Edith Cavell
Page 35
By judgement of February 8 and 9, 1916, the military tribunal has condemned LOUIS BRILL, waiter in a restaurant in Brussels, to the death penalty for assassination committed with firearms. The judgement has been confirmed and executed.
Brussels, February 11 1916.
Gaston Quien, who betrayed more than twenty resistance workers, including Edith Cavell, into believing he was on their side, went to France at the war’s end and was arrested as a traitor and spy. His court martial, before seven judges, began in Paris in August 1919 and lasted two weeks. The Princess de Croÿ and Louise Thuliez—both wearing their Légion d’honneur medals—gave evidence in camera; so did Ada Bodart and Elisabeth Wilkins. She wore her nurse’s uniform.
The priest Father Bonsteels testified how he gave Quien a railway map, which showed the latest German modifications, because he believed his claim to be helping Allied soldiers escape. Bonsteels was subsequently arrested and sentenced to twelve years. Mme. Bodart testified she had given Quien a package of annotated road maps to give to a Mme. Machiel. Questioned, Quien at first denied he had looked to see what was in the package, but later said he knew it contained annotated maps. Cross-questioned, he claimed to be suffering memory loss.
Sister Wilkins, giving evidence, said it was true that when Quien arrived at the School in the guise of a fugitive Allied soldier, he had an ingrowing toenail which prevented him walking far. She did not think it was necessarily his evidence alone that indicted Edith Cavell. The house had been watched before he arrived.
Quien denied all charges. He said he might be a braggart, drunk and thief, but he was not a traitor. He was found guilty by four votes to three and sentenced to death. He appealed, and a petition for clemency signed by some of the judges was sent to the French president Raymond Poincaré. His sentence was commuted to twenty years in jail and he was sent to Clairvaux prison in north-eastern France.
He was forty when convicted. Throughout his sentence he protested his innocence, maintained mistaken identity and wrongful imprisonment, and pleaded for retrial. Troubled with rheumatism and despised by other prisoners, he found prison life hell. While inside he inherited a lot of money which he could not use. He was released in 1937 after seventeen years. Warders said he had been a model prisoner.
At the time of his trial Pauline Randall was mentioned as having been tricked by him. It was said he plied her with drink in a café, wheedled information from her and then three days later Edith Cavell was arrested. Pauline Randall could not be traced, but the Daily Mirror reported a sighting of her at Clacton-on-Sea. She later went to work as a maid to a Dr. Broadbent in St. Albans and evidently heeded Edith Cavell’s advice to say her prayers, for after attending Bible classes in St. Albans she “married” into the Salvation Army. The Army had a rule that required its officers not to marry outside it.
Antoine Depage did not remarry. After the war he was awarded the Légion d’honneur and many other accolades. He presided over the 29th Surgical Congress in France and was only the second non-French surgeon to do so. His surgical work at La Panne influenced international consensus on the treatment of the war wounded: minimal treatment at the battlefront, rapid transport of casualties to surgical hospitals, the use of debridement and excision to avoid gangrene and infection.
In March 1925 he was diagnosed with an intestinal obstruction. He thought he had cancer and underwent surgery with a local anesthetic so that he could watch the operation in a mirror. The obstruction was a thrombosis which caused his death three months later. He was sixty-three.
Edith Cavell’s “dear old Jack” had a difficult war. Mlle. de Meyer, matron of the new school, could not manage him and for months he stayed tethered in a kennel in a nearby garden. He howled non-stop. The Prince de Croÿ’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Croÿ, heard of his misery and offered to look after him at the Bellignies château. Nurses from the new School took him there in March 1916. They could not take him on public transport, so walked with him all the way from Brussels. A relay of nurses met him at different stages. When he arrived at the château he was stiff from months of being chained without exercise and then having to walk so far. He became very ill and maddened and bit the kennel maid and the Dowager Duchess when they tried to come near him. They were patient and persisted in helping him and he got well and, the Dowager Duchess said, “became as good and gentle as any other dog. He was most attached and loving. But he remained dangerous to strangers.” He had the grounds of the château to explore and he behaved well with the Dowager Duchess’s toy spaniels. “He always was most good and gentle to other dogs. I had him for about seven and a half years, when he died of indigestion caused by old age. He did not suffer, having lost consciousness almost directly. I was extremely sorry to lose him.” After he died in 1923, Jack was stuffed and sent, via Norwich, to the Imperial War Museum in London where he remains on permanent display.
The Prince de Croÿ in August 1919 sailed to America on the Cunarder Carmania to take up the post of First Secretary at the Belgian Legation in Washington. He told the New York Times he would probably have shared Edith Cavell’s fate if he had not been warned in time to leave the country. “The work of reconstruction and rebuilding commerce and industry in Belgium is proceeding slowly,” he said, because we have not received any of the cash indemnity from Germany, and the young men of 20 and 21 years of age do not take kindly to factory life after living in the open for so long. They went into the army as boys and have never done any work before, and now that peace has come, these young men seem to prefer to wander about and smoke their pipes, but they will follow the example of their elders later and settle down, I am confident …
London Hospital nurses lay a wreath at Edith Cavell’s statue in St. Martin’s Place, London, c.1960
The question as to what is to be done with the seven billion paper marks held by the Belgian Government is still in abeyance, and it is possible the money will be spent in trading with Germany. She was one of the largest producing countries before the war, and if the Allies decline to trade with Germany there is very little prospect of Belgium or any of the Allies receiving payment of the indemnities.
