etc. in Brussels had to report themselves to the Germans, but I left Brussels on the 12th, so I do not know what really happened.