Edith Cavell: World War I Nurse and Heroine

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Despite an order from the German authorities that anyone sheltering Allied troops would be shot, Cavell’s secret work continued. She wrote to her cousin, ‘I am helping in ways I may not describe to you till we are free.’

It became obvious, however, that the escape route could not be kept open indefinitely. The Germans were well aware that large numbers of fugitive soldiers were crossing the Belgian border into Holland. Then, in August 1915, the Germans raided the home of Philippe Baucq, a member of the escape organization, and arrested him. Unfortunately, Baucq failed to destroy several incriminating letters in which Edith Cavell’s name appeared.

The head of the escape organization, Prince de Croy, left his large country chateau near Mons to warn colleagues in Brussels. He called on Cavell in her office and told her he was going into hiding. ‘I expect to be arrested,’ she said firmly. ‘Escape for me is futile and unthinkable.’ The prince realized it was hopeless to try to dissuade her and departed, eventually managing to cross the border to safety.

On August 5, Otto Mayer of the German secret police arrived in the Rue de la Culture. Cavell was driven to police headquarters and questioned. But nothing of importance was found in the institute–Cavell had, in fact, sewn her diary inside a cushion.

There is some controversy over the confession Cavell made to Mayer. On being told that other members of the organization–35 had been arrested–had admitted their guilt, she spoke freely about the help she had given to Allied soldiers. ‘Had I not helped,’ she said later in a letter from her prison cell, ‘they would have been shot.’ Cavell was accused of conducting soldiers to the enemy and was tried by a military court in Brussels. Although more than 200 troops had passed through her hands, the only document incriminating the nurse was a tattered postcard sent, rather unwisely, by an English soldier thanking her for helping him to reach home. Cavell was sentenced to death, along with four Belgians.

Two firing squads, each of eight men, carried out the execution at dawn on October 12, 1915, at the national rifle range in Brussels. Cavell was still wearing her nurse’s uniform.

The words she spoke to her last English visitor, Stirling Gahan, the English chaplain in Brussels, became almost as famous as Admiral Horatio Nelson’s at Trafalgar. ‘I know now that patriotism is not enough,’ she said. ‘I must have no hatred and no bitterness towards anyone.’

Although the German action was justified according to the rules of war, the shooting of Edith Cavell was a serious blunder. Within days, the heroic nurse became a worldwide martyr, and the Germans were universally described as ‘murdering monsters.’ As a result of her execution, Allied morale was strengthened, and recruitment doubled for eight weeks after her death was announced.

The memory of Edith Cavell has been kept alive ever since that dark day in 1915. Numerous books have been written about her. Statues of Cavell were erected near the National Portrait Gallery in London and at a busy road junction in Tombland, in Norwich. Sybil Thorndike starred as the nurse in the film Dawn in 1930, and Anna Neagle played the same role in Nurse Edith Cavell in 1939. Joan Plowright played Cavell in a successful play on the London stage in the 1950s.

The grave of this stubborn, brave nurse lies beside the ancient walls of Norwich Cathedral. Each October, on the Saturday nearest the anniversary of her death, a short service takes place, and female members of the Royal British Legion lay wreaths at the side of a simple stone cross.

At her home village of Swardeston, in the heart of the unspoiled Norfolk countryside, there is a constant trickle of visitors to the medieval church. ‘There is such enduring interest in Edith Cavell that we simply had to do something about it,’ commented the vicar, the Rev. Phillip McFadyen.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Women's History

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