Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  Is Sister Wilkins free? I have been thinking of her ever since last night. Tell them to go on with the move as before. If Sister is there, she will know how to arrange everything.

  Is Jackie sad? Tell him I will be back soon. The day is rather long; can you send me a book, a little embroidery, my nail scissors and only a very few things as I have no place to put them.

  Send me news of Mlle. Deves [their laundry woman, who had been ill]. I hope she is going on well. Remember me to the sisters, nurses and household.

  There is a little child here of 3 or 4 with her mother. She looks pale and pinched for want of air, though she is allowed out a little every day. I will write again when there is something to tell. Don’t worry—we must hope for the best. Tell them all to go on as usual and for you—

  The rest of the letter had been torn away.

  She was confined in crowded airless quarters with numerous women picked up by the police for whatever reason. There was nothing to do, no amenities, nowhere to put anything, and she was cold at night. But that was not her way of expressing things: “I should be glad of a cup, fork, spoon and plate—not the best ones.” The best ones were for better days. Her greater concern was for the child, who should not have been in such a place as that.

  Sister Wilkins and other nurses called at the Kommandantur to deliver the things Edith Cavell had asked for. They were not allowed to see her. They said the German officers laughed at them and treated them rudely. At the School, police watched their every move. Sister Wilkins seemed at the point of breakdown. Jack lay all day by the door of Edith Cavell’s office waiting for her return.

  Then the nurses heard of the imprisonment of the Countess of Belleville and Louise Thuliez. “We felt as though we were engulfed in darkness,” Jacqueline van Til wrote. On Saturday August 7 Edith Cavell was moved from the Kommandantur to the prison at St. Gilles. She was put in solitary confinement in cell 23.

  Louise Thuliez (right) and the Countess Jeanne de Belleville in prison clothes. November 11, 1918

  PART FIVE

  32

  FIRST INTERROGATION

  Edith Cavell was taken from her cell at St. Gilles prison on Sunday August 8 to police station B at the Kommandantur for interrogation. Lieutenant Bergan, Head of Espionage, Sergeant Pinkhoff, Chief Officer of Criminal Investigation, Sergeant Neuhaus, and the spy Otto Mayer were there. Bergan spoke no French or English. Edith Cavell spoke scant German. Pinkhoff was their translator. Neuhaus was scribe and witness.

  Bergan put questions to Edith Cavell in German. Pinkhoff translated these into French. Edith Cavell answered in French, and Pinkhoff translated her replies into German for Bergan’s benefit. Neuhaus wrote in German what Pinkhoff claimed she had said in French. The depositions Edith Cavell then signed were in German. She had no way of knowing whether what she signed was what she had said.

  The prison at St. Gilles

  None of the men opposite her had legal training, though like Edith Cavell they had their own interpretation of justice. It was hardly an equitable balance between prosecutor and defendant. She had no legal representation or advice, had spoken to no one since her arrest, been allowed no reading matter, no post, no communication. She did not know that Sister Wilkins was free.

  The session began with her being asked to take an oath on the Bible that she would, before God, tell the truth. To refuse would seem to confirm guilt. To take such an oath and then directly to lie would be impossible, given her Christian orthodoxy. And so she became a seeming player in their game, for what else could she be?

  After the oath came the standard details that gave a semblance of objectivity. Her name was Edith Cavell. She was head of the Berkendael Medical Institute. Her religion was Protestant. She was born on December 4, 1866 in Swardeston, Norfolk, England (in fact she was born in 1865 and her religion was Anglican). She was British. She lived in Brussels at 149 rue de la Culture. Her father was Frederick Cavell, a clergyman, deceased. Her mother’s name was Louise née Warming (in fact her mother’s name was Louisa, but what did such niceties matter here?). Her languages were English and French. Her financial position was well-off (in fact she had very little money). Against “Character and Credibility” Pinkhoff put a question mark. Against “Police Record” he wrote “apparently none.”

