Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  Affluent patrons subscribed to the Cavell Homes. Appeals in the Gentlewoman urged contributors to give as much as they could for one “who by her martyrdom has achieved an honoured place in the history of the British nation … The Foundation of these Homes will provide a permanent National and Imperial Tribute to the Memory of Edith Cavell.”

  By mid 1918 five Cavell Homes catered for 400 nurses a year. All were run by women and had long waiting lists. They were tranquil places. Most nurses stayed three or four weeks. The first, for seven nurses, opened at Little Wych near Bridport in June 1917. Miss Florence Way was its matron. It had a sea view and a well-stocked vegetable garden. Coombe Head in Haslemere, Surrey, followed. Both were filled by nurses recuperating from service in French field hospitals. At Raven House near Market Drayton eight nurses at a time found “a homelike resting-place for tired workers.” Mrs. Reginald Corbett, its owner, sold pot pourri, made from the garden’s roses, at ten shillings a pound to raise funds. “Every coin spent,” she averred, “will keep alive the memory of the brave woman, the dream of whose life was to help nurses as should need rest by the way.”

  In July 1917 in Swardeston church a stained-glass window was installed showing Edith Cavell as a uniformed nurse tending soldiers. Her mother was principal guest at the service. Such local homily was an honor, but she was not consoled. Accolades to her daughter came daily through the door. A mountain in western Canada was named after her, another nurses’ home in Brighton. “The sacrifice and heroic work of your beloved Daughter inspired we women of Ontario to do definite work for our Flag and Country,” Alice Zelius-Laidlaw, “Regent of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, Edith Cavell Chapter in Canada,” wrote to her. But Mrs. Cavell did not come to terms with this killing: the last letters undelivered, the Christian burial denied. Nor did she live to see the Armistice in November 1918. She managed in her house in Norwich for two more years after Edith’s death, then was cared for by Lilian for the last months of her life at the Wainwrights’ house in Henley-on-Thames. She died on June 17, 1918 and was buried in Swardeston graveyard beside her husband, in the village where she had brought up her family.

  The Germans refused, while they occupied Belgium, to allow Edith Cavell any sort of burial. Until the war’s end her body lay in an unmarked cemetery at the Tir National with forty-one others shot for “treason.”

  Fighting along the Western Front continued until November 1918. The Armistice at the war’s end imposed a dangerous and humiliating defeat on Germany. Its terms required the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II; the evacuation of all occupied territory including Alsace-Lorraine, German since 1871; the military evacuation of the western bank of the Rhine and of eastern bank bridgeheads at Mainz, Coblenz and Cologne; the surrender of their military equipment, all their submarines and much of their fleet; the annulment of various treaties that accorded conquered eastern territories to Germany; the payment of reparation for war damage; and the acceptance of continuation of Allied blockade. Such punishment roused the vengeance that erupted in the Second World War. Corporal Hitler, temporarily blinded by a gas attack in a trench at Ypres, called acceptance of defeat “the greatest villainy of the century.”

  The Belgian King and Queen returned to Brussels on November 22, 1918. The Princess de Croÿ was in the crowd that welcomed them. She had been imprisoned at Siegburg, with Jeanne de Belleville and Louise Thuliez, but then was moved to hospitals at Münster and Bonn and watched over by her German relatives, Duchesses and Countesses all. “The whole boulevard was a seething mass of humanity,” she wrote of that November day:

  roofs and windows were lined with people who filled even the trees. At last we heard distant cheering which grew into a roar as it spread up to us, and a motor-car made its way through the crowd. It stopped just before us and out of it got Burgomaster Max, who was received with wild acclamation. Shortly afterwards he was followed by detachments of all the armies … At last a little pause, and, amidst breathless silence, a group of six on horseback came slowly through the waiting streets. Leading was our Soldier King on a white horse with the Queen by his side, both wearing simple khaki. Behind came Prince Leopold and the Duke of York, and lastly, the Count of Flanders and his sister, Princess Marie-José …

  The return of Belgium’s King and Queen

  I had stood up to get a better view, and the emotion which had seized the crowd caught me too. Suddenly what I had taken to be a pillar against which I leant began to shake, and I realised that someone was supporting me. It was a tall French General who stood there, and down whose cheeks the tears were streaming. All around I saw handkerchiefs waving and none were ashamed to give way to the deep emotion and happiness of the moment. Slowly the procession passed out of sight, going towards the Senate, where the King and the Royal Family were received by the Government.

