Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  LOUIS SÉVERIN was one of the most zealous assistants in this work. He sheltered the men, provided them with guides and gave Miss Cavell money to facilitate their journey to the front.

  MME BODART sheltered men eligible for service, and enemy soldiers, until Thuliez or some other guide came to collect them. She herself took an English soldier from her own house to St. Mary’s church where she handed him over to Baucq. She had admitted receiving news from one of these fighting men of his arrival in Holland.

  HERMAN CAPIAU supplied false papers to English and French soldiers and French recruits. He received photographs for these forged documents from Mlle. Thuliez and the Prince du Croÿ. Miss Cavell had confessed that he brought men to her of military age.

  ALBERT LIBIEZ provided lodgings for English fugitive soldiers, made out false papers for them, and induced poor people in the region where he lived to provide accommodation for them.

  GEORGES DERVEAU escorted English fugitive soldiers in civilian clothes from the Mons district to Brussels and handed them over to Miss Cavell to be taken to the frontier. He was the mediator between Capiau and a M. van Samenliet who forged identity documents. He knew all the plans and aims of the organization.

  PRINCESS MARIE DE CROŸ, at the instigation of Thuliez, had taken photographs of French and English soldiers at the château of Bellignies for use in forged documents. She gave money to Thuliez to defray expenses for the conveyance of these soldiers. Her château was a meeting place for these soldiers. She was a link in the chain of those who intended injury to Germany by reinforcing the Allied army with the influx of these men. Her actions could not be ascribed to motives of charity as she claimed. But as she was influenced by her brother, the court should admit her case to be less serious.

  GEORGES HOSTELET had assisted Miss Cavell in conveying soldiers to the Allied army and spent some thousand francs to this end. His agreement with Miss Cavell was that each month she should send the guides they used to him so he could pay them. In mitigation, at the outset of the war he had given protection to a German journalist.

  CONSTANT CAYRON gave Father Piersoul the addresses of fifty men who wished to join the Allied ranks, and ten men with technical qualifications who wished to reach England or France. He was under eighteen when he did this. He knew Father Piersoul was engaged in the transport of such men. Among them was his own brother and one of his brother’s friends. Both were today bearing arms against Germany in Allied ranks …

  “He went on talking and talking,” Libiez wrote. The room got hotter. There was no drinking water. All that most of the prisoners understood was when their names punctuated Stoeber’s monologue. Toward the end of it they heard the word todesstrafe—death penalty. They were impassive until Brueck, the interpreter, translated into French the sentences called for by Stoeber. That was the only part of his oration that was translated. The German army, Stoeber said, had been put in great danger through the activities of these wretched people. They were guilty of treason, which the German military code punished with death, according to paragraph 68: “Whosoever with the intention of helping the hostile power or of injuring German troops is guilty of one of the crimes listed in para. 90 will be sentenced to death for treason.” That included “conducting soldiers to the enemy.” He called for the court to pass the death sentence on Cavell, Baucq, Thuliez, Capiau, de Belleville, Bodart, Séverin and Libiez and to sentence the others to long terms of imprisonment with hard labor.

  Libiez, in his memoir, wrote that Baucq seemed crushed, Louise Thuliez seemed not to understand the reality of it, Séverin screwed up his eyes as if he were already facing the firing squad, and Mme. Crabbé fainted. “Only Edith Cavell,” he said, “kept her imperturbable calm.”

  Then the defending lawyers were called. Except for Alexandre Braun, who represented the two aristocrats, they had not corresponded with or seen their clients prior to these two days. They had not received written or verbal account of the charges against them or been allowed time to prepare any kind of defense. Each lawyer was speaking for between nine and eleven people with disparate degrees of involvement in a fluid organization. Thus the court tried and indicted thirty-five people for capital crimes in two days.

  The barrister M. Dorff spoke first. He was defending Capiau, Libiez, Baucq, Hostelet, Cayron, and Maurice Crabbé. He told the court there was no structured organization. Assembled was an ad hoc collection of individuals each of whom had acted out of circumstance and humanity. Each had done his or her best to help for different motives. If they were to be punished it should be proportionate to their individual actions. The student Constant Cayron should be acquitted because he was under eighteen at the time of the alleged offenses.

