Edith Cavell
Edith Louisa Cavell was a British nurse. She is celebrated for treating wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination during the First World War and for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium. Cavell was arrested, court-martialled under German military law and sentenced to death by firing squad. Despite international pressure for mercy, the German government refused to commute her sentence, and she was shot. The execution received worldwide condemnation and extensive press coverage.
The night before her execution, she said, "Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone". These words were inscribed on the Edith Cavell Memorial opposite the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery near Trafalgar Square. Her strong Anglican beliefs propelled her to help all those who needed it, including both German and Allied soldiers. She was quoted as saying, "I can't stop while there are lives to be saved." The Church of England commemorates her in its Calendar of Saints on 12 October.
Cavell, who was 49 at the time of her execution, was already notable as a pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium.
Early life and career
Cavell was born on 4 December 1865 in Swardeston, a village near Norwich, where her father Frederick Cavell was vicar for 45 years. She was the eldest of the four children of the Reverend Frederick Cavell and his wife Louisa Sophia Warming. Edith's siblings were Florence Mary, Mary Lilian and John Frederick Scott.Cavell was educated at Norwich High School for Girls, then at boarding schools in Clevedon, Somerset, and Peterborough.
After a period as a governess, including for a family in Brussels from 1890 to 1895, Cavell returned home to care for her father during a serious illness. The experience led her to become a nurse after her father's recovery. Cavell worked as a nurse at the Fountain Fever Hospital in Tooting from December 1895. At the age of 30, Cavell applied to become a nurse probationer at the London Hospital and commenced as a regular probationer at the London Hospital in September 1896 under Matron Eva Luckes. Cavell was seconded to work with other London Hospital nurses in the Maidstone typhoid epidemic, from 15 October 1897 until early January 1898, while still a probationer. Along with other staff, she was awarded the Maidstone Typhoid Medal. After her training, Cavell worked from October 1898 to December 1899 as a private nurse employed by the Private Nursing Institution of the London Hospital, treating patients in their homes. Cavell travelled to tend patients with cancer, gout, pneumonia, pleurisy, eye issues and appendicitis. In 1901, Luckes recommended Cavell for the position of night superintendent of St Pancras Infirmary. In November 1903, she became assistant matron of St Leonard's Infirmary in Shoreditch.
In 1906, Cavell took a temporary post as matron of the Manchester and Salford Sick and Poor and Private Nursing Institution, working there for about nine months.
Work in Belgium
In 1907, Cavell was recruited by Dr. Antoine Depage, the Belgian royal surgeon, and the founder and president of the Belgian Red Cross, to be matron of a newly established nursing school, L'École Belge d'Infirmières Diplômées on the Rue de la Culture, in Ixelles, Brussels. By 1910, "Miss Cavell 'felt that the profession of nursing had gained sufficient foothold in Belgium to warrant the publishing of a professional journal' and launched the nursing journal, L'infirmière". Within a year, she was training nurses for three hospitals, twenty-four schools, and thirteen kindergartens in Belgium.Cavell was offered a position as matron in a Brussels clinic. She worked closely with Depage, who was part of a "growing body of people" in the medical profession in Belgium. He realised that the care that was being provided by the religious institutions had not been keeping up with medical advances. In 1910, Cavell was asked if she would be the matron for the new secular hospital at Saint-Gilles.
When the First World War broke out, Cavell was visiting her widowed mother in Norfolk. She returned to Brussels, where her clinic and nursing school were taken over by the Red Cross.