  Slips and elisions, from minor to major, punctuated this deposition. The ostensible aim of the interrogation was to obtain facts. In reality it was to incriminate. Pinkhoff was not a disinterested translator. He was a prosecutor, an officer of the secret police, like Bergan. It was his art or guile to seem to record in objective detail the nature of Edith Cavell’s complicity, but, by shifts of interpretation and minor additions, enhance her culpability in order to ensure maximum indictment. In order to destroy her, her interrogators must first demonize her. They could not punish her for who she was, for then their own egregiousness would reflect back on themselves. Only by inference could Pink-hoff, face to face with this slightly built gray-eyed woman—the vicar’s daughter, with a lifetime’s service as a nurse, whose creed was devotion and goodness—put a question mark against her character and credibility, or infer she might have some unrevealed police record.

  Edith Cavell had no advice on how to proceed. She knew the cover of her particular unit was blown and their work finished. Reginald de Croÿ had told her Philippe Baucq and Louise Thuliez had been arrested, that the Princess de Croÿ and Mme. Bodart were hunted, that he himself would try to escape the country. She had destroyed all evidence of her complicity. Her strategy, in so far as she had one, was to cooperate, give her interrogators the satisfaction of confirming what they already knew, and take responsibility herself where possible. By such seeming cooperation she hoped to spare others in the network and to safeguard the lives of the fugitives. She did not know what these others had said or might say. She was perfectly aware she had broken her prosecutors’ laws and knew she would be punished in whatever way they chose.

  For the credibility of his deposition Bergan wished her to be precise about numbers, places and amounts of money. He took it as a victory of entrapment when, at the outset, he accused her of receiving 5,000 francs from Reginald de Croÿ to help Allied soldiers escape, and she apparently replied, “No not 5,000, 1,500.” Such satisfaction had little to do with any mistake on her part. For what did it matter to them or to her if it was five or fifty or five thousand francs? The truth of what mattered was why these men were in this building, in this country, looking out for themselves, while killing and oppressing its citizens and stealing their produce.

  Bergan questioned, Pinkhoff translated, Neuhaus transcribed. It suited their purpose by shifts in translation to record that the men whom she helped had not been wounded, that she was at the head of an espionage network, that she guided Allied soldiers to Holland so that they might rejoin their regiments and that she did such work for profit.

  These officials were united in their hatred of the English. It surpassed their antipathy to the French or Belgians. It was the English who in their view had prevented the realization of the Schlieffen Plan and pushed the world into catastrophe. Brand Whitlock described this hatred as “wild and implacable.” “We are going to continue this war,” a German official said to him, “until one can travel around the earth without seeing Englishmen who act as if they owned it.”

  Like Jack, who pined for her, Edith Cavell passed by officials like Bergan and Pinkhoff with “sublime indifference.” She would not report to their offices or take heed of their edicts. She was a stickler for obedience, but obedience had to have its justification in a context of goodness. It was a response to a rule, not a rule in itself. She had spent too much time in the contemplation of good not to have a sense of what it was. She would not do what she believed to be wrong. The law to which she deferred made great demands on her—demands which she met with all grace. She viewed the authority of her accusers and their use of the words law and truth as corrupt. Thus a citizen whose every impulse was law-abiding, became criminalized.
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  Her manner was anathema to them. “Edith Cavell had a self-sufficient manner,” Eva Lückes had written of her, as a probationer some twenty years previously, from what now seemed like a different planet, “which was very apt to prejudice people against her.” This manner seemed to these men to encapsulate all they loathed about the English and the arrogance of Victorian colonialism.

  Edith Cavell knew that because she was English they aimed to destroy her. Her conscience was clear. Were she to play by their tricks of wiliness and deceit she would be lost to herself. She would rather be dead than in their shoes.