“Let only the right of conquest speak” had been the view of the Governor General Baron Moritz von Bissing. He died in Belgium in April 1917 and after a State funeral was buried in the Invalidenhof Cemetery in Berlin. Among his papers was a memorandum advising that any peace settlement should include the permanent annexation of Belgium to Germany, the exploitation of its resources and industry for German use and the disposal of King Albert and his dynasty, if necessary by death.
The military police officers Sergeant Pinkhoff and Lieutenant Bergan were rewarded with the Iron Cross second class, for their wartime services to Germany. The Military Governor General von Sauberzweig who hastened Edith Cavell to her death did not live down his shame. Baron von der Lancken, head of the Political Section in occupied Brussels, in his memoirs wrote of her blood being on Sauberzweig’s hands and that of his children. When Sauberzweig died, in April 1920, all press coverage of his death mentioned him in connection with the execution of Edith Cavell. Karl-Gustav, his one-eyed son, perhaps blinded, his father had conjectured, by one of the Allied soldiers whom Edith Cavell helped reach the Dutch border, became a Waffen-SS Colonel in the Second World War with a mandate to turn north-eastern Bosnia into an SS vassal state. Imprisoned by the British in 1946, he poisoned himself with cyanide rather than face trial in communist Yugoslavia. Dr. Eduard Stoeber, the prosecutor who sent Edith Cavell, Philippe Baucq, Louis Brill and Gabrielle Petit to their deaths, was a senior military prosecutor in Hitler’s regime. He died in 1960 aged eighty-eight.
In the Second World War Louise Thuliez and the Princess de Croÿ again resisted German military occupation. Louise Thuliez organized an escape network from the Auvergne district of occupied France. The Princess again sheltered fugitive soldiers at the Bellignies château. She and her chauffeur were arrested. Though beaten unconscious he refused to incriminate her and she was releas
ed through lack of evidence. “Of course we had many of the same experiences as in the last war,” the Princess wrote in November 1946 to Elisabeth Wilkins, who was then matron of the Cottage Hospital in Chard in Somerset. “We had to help our men to get away.”
Edith Cavell too would have done the same again, not in the name of heroism, but out of compassion for those who needed help and with “sublime indifference” to the tyranny of any brutal regime.
53
REMEMBERED
“I like to look back on the days when we were young and life was fresh and beautiful and the country so desirable and sweet.”
Edith Cavell died when that life had been violated. By her words on the night of October 11, 1915, knowing she was to be shot at dawn, she rose above the squalor of war and injustice: “Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity I know that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.”
The only medal awarded her was for her work in the Maidstone typhoid epidemic of 1897. The inscription on it, “For loving services,” applied to her life’s work. She cherished her own life only in so far as she could use it to make a contribution to a better world. She liked pleasure—country walks, painting watercolors, travel, sea bathing, the company of family and friends—but pleasure was not the principle by which she lived her life. The profession of nursing, she told her probationers in her evening lectures, would lead to “the widest social reform, the purest philanthropy, the finest humanity.” Good nurses were “the handmaids of that science which not only assuages and heals the suffering of today, but reaches on, through ever-widening circles, to the dawn of perfect manhood when disease shall be unknown, because the laws which scientists discover, and which they help to teach, shall have banished it and taught the world how to live.”
She had hurried back to Brussels when war was declared, not to find a place as a heroine or martyr, but because as a nurse she thought she would be more than ever needed. Circumstance took her to a landscape of violence and grief. She told her nurses, when enemy soldiers marched into the peaceful city of Brussels, that if any of the men were wounded they must be treated. Each was a father, husband or son. As nurses they must take no part in the quarrel. The profession of nursing knew no frontiers.
As a nurse she had seen, she said, suffering, poverty and human wretchedness in the slums of London, “but nothing I saw there hurts me the way it does to see these proud, gay, happy people, humiliated and deprived of their men, their homes invaded by enemy soldiers that are quartered in them, their businesses ruined. I can only ask myself why oh why should these innocent people be made to suffer like this?” It was not a question she could answer, despite her belief in an interventionist God. But the lack of an answer did not blur her dream of how heaven on earth might some day be achieved. She nursed and served, not for grand redemption in the sky but to make the vicinity in which she found herself a better place. Uniformed soldiers shot her at dawn because they saw, not who she was, but what she represented to them. But they could not destroy her soul, or silence her voice, soft-spoken and clear:
The dusting should be done by ten, nurse.
Are all my things put away safely? With camphor?
Don’t buy anything for me. I do very well with what I have. I should be glad to have one of your red blankets, a serviette, cup, fork, spoon and plate—not the best ones—also one or two towels and my toothbrush.