  The prisoners were then called singly. Each was asked if they had anything to say in their own defense. Most tried to mitigate the sentence that hung over them. Capiau said the charges against him were overstated. There was no organization. He had not given Miss Cavell a thousand francs as it was claimed she stated. He had never given her any money.

  Stoeber turned to Edith Cavell. He ordered her to stand. She stood by her chair, as ever controlled and calm—“toujours maîtresse d’elle même,” her lawyer Sadi Kirschen said. Stoeber asked her if she had lied.

  Capiau was right, she told him. He had not given her money.

  Why had she lied?

  “My memory was confused,” she said, for as ever she would disadvantage herself to help another. “Afterwards I remembered it was not from him.”

  “The rudeness, the brutality even,” the Princess de Croÿ was to write in her memoir, “used towards this brave lady were unworthy of any civilised nation.”

  The other prisoners represented by Dorff were called. They tried briefly to defend themselves. Libiez reiterated he only helped English soldiers escape from Wihéries because he feared they brought the region into danger. Hostelet, too, claimed that fear of endangering the lives of others had prompted him to give money to help these fugitives. Baucq denied Philippe Bodart’s claim that he had mapped a route for escaping soldiers, or that he had ever had anything to do with the Prince de Croÿ.

  The Belgian barrister Sadi Kirschen then stood to defend Edith Cavell, Mme. Bodart, Séverin and four others. He too denied that they were part of an organization. Miss Cavell, he said, had devoted her whole life to nursing the sick. Extreme circumstances had led her to where she now was. She could not have refused these men who asked for her help. A psychologist would be better suited to try this woman than trained judges. A psychologist would understand how impossible it was for her, whose nature it was to help others, not to do what she could for the British, French, and Belgian soldiers she hid and protected. The first Englishmen who came to her were wounded. The lives of all these men were in danger.

  Stoeber intervened. This was not the case under German military law, he claimed. Kirschen protested that she, like the other accused, had not known that. All believed the lives of the men they helped to be threatened. The only way to help them had been to get them over the frontier. Her objective had not been to damage the German cause. Her accusers must prove whether these men again enlisted because of the help of Nurse Cavell. Only that would make her actions liable to the death penalty.

  Perhaps, he suggested, she had exaggerated the number of men she had helped reach Holland. If he had seen her notes and spoken to her before the trial he might have ascertained the truth, but he had become her lawyer without any means of defending her. This tribunal, he said, did not have the moral right to condemn to death a trained nurse. He implored the judges to recognize that her life was dedicated to the sick and wounded, that German soldiers owed their lives to her care. If she was to be condemned then at least let her sentence be mitigated to attempted treason, not treason itself. The most that was needed or merited by the prosecutors was a sentence to curtail her until the end of the war.

  Stoeber turned to Edith Cavell. Again she stood. What had she to say for herself, he asked. He looked at her and saw an aging spin
ster, an enemy agent. What might she say to him? “Je n’ai rien à ajouter,” she said, I have nothing to add.

  Kirschen moved to a cursory defense of the other five prisoners. Mme. Bodart and Séverin had helped when Edith Cavell had no room for these men. Did that merit their death? Neither of them had guided men to the frontier. Stoeber saw this assertion as a challenge to the integrity of the court. He flew into a rage. He accused Kirschen of insulting him. Kirschen became defensive. He said he had been a barrister for sixteen years. He knew that to offend the judges was not a good way to defend a client. He was speaking in German which was a foreign language for him. He might have used an expression unwisely. He was in an emotional state because a woman he was defending was sentenced to death.

  Damage accrued. This was a court where decisions were made out of personal antipathy and on nasty whims. It counted against Kirschen that French was his first language. It counted so much more against Edith Cavell that she was English, a woman, unmarried, unrepentant. It counted against Baucq that he distributed La Libre Belgique which poked fun at generals and self-styled Governors.