  Bergan’s interrogation technique was to switch alarmingly from seeming gentleness to extreme severity and to persuade her that details of her actions were already known. He kept leaving the room as if to corroborate a point with other defendants, whose apparent testimony he then returned to give. His intention was to indict and punish by cunning and guile, according to his ambitions for this prosecution. There was no one to insist, or even to suggest, he play fair.

  So, in her deposition, Edith Cavell was recorded as having said:

  I lay particular stress on the fact that of all the soldiers English or French lodged with me two or three only were wounded and in these cases the wounds were slight and already beginning to heal.

  I acknowledge that between November 1914 and July 1915 I have received into my house, cared for, and provided with funds to help them to reach the front and join the Allied Army:

  1) French and English soldiers in civilian clothes, separated from the ranks, amongst whom was an English colonel.

  2) French and Belgians eligible for military service who desired to get to the front.

  But at least twelve of the British soldiers, including Colonel Boger, and an equal number of French who stayed at the School were severely wounded. The reason they were brought to her was because they were hurt. And Colonel Boger did not reach the front. He was arrested in Brussels and sent to a German prisoner-of-war camp. Nor had she provided the men brought to her with money to help them join the Allied armies. Her intention was to get them over the Dutch border so that they would be free, and not have to live as fugitives or be imprisoned or shot. It was up to them whether or not they rejoined the army.

  She was recorded as saying that during those eight months French and English soldiers and Belgian and French men of military age were brought to her by four people: the engineer Capiau of Wasmes; Prince Reginald de Croÿ; Mlle. Thuliez who went under the name of Mlle. Martin; and the barrister Libiez, from Mons.

  Her deposition read that Capiau brought forty English soldiers in civilian clothes to her, including Colonel Boger and an English sergeant, that Reginald de Croÿ visited her six or seven times between January and July 1915, each time bringing men to a total of about fifteen French and English soldiers, and that he gave her 1500 francs so they would have money for their journeys. She said, or they said she said, that Colonel Boger and five others wrote to tell her of their successful arrival in Holland. She apparently confessed that peasants from Mons also brought “derelict” soldiers to her, that Thuliez brought fifteen French and English soldiers and a hundred French and Belgian men of military age, that Libiez brought six English and ten French and Belgian …

  She confirmed Bergan’s statement that she hid the men brought to her until there was a prearranged time for them to leave. She confirmed the handover points he cited: behind St. Mary’s church; the tram waiting room at Place Rogier; opposite the Hôtel de l’Esperance in the Place de la Constitution; under the clock of the school at Place Rouppe; behind the Cinquantenaire at the end of the Chaussée de Tervueren; at the Square Ambiorix. Of the score of other safe houses, swap-over points and meeting places she did not speak.

  Neuhaus wrote in her deposition that on the day before she took the men to the pick-up point, a guide or messenger would call at her house to check arrangements. Sometimes the guide would leave, then and there, with the men. If she did not have enough space for all those sent to her, or if she supposed the German police might apprehend her, she would take the fugitive men to Mme. Ada Bodart at 7 rue Taciturne—who then moved to 19 rue Emile Wittman; to Marie Mauton at her boarding house at 12 rue d’Angleterre; to Philippe Rasquin at his coffeehouse at 137 rue Haute, to Mme. Adolphine Sovet at her café at 16 boulevard de la Senne; to Louis Séverin the chemist at 138 avenue Longchamp. She said, or was said to have said, that she handed over about a hundred men in this way.

  Thus Edith Cavell was steered into a contrived confession, where the boundaries of what she was supposed to have done were blurred. She had disguised Allied soldiers as monks, assigned false medical papers and passports to them, denied their existence, but that was all to save their lives, not her own. If these officials with bayonets and guns, whose uniform she despised, who to her thinking were complicit in heinous crimes, who told her when to stand or sit, who locked her up—if they wished to parade their cunning in indicting her, so be it. She was not going to try to justify herself to them, nor did she anticipate justice from them. They chose to deprive her of every right, expose her to insult and condemn her to certain punishment, but she was not going to dance to their tune. Had they been her patients she would have attended them with care; had they shown vulnerability she would have tried to help them. But she would not concede to their thinking. If she was afraid, jaded and through with it, it was not for them to know.