  At the Senate, three years previously, Edith Cavell had been convicted of treason. King Albert posthumously awarded her the Cross of the Order of Leopold, the Belgian government awarded her the Croix Civique, the French awarded her the Légion d’honneur.

  Britain reclaimed her. An Executive Committee for the Public Funeral of Miss Edith Cavell was formed, with headed paper for correspondence. The Belgian government financed her exhumation. Her body was kept in a tin coffin in a locked room at the Tir National until arrangements were finalized. The British Minister in Brussels, Mr. Villiers, wrote about her to Lilian Wainwright:

  The features which bear a perfectly calm expression have not suffered decomposition and were identified beyond doubt by two of the Schaerbeek Communal Authorities who knew Miss Cavell by sight.

  A hair comb, a collar stud, apparently of gold, and the top of a hat pin in light tortoiseshell were found and have been preserved for presentation to you. I shall be glad to learn whether you wish that these should be cleaned or handed to you just as they are.

  It seemed Edith Cavell had fulfilled a criterion of sainthood: her body had stayed incorruptible like St. Teresa of Avila’s in the sixteenth century. The collar stud was duly polished, the hair comb and hatpin cleaned. Florence Cavell and Lilian Wainwright and her husband went over to Brussels in May 1919 as guests of the British Legation, which now had offices there. They visited Edith Cavell’s cell at St. Gilles prison, which had become a venerated place, with fresh flowers placed in it each Sunday.

  On May 13, escorted by British troops sent from Cologne, her body in an oak coffin with a silver plate inscribed edith cavell—Born Dec. 4, 1865. Died Oct. 12, 1915, was taken on a gun carriage through the crowd-lined streets of Brussels to the Gare du Nord. Her sisters traveled with it. At the station the Reverend Gahan held a service. From Ostend the battleship Rowena took her coffin to the naval pier at Dover. Nurses and servicewomen led the procession to the harbor station. Church bells rang for three consecutive hours. Soldiers from the Connaught Rangers guarded her body all night.

  A special train left next morning at 7:35 a.m. and arrived at Victoria station at 11:00 Nurses walked in front of the gun carriage in the procession to Westminster Abbey. There was an escort of a hundred soldiers of all ranks, there were military bands, the streets were congested with people. “No triumphant warrior and no potentate could have received a more impressive tribute than was paid today to the mortal remains of Miss Edith Cavell as they were borne through London,” the New York Times wrote next day. The Dean of Westminster conducted the service. The Bishop of London described Edith Cavell as “that brave woman who deserves a great deal from the British Empire.” The coffin was draped in the Union Jack. There was the twenty-third psalm, the Litany, the Lord’s Prayer, the hymn “Abide with Me,” the sounding of the Last Post and Reveille, the playing of Chopin’s Funeral March as the cortège left the Abbey.

  Edith Cavell’s funeral service, Norwich Cathedral, May 14, 1919

  The family had asked that she be buried in Norwich Cathedral, not Westminster Abbey. The procession passed down the south side of Parliament Square, down Bridge Street, across Victoria Embankment, down
Blackfriars, Queen Victoria Street, Mansion House and Broad Street to Liverpool Street station. In it were the Lord Mayor, sheriffs, buglers, soldiers and rows and rows of nurses and women ambulance drivers. Women as citizens were more in evidence than ever. The men in the crowds that lined the pavement took off their hats as the hearse passed by.

  A special train left for Norwich at 2:30 p.m. From Norwich station to the cathedral there was another procession, another gun carriage, more nurses, then a service for “Edith Cavell, a nurse who gave her life for her countrymen,” the singing of “Now the Labourer’s Task Is O’er” and “I Know that My Redeemer Liveth,” then by her graveside again “Abide with Me,” the Benediction, the Last Post. Bishop Pollock described her as “an innocent, unselfish, devout and pretty girl … in the very hour of her death she has rebeckoned us to eternal things.” It was a spring evening with lilac in bloom. “I am so glad you and I had a word with one another by the open grave … It was a lovely evening, wasn’t it?” he wrote to Lilian Wainwright.