  Then it was the turn of the respected German lawyer Thomas Braun to defend the Princess de Croÿ and the Countess de Belleville. To their advantage both women were aristocrats. Both had benefited from counsel prior to the hearing. No matter that the de Croÿs’ involvement spanned escape, recruitment and espionage. Breeding and wealth put the Princess in a superior league, in this court’s view, to nurses, teachers and engineers.

  The Princess, Braun said, had acted under the influence of her brother. Her sole aim had been to save life. At the outset of the war both women had cared for the German wounded. How could they be expected not to care for their own kind? They were caught between helping their own people or denouncing them. They chose to help them. All Germans to whom he had spoken about the case said they would have acted the same way.

  The Princess stood. She said she took full responsibility for what she had done but that she must speak out for Miss Cavell. What had been said about her was not true. She was not at the head of an escape organization.

  “She was brought into danger by my brother and me. We sent the men to her.” It was, the Princess said, at first she herself who sheltered and hid these men. “And even when Miss Cavell told us she could not lodge any more, that her School would be in danger if more men were sent to her, we still sent others to her and so did our confederates. The responsibility should fall on my brother and me. I am ready to take her place. Pour moi je le répète, je suis prête à prendre la place qui m’incombe.”

  Libiez in his diary wrote of her intervention:

  The Princess looked frail. Usually there was nothing remarkable in her appearance, but at that moment, standing in the half light of the Chamber, her shoulders drawn back, her right hand raised, she appeared beautiful. And as she said these words I could have applauded her. I said to myself I must make the same declaration as this Princess, but my courage failed, I let the moment pass. Five minutes later it was too late and I bitterly regretted my own cowardice.

  It was too late for Edith Cavell. It was a declaration that needed to be made. The rest of the hearing was hurried on. Thirty-five people must be dealt with in two days. For eight of them the death penalty had been demanded. This second session lasted from 9:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the evening without a break. There was continuing confusion over language, the single interpreter, a muddle over names and who was charged with what. Treason became an ever more loosely used word. The accused were told their sentences would be communicated to them in prison. The court rose. Sadi Kirschen tried to approach Edith Cavell as she was led from the court but a soldier stopped him.

  Edith Cavell and Jeanne de Belleville were driven back to St. Gilles. They asked the German guard in the prison van if the rumour they had heard was true—that following the execution of a woman prisoner at Liège no more women were to be condemned to death. The guard said he thought that was now the case. In the prison hall the two women were left alone together for ten minutes. They did not discuss the trial. With a revision downward of what constitutes good fortune, they hoped to meet each other again in the prison camp at Siegburg. Edith Cavell was allowed brief exercise in the prison yard. She was then led back to her cell to await sentence.

  41

  SATURDAY OCTOBER 9

  Then it was the weekend. At the American Legation the minister Brand Whitlock was ill in bed. Quite what was wrong with him was unclear, but he was depressed and homesick for America. Injections from his doctor had not helped. Edith Cavell was not on his mind. But the Legation was the only place from where, at this point in time, appeal on her behalf might be made or diplomacy galvanized.

  Edith Cavell’s defense lawyer Sadi Kirschen had endured a tiring and frustrating two days. After the fiasco of the trial he went straight to his country house at Quatre Bras, a small woodland village outside Brussels. He did not communicate the trial’s outcome to Brand Whitlock. He did not feel obliged to do so. He was under instruction from the Nursing School, not the Legation. Anyway he supposed there would be ample time for appeal. It had taken ten weeks from when charges were made against Edith Cavell for her case to come to trial. He assumed the process of law would continue to move slowly.

  The nurses at the School were sleepless with anxiety. Elisabeth Wilkins went to the prison for news, hoping for permission to speak to her matron. She was turned away.

  The German prosecutors worked over the weekend. That Saturday the court of five judges, for a third and final time, sat in secret session to formulate the sentences according to the Imperial Military Decree Concerning Extraordinary Criminal Proceedings in Time of War Against Aliens.

