One gray, dismally wet night in November 1914, two British soldiers in disguise were guided through the silent side streets of German-occupied Brussels by a patriotic Belgian civilian. Herman Capiau was an engineer by trade, but since the outbreak of World War I he had played a key role in an escape organization that was sheltering British and French soldiers trapped behind the German lines after the Allied defeat at Mons.

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One of the soldiers, Lt. Col. Dudley Boger, who had a leg wound, had grown a beard in the three months he had been lying low, and was wearing the black hat and floppy tie of a typical Belgian factory worker. His colleague, Company Sgt. Maj. Frank Meachin, also dressed as a laborer, had packed rolls of cloth between his shoulders to turn himself into a hunchback. That, he hoped, would explain to any inquisitive German soldier why such a tall, strongly built man was not serving in the army.

Capiau cautiously led the pair across the greasy cobbles. German patrols were frequent, and he was forced to try three different routes before reaching the Berkendael Medical Institute, a training school for nurses on the outskirts of the Belgian capital.

The three men were admitted into the building, and Capiau handed a letter of introduction to the school’s matron, a British nurse named Edith Cavell. There was a brief, hushed conversation, then Capiau left the matron’s office and slipped away into the night. It was 8 p.m. Sister White, the assistant matron, was summoned.

‘These men are fugitive soldiers,’ Cavell told Sister White. ‘Give them beds in the empty surgical house.’ Both men, Sister White later recalled, looked dirty and tired, and she put them to bed immediately.

Boger and Meachin were the first of more than 200 British, French and Belgian troops who would be hidden and cared for by Cavell and her staff during the next 12 months.

When they were taken prisoner, Boger and Meachin, both of the 1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, had been taken to a temporary hospital in a convent at Wiheries, Belgium. But when their guards’ backs were turned, the two men had staggered out into the village under cover of darkness and hid in a disused building.

The fugitive soldiers were in a difficult position. Many other officers and men of the British Expeditionary Force had been cut off from their units and left behind in the retreat from Mons. Some, aided by civilians, had reached the Belgian coast. But when Antwerp fell, the Belgian army had retired to link up with British units on their right, and had opened sluice gates behind them to flood the low-lying country and hold up the German army’s advance. That also had cut off the escape route to the coast for stranded Allied soldiers.

Peasants, priests and nuns cared for some of the fugitive troops. Unwounded Allied soldiers who disguised themselves as laborers or miners risked being shot as spies–a danger Boger and Meachin were prepared to face.

They had been lucky to contact a helpful Roman Catholic priest who led them to the home of a woman named Libiez, the widowed mother of a local lawyer, and she had hidden them in the loft of an outbuilding at the bottom of her garden for several weeks.

All occupied countries have their share of traitors. On October 26, 1914, German intelligence received a tip that Libiez was concealing two British soldiers. Within hours, a company of cycle troops of the Landsturm swooped into town and searched both Libiez’s home and those of her neighbors. Twice they returned, but the fugitives had been alerted in time and had slipped out to mingle with a crowd of curious Belgian civilians in the street.

Boger and Meachin were clearly embarrassing their gallant host, and the following night two nuns, Sister Marie and Sister Madeleine, arrived with a hurricane lamp to guide them to a convent in Wasmes.

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