Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  On Monday July 27 Serbia and Austria broke off all diplomatic efforts, five Russian army divisions mobilized in St. Petersburg, and General Putnik, Chief of the Serbian General Staff, was arrested in Budapest as he tried to make his way back to Belgrade. He had been in an Austrian health spa because of his heavy smoking. In Berlin there was a run on the banks. In Britain Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the fleet to war stations in the North Sea.

  The murder of the Archduke was a catalyst. Austria and Germany were fearful of the threat of the Entente Cordiale, a 1904 alliance between France, Britain and Russia. They were fearful, too, that Russia might intervene to help Serbia. But they were also looking for a casus belli to realize a dream of might and power. Since 1905 Germany had had a plan in place to conquer France by marching its army through the neutral countries of Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland, in an encircling web, with Paris at the center. Called the Schlieffen Plan after Alfred von Schlieffen, the German Army Chief of Staff, it avoided invading France along its heavily defended border with Germany—its “fortress zone.”

  Britain, the richest nation in Europe, hoped diplomacy might succeed. Sir Edward Gray was seen as a peacebroker. He hoped Germany, France, Italy and Britain would work together to reach a settlement. Cooperation was essential if the dispute was to be limited.

  On Tuesday July 28, a month after the Archduke’s assassination, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. The British fleet took up position at its war stations in the North Sea. Germany rejected Britain’s call for a conference and warned Russia to stand aside until Austrian military measures against Serbia were completed. There were huge patriotic displays in Paris as France prepared to mobilize. At last the situation became the lead story in the British newspapers. But still in Britain there were hopes that this was brinkmanship, saber-rattling, that fears would be appeased and conflict limited.

  On Thursday July 30 Russia mobilized its army of six million men and lined up its troops along the Austrian frontier. The Serbs blew up the bridge over the Danube between Semlia and Belgrade. In Vienna market stallholders were beaten up for raising the price of goods like potatoes by 400 percent.

  On Friday July 31 Austria mobilized its army of three million men. Germany demanded an explanation for the deployment of Russian forces and a reply within twenty-four hours. It feared that if Russia attacked Austria and Germany, France, which was an ally of Russia and still humiliated by defeat in the Franco-Prussian War forty years earlier, would attack too. Germany would then be pincered between two hostile powers.

  Belgrade was in flames. The London Stock Exchange closed on a business day for the first time in its history. The bank rate doubled. Customers besieged banks to draw out their money. The Tory press demanded war. Academics and prominent men like Thomas Hardy, Josiah Wedgwood and G. M. Trevelyan called for neutrality. And still it was hoped that the world was not slipping out of control, that declarations of alliance were only posturing, that the massive positioning of men and arms was display, that the real issues were local and that resolution would be contained. As they stirred for war all parties spoke of how they wanted peace. Sir Edward Gray wired the governments of France and Germany for assurances that they had no intention of violating the sovereign neutrality of Belgium. France agreed. Germany did not.

  On Saturday August 1 Germany mobilized its army of four and a half million men and declared martial law. Holland, Switzerland and Belgium mobilized their small armies, and Sister White sent Edith Cavell a telegram from the School in rue de la Culture about the expectation of war, and expressing concern about how their matron would manage to return. Telephone links and trains between Belgium and Germany were suspended. “DAY OF GLOOM,” declared the Eastern Daily Press. In London, the bank rate went from 4 to 8 percent, the Stock Exchange closed, and the King canceled his visit to Cowes.

  On Sunday August 2 Germany declared war on Russia, invaded Luxembourg and requested the Belgian government to allow German troops to pass through Belgium so they could attack France. They demanded a reply from Belgium by 7:00 a.m. the following day, and said that if Belgium refused it would be treated as an enemy. In haste and alarm Edith Cavell packed to return to Brussels. Everywhere there was a fever of anticipation. It was hard to leave her aged mother at such an anxious time but there was no thought in her mind of abandoning the new School she was shaping, her nurses, her mission. More than ever now it seemed Belgium would need her expertise. This time it would be amputees, the shell-shocked, the wounded. She had been at the London Hospital when nurses sailed to the Boer War. She had read Florence Nightingale’s accounts of nursing in a war zone. Whatever was required of her she would give.