  Based on the prosecution document drawn up by Bergan and Pink-hoff, and embellished by the prosecutor Herr Stoeber, they summarized their findings:

  From their own statements and the assertions of their fellow prisoners the Court concludes that de Croÿ, Baucq, Thuliez, Cavell, Belleville and Séverin were the main organisers of two seditious groups one based in northern France the other in the Borinage, which helped English and French fugitive soldiers and French and Belgians of military age, escape to Holland in order to join the Allied armies.

  The château at Bellignies was put at the disposal of the organisation by the Prince de Croÿ. It was the main grouping place for the soldiers on their way to Holland via Brussels. The Prince’s sister gave hospitality to the men and took photographs of them to enable Capiau and Derveau to fake identity papers stating that British and French soldiers were Belgian nationals.

  The men were then taken to Brussels and hidden in different places by Cavell until they could be taken over the frontier by guides hired for this work. In this way Cavell has made it possible for some two hundred and fifty men to reach Holland. Baucq was her chief assistant. Six of these men notified those who helped them of their arrival in England or France.

  It is the opinion of this Court that most of the prisoners were aware they were conveying fugitive soldiers and men of military age to the enemy. It was their deliberate intention to send reinforcements to the hostile powers to the detriment of our own German troops.

  The judges then ruled on the punishments to be meted out: death for Philippe Baucq, Louise Thuliez, Edith Cavell, Louis Séverin and Jeanne de Belleville; fifteen years’ hard labor for Herman Capiau, Ada Bodart, Albert Libiez and Georges Derveau; ten years’ hard labor for Marie de Croÿ; from two to eight years’ hard labor or imprisonment for seventeen of those on minor charges; the acquittal of eight others.

  The court was closed. A process had been followed, a verdict reached. The court clerk, Neuhaus, wrote up the court’s findings for approval by the Military Governor, and in her cell Edith Cavell waited. She drafted letters to her mother, to Sister Wilkins, to Grace, to the nurses.

  In England that day Edith Cavell’s brother-in-law Longworth Wainwright, who had received no news, again wrote to Britain’s Foreign Secretary. The family, he sa
id, would be “very grateful for any further information that may be obtained and also for instruction as to whether it is possible to communicate with or send comforts to Miss Cavell.” No such information was to be obtained, communication made or comforts given. Mrs. Cavell endured an unbearable silence.

  Her daughter looked to prayer, for hope and comforts beyond injustice and harm. Among the texts she highlighted were:

  Thou that rulest the power of the sea and stillest the violent motion of its waves, arise and help me.

  Scatter the nations that desire war.

  There is no other hope or refuge for me, save in Thee, O Lord my God.

  42

  SUNDAY OCTOBER 10

  God did not intervene. Neither did the diplomats or defense lawyers who seemed to be doing the minimum their professions required. Whitlock had known of Edith Cavell’s arrest since August 26. He had told Britain’s Foreign Secretary he would try to ensure she had a fair trial and would keep him informed as to what was happening. Those assurances were as far as his involvement had gone. Her defense lawyer Sadi Kirschen had gone off to his country house without communicating the outcome of the trial to the Legation.

  On the morning of Sunday October 10, Herr Stoeber submitted the judges’ report and sentences to the new and brutal Military Governor, Brigadier-General von Sauberzweig, who viewed even von Bissing the Governor General as not severe enough—he thought he compromised military security. Sauberzweig’s reply was brief and immediate: “I confirm the judgement,” he wrote back.

  Elisabeth Wilkins again visited the prison and again was turned away. Nurse Aerschodt asked her father, who had penned the nurses’ luckless petition for clemency to the Governor General, to find out what he could from the prison guards about Edith Cavell’s fate. Aerschodt heard from a Belgian warder that the prosecution had asked for the death sentence for the nurses’ matron, the Princess de Croÿ, the Countess de Belleville and others. He gave this news to Sister Wilkins. She went straight to the American Legation. She was told that Brand Whitlock was too ill to see her. She spoke to Gaston de Leval. He relayed the information to Whitlock.