My dear old Jack! Please brush him sometimes and look after him.
There is a little child here of three or four with her mother. She looks pale and pinched for want of air.
I told you devotion would bring its own reward.
There are two sides to war—the glory and the misery. We begin to see both. We shall see the latter more clearly as time goes on.
I am but a looker-on, after all. It is not my country whose soul is desecrated and whose sacred places are laid waste. I can only feel the pity of the stranger within the gates, and admire the courage of a people enduring a long and terrible agony.
My dearest love to you, my darling Mother. I am glad to think of you all safe & I hope well, with the fleet to keep away all harm from the dear country.
I have perhaps sometimes been too strict but never knowingly unjust, and I have loved you all much more than you can know.
You have been very kind my dear and I thank you and the nurses for all you have done for me in the last ten weeks.
Tell my Mother I think my soul is safe.
I have no fear or shrinking. I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.
Think of me as a nurse who tried to do her duty.
Please see the nurses going for their exam for the 2nd time in October study regularly.
Miss J. owes me (she will remember) a hundred francs. Take it to buy a clock for the entrance hall.
My love to you all. I am not afraid, but quite happy.
Your devoted Matron
Edith Cavell
NOTES
Abbreviations
BL
British Library
CNL
Colindale Newspaper Library
IWM
Imperial War Museum
LH
Royal London Hospital Archive
NA
National Archive
NRO
Norfolk Record Office www.noah.norfolk.gov.uk
PCL
Peterborough Central Library
RMA
Ruth Moore Archive
SA
Swardeston Archive
PART ONE
1 BIRTH
3 Edith Cavell was born … see marriage and burial registers for Reverend Cavell’s ministry (SA). And, papers of the Cavell family (NRO). And, William White, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Norfolk, 1845. And, Norfolk, A General History, vol. 2, 1829
4 the front bedroom of the eighteenth-century farmhouse … Now called Cavell House (SA)
—even at the risk … Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not, 1859
5 the antiseptic principle … Joseph Lister, “On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery,” Lancet 2:353–356, 668–9 (1867)
—Thy desire shall be … Genesis 3: 16
6 The presence of a young female … Statement issued by male doctors at the Middlesex Hospital in 1863
—The 60-foot-high tower … Simon Knott, www.norfolkchurches.co.uk
3 GROWING UP
13 life was fresh and beautiful … letter from Edith Cavell to her cousin Eddy Cavell, March 11, 1915, quoted in Helen Judson, Edith Cavell, 1941
15 I’d love to have you visit … ibid.
16 having deviated … William White, History, Gazetteer and Directory of Norfolk, 1845 poor lunatics … ibid. the operation for the stone … ibid.
4 SCHOOL
19 They are obliged to profess … Emily Davies in evidence to the 1867–8 Schools Inquiry Commission. Quoted in Kathryn Hughes, The Victorian Governess, 1993
20 a high moral training … Peterborough Advertiser, 1884 (PCL)
22 an album of drawings … Claire Daunton, Edith Cavell Her Life and Her Art, 1990 (LH)
5 THE ENGLISH GOVERNESS
23 A private governess … Charlotte Bronte to her sister Emily, June 8, 1839. Kathryn Hughes. And, Jane Austen, Emma, 1815
6 A GERMAN SUMMER
26 She went in a party … Diary of Alice Burne (SA)
7 THE BELGIAN GOVERNESS
31 It was an intelligent way … A. E. Clark-Kennedy, Edith Cavell, 1965
32 A dog soon reciprocates … “Nurse Cavell Dog Lover” facsimile, with an introduction by Rowland Jones, 1934
33 Being a governess … Helen Judson
37 Among articles about clauses … Norwich Union Insurance Company in-house magazine (BL)
PART TWO
8 NO HOSPITAL TRAINING
41 too old, too weak … Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing
42 If a patient is cold … ib
id.
45 I have had no hospital … Z/1/CAVELL (LH)
9 THE FEVER NURSE
47 The infectious diseases … W. H. Bradley, Notifiable Infectious Diseases, quoted in Gwendoline Ayers, England’s First State Hospitals and the Metropolitan Asylums Board 1867–1930, 1971
—the sewer king … G. C. Cook, “Joseph William Bazalgette,” Journal of Medical Biography, 1999
52 known Edith Cavill … Z/1/CAVELL (LH)
10 THE PROBATIONER
53 the London Hospital … A. E. Clark-Kennedy, The London: A Study in the Voluntary Hospital System, 1963
56 There was only one operating theatre … Viscount Knutsford, In Black and White, 1926
58 You have chosen a profession … Eva Lückes lecture to probationers, 1892. And, Eva Lückes, General Nursing, 1914. And, Matron’s annual letters to nurses, 1896–1915 N/7/1/3–23 (LH)
59 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Edith Cavell’s annotated edition, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp41475
60 Be careful not to get into the habit … Eva Lückes lecture to probationers, 1892 (LH)
—for amputations … Eva Lückes, lecture VII (LH)
—You have to fight … Eva Lückes, lecture XII (LH)
—“the elephant man,” Frederick Treves, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, 1923