Assistance to Allied soldiers
In November 1914, after the German occupation of Brussels, Cavell began sheltering British soldiers and funnelling them out of occupied Belgium to the neutral Netherlands. Wounded British and French soldiers as well as Belgian and French civilians of military age were hidden from the Germans and provided with false papers by Prince Réginald de Croÿ at his château of Bellignies near Mons. From there, they were conducted by various guides to the houses of Cavell, Louis Séverin, and others in Brussels, where their hosts would furnish them with money to reach the Dutch frontier, and provide them with guides obtained through Philippe Baucq. This placed Cavell in violation of German military law. German authorities became increasingly suspicious of the nurse's actions, which were further fuelled by her outspokenness.Arrest and trial
Cavell was arrested on 6 August 1915 and charged with harbouring Allied soldiers. She had been betrayed by Georges Gaston Quien, who was later convicted by a French court as a collaborator. Cavell was held in Saint-Gilles prison for ten weeks, the last two of which were spent in solitary confinement. She made three depositions to the German police, admitting that she had been instrumental in conveying about 60 British and 15 French soldiers, as well as about 100 French and Belgian civilians of military age, to the frontier and had sheltered most of them in her house.At her court-martial, Cavell was prosecuted for aiding British and French soldiers, and young Belgian men, to cross the Dutch border and eventually enter Britain. She admitted her guilt when she signed a statement the day before the trial. Cavell declared that the soldiers she had helped escape thanked her in writing when they arrived safely in Britain. This admission confirmed that Cavell had not only helped the soldiers navigate the Dutch frontier, but it also established that she helped them escape to a country at war with Germany. Her fellow defendants included Prince Reginald's sister, Princess Marie of Croÿ.
The penalty, according to German military law, was death. Paragraph 58 of the German Military Code determined that "In time of war, anyone who, with the intention of aiding a hostile power, or of causing harm to German or allied troops", commits any of the crimes defined in paragraph 90 of the German Penal Code "shall be punished with death for war treason". Specifically, Cavell was charged under paragraph 90 no. 3 Reichsstrafgesetzbuch, for "conveying troops to the enemy", a crime normally punishable by life imprisonment in peacetime. It was possible to charge Cavell with perfidy, or war treason, as paragraph 160 of the German Military Code extended application of paragraph 58 to foreigners "present in the zone of war".
While the First Geneva Convention ordinarily guaranteed protection of medical personnel, such protection was forfeit if medical practices were seen to be used as cover for belligerent action. This forfeiture is expressed in article 7 of the 1906 version of the convention, which was the version in force at the time, and justified prosecution under German military law.
The British government could therefore do nothing to help her. Sir Horace Rowland of the Foreign Office said, "I am afraid that it is likely to go hard with Miss Cavell; I am afraid we are powerless." Lord Robert Cecil, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, advised that, "Any representation by us will do her more harm than good." The United States, however, had not yet joined the war and was in a position to apply diplomatic pressure. Hugh S. Gibson, Secretary to the U.S. Legation at Brussels, made clear to the German government that executing Cavell would further harm Germany's already damaged reputation. Later, he wrote:
Baron von der Lancken is known to have stated that Cavell should be pardoned because of her complete honesty and because she had helped save so many lives, German as well as Allied. However, General von Sauberzweig, the military governor of Brussels, ordered that "in the interests of the State" the implementation of the death penalty against Baucq and Cavell should be immediate, denying higher authorities an opportunity to consider clemency. Cavell was represented by defence lawyer Sadi Kirschen from Brussels. Of the twenty-seven defendants, five were condemned to death: Cavell, Baucq, Louise Thuliez, Séverin and Countess Jeanne de Belleville. Of the five sentenced to death, only Cavell and Baucq were executed; the other three were granted reprieves.
Cavell was arrested not for espionage, as many were led to believe, but for "war treason", despite not being a German national. She may have been recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service, and turned away from her espionage duties in order to help Allied soldiers escape, although this is not widely accepted. Rankin cites the published statement of M. R. D. Foot, historian and Second World War British intelligence officer, as to Cavell having been part of SIS or MI6. The former director-general of MI5, Stella Rimington, announced in 2015 that she had unearthed documents in Belgian military archives that confirmed an intelligence-gathering aspect to Cavell's network. The BBC Radio 4 programme that presented Rimington's quote, noted Cavell's use of secret codes and, though amateurish, other network members' successful transmission of intelligence.
When in custody, Cavell was questioned in French, but her trial was minuted in German; which some assert gave the prosecutor the opportunity to misinterpret her answers. Although she may have been misrepresented, she made no attempt to defend herself, but responded to have channelled "environ deux cents" soldiers to the Dutch border. Cavell was provided with a defender approved by the German military governor; a previous defender, who was chosen for Cavell by her assistant, Elizabeth Wilkins, was ultimately rejected by the governor.
File:Bellows, George Wesley, The Murder of Edith Cavell, 1918.jpg|thumb|George Bellows, The Murder of Edith Cavell, 1918, Princeton University Art Museum