  It was hard to secure a passage back. Pauline Randall was adamant about accompanying her. Trains and ferry links were being canceled. Hordes of anxious people were on the move. She managed to get a train to Dover and a late ferry to Ostend crammed with passengers all searching the newspapers for the latest developments. She reached rue de la Culture in the early hours of Monday August 3.

  Throughout the night of August 2 King Albert of Belgium and his Cabinet discussed the crisis. In the morning the King told the Kaiser that his troops were not allowed on Belgian soil, that any invasion was a flagrant attack on the rights of nations, that Belgium was determined to defend her neutrality and would do so by every possible means. He appealed to Britain to safeguard Belgium according to promises made in a treaty of 1839. Sir Edward Gray told the House of Commons the only way for Britain to keep out of this conflict was by taking a position of unconditional neutrality, which they could not in honor do.

  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Labor opposition, opposed Britain entering the conflict. Macdonald thought war a crime. “Honour?” he said.

  There has been no crime committed by statesmen of this character without those statesmen appealing to the nations’ honour. We fought the Crimean War because of our honour. We rushed to South Africa because of our honour. The Right Hon. Gentleman [Sir Edward Grey] is appealing to us today because of our honour … What is the use of talking about coming to the aid of Belgium, when, as a matter of fact, you are engaging in a whole European War which is not going to leave the map of Europe in the position it is in now?

  This was not a view that was popular in the country. It was not held by Edith Cavell. In her view Belgium was undefended and threatened and must be protected. Just as England’s nurses pioneered good practice, so England’s army would put right this wrong.

  On August 4 Germany invaded Belgium. That same day Britain declared war on Germany. Mrs. Cavell opened the Eastern Daily that morning to the headline “GREAT WAR BEGINS.” Her daughter had returned to a war zone. German troops had occupied neutral Luxembourg, which could not resist, and invaded France, without declaring war, at the north-eastern fortress town of Longwy. After a summer of slumbering British people had their eyes opened to the nightmare of what was to ensue. Nineteen million men were under arms in Europe. The central powers—Austria/Hungary and Germany—started with eight million men. The Allied powers—France, Britain, Belgium, Russia, Serbia, Montenegro—had eleven million men under arms. It was a week when mankind slipped out of control, when fears of subjugation allied with dreams of conquest, when past alliances informed makeshift strategies, and when plans were thrown like paper darts into the killing fields of war. Diplomatically it was a week of haste, miscalculation, humiliating ultimata, reluctance to negotiate and true intent disguised. None of the countries going to war anticipated how long the fighting would last or how terrible the cost would be. It was a war of men in high office, though ordinary men fought it and died for it. In implementing the gamble of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany assumed Russia would take six weeks to arm and that Britain would not go to war to fulfill her treaty obligations of 1839 to defend Belgian neutrality.

  Tuesday August 4 had been another hot summer’s day in both London and Brussels. Herbert Asquith asked
for, and got, credit of 100 million pounds “for the general purposes of the war.” In Brussels King Albert rode on horseback through the streets past cheering, flag-waving crowds to Parliament House. “A country that defends its freedom,” he told them, “can never die.” As evening came in London, Sir Edward Gray looked from a window in the Foreign Office at the man lighting the gas lamps in the street below and said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

  PART FOUR

  21

  THE ARRIVAL OF THE ENEMY

  On August 3 German troops crossed the Belgian frontier near Liège. “War was declared by Germany this morning at 9 o’clock,” Edith Cavell wrote home the following day. “All the ports are blocked and we believe in a state of siege. There is very little reliable news as the telegraph and telephone have been seized by the government … There are no soldiers here and Brussels is undefended, only the Civil Guard is keeping order in the town. The treasures and jewels are gone to Antwerp.”

  Britain was to send an Expeditionary Force to drive the German army back. “We were full of enthusiasm for the war and full of confidence in the Allies,” Edith Cavell wrote in a piece for the Nursing Mirror.

  Flags were hung from end to end and no street, however mean, was without its stripes of yellow, red and black. Crowds assembled everywhere to talk over the prospects of a speedy peace, and the newspapers, published all day long, were sold in hundreds at every street corner. The sun shone out and the glorious warm days of late summer were full of courage and anticipation. In the trams, in the trains, on the telephone one heard nothing but discussions on the situation. People who knew each other slightly, or not at all, waxed quite confidential in relating the latest news. We were preparing 18,000 beds for the wounded; all sorts and conditions of people were offering help, giving mattresses and blankets, rolling bandages and making shirts; our chief thought was how to care for those who were sacrificing so much and facing death so bravely at Liège and elsewhere.

  All Germans were ordered to leave the city. The Belgian police checked every house. Edith Cavell took her German probationer nurses to the Gare du Nord and waited all night with them for the special train (the last) that left for Esschen on the Dutch border. “We saw them off with their hand luggage, all they were allowed to take.” She kept her personal German maid, Marie, who had no one to go to. She tried to send Grace Jemmett back to England. “I did my best to send Gracie home but she refused to leave me—she is very quiet and brave,” she wrote to her mother. She told Sister Wilkins she would be safer in England, but she too chose to stay.

  She anticipated that Brussels would become the center for the care of wounded soldiers so she prepared beds at the School, at the Institute and at the St. Gilles hospital.

  Everyone is volunteering, either for fighting or the Red Cross. Our houses are under the Red Cross flag and we are preparing to take in the wounded who will probably be sent on here from the front—but how to feed them is the mystery. All day long people are coming in for information, offering rooms and beds and personal help and motorcars to transport the wounded. I must have seen 50 persons since the morning.

  Her existing patients left, out of fear of the German army. Most went to the coast. Queen Elisabeth offered the Royal Palace for use as a Red Cross hospital. It was quickly converted to the “Ambulance du Palais.” The great ballroom and the Empire room, with marble pillars and crystal chandeliers, and the state apartments, were divided into wards, and filled with iron bedsteads. The Mirror Room was fitted out as an operating theater. There was a room for dressing wounds, an X-ray room, a sluice room, a linen room, a mortuary in the grounds. Mme. Depage began as the sister-in-charge and staff volunteered to work full time: three surgeons, two chief medical officers, three resident doctors, nine ward sisters, stretcher bearers, and a team of boy scouts to help with correspondence and organize ambulances. All the staff were Belgian nationals or from Allied or neutral countries. The expectation was that both Allied and German wounded would be treated at the hospital under the Red Cross flag and the rules of the Geneva Convention.

  Antoine Depage was President of the Red Cross in Belgium. Queen Elisabeth asked him as chief surgeon to head a field hospital at the coastal town of La Panne. The Océan hotel was converted. Many doctors and nurses from his St. Gilles hospital went with him. During the course of the war he and his team were to treat more than 50,000 soldiers suffering wounds, fractures, nitrous gas poisoning, septicaemia and infectious diseases.

  Depage wanted Edith Cavell to stay in Brussels, supervise nursing care there, and keep the project of the new Training School moving forward for when this swift war was through. She inspected schools, factories and private houses and supervised their conversion to temporary hospitals.

  Yesterday I went to inspect a little factory from which all the plant had been removed. The walls were whitewashed and the air blew through it pleasantly. A gallery runs under the roof, and here and on the ground floor are ranged neat, narrow beds with white linen sheets and blankets neatly tucked in. Small tables are covered with clean towels on which bowls and jugs are ready for use. There is a fresh smell of creosote from the newly scrubbed floor. The cellar has been transformed into a store-room for arms and uniforms, and a little kitchen is invitingly supplied with utensils. All looks clean and bright, and through the good will and generous aid of the working population, the whole installation has only cost 30 francs.