  Edith Cavell was buried in the area called Life’s Green by the south transept of the cathedral. The Cavell family asked for a plain tomb with a cross, such as was used for fallen soldiers. Her own choice might have been the churchyard at Swardeston beside her mother and father and for a simple service without fanfare or fuss.

  A plethora of other monuments was then commissioned and ceremonially unveiled. By Norwich Cathedral a sculpture by Henry Pegram showed a bronze bust of her on a stone pillar with a soldier holding up a laurel wreath. “Edith Cavell, Nurse, Patriot and Martyr” the inscription read. In 1919 in Brussels a monument, since destroyed, showed her helping soldiers to escape. In Paris in the Jardin des Tuileries24 the sculptor Gabriel Pech depicted a young defenseless damsel prone on the ground, shot by a German officer, but about to ascend to heaven. On July 15, 1920, outside the new Nursing School which she had worked so hard to complete, in a ceremony attended by the Queen of Belgium, the Mayor of Uccle unveiled a memorial to her and Marie Depage. It was a sculpture of two semi-naked allegorical figures, one winged, in protective stance. The School was renamed the École Edith Cavell and the street it was in, the rue de Bruxelles, was renamed rue Edith Cavell.

  Nor did remembrance stop with monuments. Streets were named after her in Norwich, Brussels, London, Melbourne, Toronto, Port Louis. There were Edith Cavell hospitals in Peterborough, Auckland, Christchurch, Brisbane; schools in Vancouver, British Columbia and New Brunswick; a bridge over the Shotover River near Queenstown; a car park in Peterborough. A feature on the planet Venus was named the Cavell Corona. The French singer Édith Piaf, born two months after the execution, was named after her. There were requests for a yearly “Cavell Day” to be commemorated throughout the British Empire.

  Plaques were put up in places where she had spent any time: at Steeple Bumpstead vicarage, in Peterborough Cathedral. Framed portraits of her were hung in hospitals and public buildings, there were postcards of her, films about her: The Woman the Germans Shot in 1918 starring Julia Archer; Dawn in 1928 with Sybil Thorndike25; Nurse Edith Cavell in 1939 starring Anna Neagle. There was a play, The Martyrdom of Edith Cavell, songs about her—“She Was an Angel of Mercy” was one, biographies of her. At least one locomotive was named after her.

  As time passed her significance became bleached. She became the monuments, street names, and hospital wards. She was a heroine, her name synonymous with courage in war.

  The London statue was completed in March 1920 then draped in the English and Belgian flags. Unveiling it was a grand event, under a crimson canopy to cover the royals and dignitaries. A large crowd, including nurses from the London Hospital and a delegation from the École Edith Cavell in Brussels, watched Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother, pull the flags away.

  In 1923 the National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland, which campaigned for women’s rights, asked for Edith Cavell’s words about patriotism not being enough to be added to the monument. They said the essence of her had been omitted. They hoped her words might contribute to world peace. They were accused of being pro-German and pacifists.

  The following year the first Labor government, with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister, authorized the adding of PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH. I MUST HAVE NO HATRED OR BITTERNESS FOR ANYONE. The words were etched smaller than the other exhortations on the monument and looked like an afterthought. There were protests. How would it be known the words were Edith Cavell’s, not the government’s? Sir Lionel Earle, Permanent Undersecretary at the Office of Works, said inverted commas should be added, but this did not happen.

  In 1926 in the preface to his play Saint Joan, Bernard Shaw commended Edith Cavell as “another heretic” and said, “She made it abundantly clear that she would help any fugitive or distressed person without asking whose side he was on, and acknowledging no distinction before Christ between Tommy and Jerry and Pitou the poilu.” He reviled the “moral cowards” who had not from the start inscribed her true sentiment on her statue after “a modern military Inquisition shot her out of hand.”