  Lieutenant Bergan attached a note to the admissions which incriminated her and those in the resistance cell in which she had worked. It read: “All our suppositions were confirmed by the deposition of the woman Cavell. In order to achieve this we made use of the trick [‘Kniff’] of pretending that the information is already in the hands of the law.” What she actually said would never be known. No French transcript of proceedings was made. And they did not need her confirmation in order to indict. Had she said anything quite other, the outcome would have been the same. The hands were Bergan’s and Pinkhoff’s and the law was of their making. The irony was that while seeming to play into these hands the woman Cavell was quite beyond their reach.

  She did not know if this deposition indicted others working in the resistance movement with her, who might have evaded detection. As she saw it, if Bergan and his men thought they had broken the ring they would not look further. And she knew there was much further to look.

  The deposition concluded that she acknowledged having worked “to transmit soldiers into the ranks of the Allies” in collaboration with Prince Reginald de Croÿ, the architect Philippe Baucq, the chemist Louis Séverin, Herman Capiau the engineer, Albert Libiez the barrister, Georges Derveau the chemist, Louise Thuliez the schoolteacher, and Ada Bodart.

  The final paragraph of this German document read: “My statements which have just been read over to me, translated into French, conform to the truth at every point. They are perfectly intelligible to me in every detail, and I will repeat them before the tribunal.”

  So much for August 1915. A fragile elision of personal circumstance—Miss Gibson of Laurel Court, Mellish Ward, a recommendation from Marguerite François, an assassination in Bosnia—had led Edith Cavell to this room and to these men who tricked her into signing a deposition of what they said she had said, as if by doing so they might win a war already lost to all those feeling its pain. She signed where she was told to sign and was then taken back to the prison at St. Gilles and again locked in cell 23. Armed guards were posted outside her door, such was the threat she posed to the Axis powers’ war effort.

  33

  BETWEEN INTERROGATIONS

  Her cell measured 4 meters long, 2.5 meters wide, 2.75 meters high. It was whitewashed and clean. In it was a folding bed with a wooden headboard that by day served as a table, a metal bucket that served as a toilet, a wooden stool, a crucifix on the wall, a corner shelf to the left of the door, a basin and tap to the right. Two water pipes gave occasional heating. The floor was parqueted oak. Through a spyhole in the wooden door warders looked in, and through a
wicket meals were passed. Twice nightly through this wicket a warder shone a torch on her face. Outside, on the door, was a slate on which was chalked her alleged crime.

  Cell 23 where Edith Cavell was imprisoned

  Near the ceiling a small iron-barred window opened 20 centimeters inward from the top and through it came a shaft of light. A small gas lamp lit the cell at night.

  The prison, an early nineteenth-century Gothic fortress, built on a hill, had crenellated battlement towers and daunting walls. Designed as a panoptic, rows of cells radiated out from circular exercise yards. The section in which Edith Cavell was interned had, in peacetime, been for male offenders. Under the occupation it was filled with political prisoners.

  The deputy prison governor Xavier Marin and the warders were Belgians, though ruled by the German governor and chief warder and watched by German soldiers. The warders were respectful to political prisoners, though forbidden to speak to them or allow them news of the outside world. On her arrival Edith Cavell was searched and given the prison rules, as drawn up by the German prison governor Lieutenant Behrens:

  Prisoners must obey all laws passed by the Military Authorities of the Prison. Failure to do so will invoke punishment.

  When an Officer enters the cell the prisoner must stand to attention face his Superior and stop work of any kind.

  When Officers walk through the prison corridors or halls each prisoner must bow his head and, if not manacled, must remove his cap.