  The Red Cross formed a central committee with divisions throughout Belgium to deal with provisions, dressings, ambulances, enrollment of nurses. Doctors, nurses and stretcher-bearers were issued with Red Cross armbands. Edith Cavell flew the Red Cross flag over the School and rapidly trained volunteers to help staff the makeshift hospitals. There was a shortage of money and she posted an appeal in The Times.

  On August 5 Belgian army officers drove through the streets calling through loudhailers for recruits for the army. The mood was of outrage and determination. There was a rumor the enemy had poisoned the water supply, so people tried to use rainwater to make tea. The windows of German businesses and shops were smashed in the night. Liège was said to be burning in a fierce battle. “Liège has resisted beyond all our hopes,” Edith Cavell wrote home next day. “Its defenders are the heroes of the hour.” She was asked to send cars for wounded soldiers who would be arriving on the 6 p.m. train, but most of the wounded were kept on the train and sent on, with doctors, to safer hospitals in Holland.

  Those that are here are for the most part not seriously injured, but are worn out with fatigue, have blistered feet, slight wounds and intestinal problems. They can hardly wait to be patched up before they are off again to join their regiments. One told us he could not lie in a comfortable bed while his comrades were in the midst of a terrible conflict.

  She was wrongly informed about the defense of Liège, Belgium’s gateway city on the river Meuse, with its citadel, merchant houses and alleyways. The battle to defend it lasted twelve days until August 16. Outside the city were twelve huge concrete forts, six on either side of the river. But neither those nor the Belgian force of 70,000 men could withstand the German army’s onslaught with Zeppelin bombs and Big Bertha guns, which took a thousand men to assemble, had a range of 15 kilometers and fired shells that weighed 820 kilos.

  “We have just heard there has been a great battle,” Edith Cavell wrote on August 15:

  —over 700 wounded. Some have arrived; others will come in during the night or tomorrow … Crowds assemble at the railways to see the wounded carried to the waiting ambulances, the men with bared heads and the women with wet eyes. War is terrible in this little country where every one has a relative or friend in the Army and where the fighting furthest from us must still be near at hand. The young men, gone so short a time and so short a distance, and in such brave spirits, are brought back—one dare not think how, even though one has passed twenty years among the sick and suffering.

  This was the reality of it
: the mutilation of young men. She braced herself to alleviate their suffering—with splints and analgesics, dressings, antiseptics, sustenance, warmth and loving care.

  On August 17 the German army began to implement the next stage of the Schlieffen Plan. At Namur, garrisoned with 37,000 Belgian soldiers against 107,000 German troops, morale was low after the fall of Liège. The French and British armies had not arrived. Belgian soldiers had expected their support at Liège. German bombardment with huge shells reduced Namur to rubble in three days. The city was evacuated, thousands of its citizens fled—and from the nearby villages. Ten years previously Edith Cavell had rowed on the River Meuse and sketched the landscape on holiday with the François family. Now columns of refugees formed, the very old and the very young, with mules, dog carts, pony carts, bicycles and random bundled possessions, and with nowhere to go except out of the path of this marauding army. The town of Louvain was next to be decimated. It had a population of 42,000. It was seized by the German army on August 19. For a week after that the town was quiet. But on August 26 a Belgian force advancing from Antwerp attacked a German battalion and killed fifty soldiers. And at the hôtel de ville the mayor’s son shot members of the occupying German staff. The German army then shelled the city, slaughtered citizens and drove out the rest. They then returned with incendiary bombs, set light to them and threw them into houses. Within half an hour the city was ablaze. Next day it was silent. A smoking heap of ruins. The church of St. Peter’s blackened and caved in, Les Halles destroyed, the library and its treasures gone, the houses in rue du Canal, rue de Diest, rue de la Station and rue Louis Quinze a mangle of ruins, bricks, twisted iron, charred beams and acrid smells. Some affluent houses had been marked not to be torched. They were pillaged instead.