  Virginia Woolf in her novel The Years in 1937 also scorned the way the State used Edith Cavell’s statue as propaganda. Her two characters Eleanor and Peggy are in a taxi:

  It stopped dead under a statue: the lights shone on its cadaverous pallor.

  “Always reminds me of an advertisement of sanitary towels,” said Peggy, glancing at the figure of a woman in nurse’s uniform holding out her hand.

  Eleanor was shocked for a moment …

  “The only fine thing that was said in the war,” she said aloud, reading the words cut on the pedestal.

  “It didn’t come to much,” said Peggy sharply.

  Edith Cavell’s soul-searching dying words belied the recruitment call of FOR KING AND COUNTRY—a sentiment that militarized her and commemorated her like a war hero. With her own words added it became a muddle of a statue. Its apex did not know what its plinth was saying.

  52

  ENDGAME

  The “Cavell affair” rippled on, long after the war’s end. Those involved in it sought to exonerate themselves from a stain of wrongdoing, or suggestion they might have done more to save her life. Bitter accusation continued for years between Gaston de Leval and Sadi Kirschen. De Leval went on saying publicly that Kirschen had not kept him informed about what had happened in the military tribunal and had been unavailable on the night of her sentence. Kirschen countered by accusing de Leval of triggering a press campaign against him. He said he could have asked at his house and worked out how to meet him.

  A month after the war’s end, the two men met on Christmas Eve 1918 in the lobbies of the Palais de Justice in Brussels. Kirschen “gave way to an act of violence” and hit de Leval. He “assaulted him and used abusive language toward him.” Law suits followed over the next three years. Accusation and counter-accusation. Kirschen accused de Leval of slandering him, making defamatory statements about him to the press and in lectures, of allowing falsehoods to be spread and of “imperilling the dignity of the Bar Council.” He apologized for his violence but said he had been driven to it and that de Leval presented himself as the only person to have defended Edith Cavell.

  Eight appointed lawyers read evidence, listened to explanations from Kirschen, de Leval and their counsels, then gave their verdict at a Bar Council meeting in Brussels on July 16, 1921.

  Kirschen’s assault, they said, was reprehensible, “contrary to the dignity of the Bar Council” and deserved “a disciplinary penalty,” but their harsher judgment was for de Leval. His official report, they said, given to the American Legation in Brussels on the day of Edith Cavell’s execution, about Kirschen disappearing to the country and not keeping the Legation informed, had started off accusations in France, Britain and the United States about Maître Kirschen’s professional honor. He had even been reported to be a German agent, “betraying the sacred cause which as an Advocate, he had undertaken to defend.”

  De Leval, the Council judged, made no seriou
s attempt to meet Kirschen between the 8 and 11 of October 1915. Kirschen naturally felt indignant at seeing his role “abominably misrepresented.” Nor did de Leval attempt to correct the false impression he created, rather he compounded it by saying Maître Kirschen’s hands “were stained with the blood of Miss Cavell.” He seemed dazzled by the honor of being “the real and only defender of Miss Cavell, and to the present day goes on maintaining M. Kirschen is in part responsible for the fatal ending of the tragedy.”

  They said de Leval was the primary cause of the press accusations against Kirschen. De Leval was “guilty of a breach of the rules of confraternity” and had “imperilled the dignity of the Bar Council.” Kirschen’s “act of violence,” though abhorrent, was “much reduced in importance by the circumstance of the case.” They ruled that Kirschen should be censured and de Leval reprimanded. Reprimand was the higher punishment. De Leval appealed but to no avail. At a final hearing in Brussels in December 1921 the Bar Council upheld its finding and ordered both sides to share costs.

  Gaston de Leval (1895–1978) Belgian legal adviser to the American Legation

  Extreme injustice led to extreme retaliation and a great deal of hatred and bitterness. Maurice Neels, the young man planted by the secret police in Philippe Baucq’s cell to betray him, was hunted down by a Belgian waiter, Louis Brill. Brill followed him and frequently saw him enter the German police headquarters in the boulevard de Berlai-mont at night. One night when Neels stepped from his own house into the street Brill shot him and left his body lying on the pavement. For weeks Brill eluded the spies and police, but was then caught, taken before the usual military tribunal and executed in February 1916. Yet another affiche was posted up: