Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  After the first month of the war, the only functioning Red Cross hospital in Brussels was the Ambulance du Palais Royale, run by Belgian doctors and nurses and bound by the Geneva Convention to admit wounded of all the warring nations. The first casualties arrived there on August 16. Edith Cavell sent eight of her Belgian and Dutch nurses, and Nurse Moore, who though English born was fluent in German. She wanted them to gain experience in treating the war wounded. Harrowing though it was, she thought it would make them better nurses. She told them to remember they represented the Training School.

  The German authorities were suspicious of the hospital and wanted it closed. They accused the staff of unsatisfactory treatment of German wounded, of interfering with their correspondence, of using the Red Cross flag to send signals. In the middle of the night on September 16 soldiers forcibly removed twenty-three Belgian wounded, several of whom had just been operated on, and sent them to Germany.

  Ruth Moore wrote an account of nursing at the Palace and of the common suffering of wounded men. She was in charge of four German wards. Many patients had terrible wounds, many died. She was summoned whenever a wounded British soldier was brought in. “Venez un anglais,” she would hear at two in the morning. She removed his muddy clothes, dressed his wounds, got him into a clean and comfortable bed and did not tell him that the 5 a.m. ambulance train would take him to Germany. At least, she thought, he might have a few hours’ sleep.

  The Royal Palace. The only Red Cross hospital in Brussels during the war. The Mirror Room became an operating theater, the state apartments became wards

  A German patient, a sergeant, helped her. He wrote letters for the other men, read to them, went shopping for them. The youngest of her patients she called Kindchen. He was grievously wounded. His mother sent him a letter saying his brother had died at sea. Two weeks before that another brother had been killed. One night he asked Ruth Moore to sit with him. He said he too wanted to die. In his locker drawer she found a pistol.

  In the evenings from 5:00 to 6:00 the soldiers had a recreation hour and sang and smoked. One night Nurse Moore was on the ward finishing her reports and filling in charts. One of the men started singing “Das Lied der Deutschen,” the Song of the Germans, and the others joined in. The sergeant told them to stop, asked if they had forgotten where they were and who was in the ward. They changed the song and she left the ward.

  The Depages’ house was soon closed up. For the first months of the war Marie Depage worked at the Palace Hospital, uncertain of what the nursing requirement would be there. In November she joined her husband at the Océan Hospital at La Panne.

  Edith Cavell’s frustration was to be denied the opportunity to nurse in the capacity needed. She stayed in a state of readiness, though with fewer nurses and not many civilian patients. At the School, the Berkendael Institute and the St. Gilles hospital, beds were waiting and the wards cleaned each day. The cook and housekeeper went to market five times a week to buy supplies as economically as possible. Edith Cavell went on giving daily lectures to her nurses. Every day she walked with Pauline Randall and Jack to check on building progress for the new School. Some work continued, but materials needed were stuck in trucks on the paralyzed railway, and workmen could not get in because no movement of traffic was allowed.

  Life, she said, reverted to the Middle Ages. There was a shortage of bread. The sort they got was black and heavy. Letters took months to get through, if at all. Poverty became extreme. There were feeding stations for impoverished children, stations to hand out clothes. “We are engaged in making up all the stuff we can get into garments for the children of the refugees and the other poor,” she wrote in a letter home. Soup kitchens in every quartier were organized by the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation, financed by America. Brand Whitlock, at the American Legation, extracted a guarantee from the Governor General that this food would not be requisitioned. Queues formed of people, each with a number and card, holding bowls and pitchers. They were given soup and bread, coffee with chicory.

  As summer turned to misty autumn, Brussels became paralyzed. There were “no gaieties of any sort.” Theaters, cinemas and all places of amusement shut down:

  The once busy and bustling streets are very quiet and silent. So are the people who were so gay and communicative in the summer. No one speaks to his neighbour in the tram, for he may be a spy. Besides, what news is there to tell, and who has the heart to gossip, and what fashions are there to speak of, and who ever goes to a theatre or a concert nowadays, and who would care to tell of their all-absorbing anxiety as to how to make both ends meet and spin out the last of the savings or to keep the little mouths filled, with the stranger close by?

  I am but a looker-on after all, for it is not my country whose soil is desecrated and whose sacred places are laid waste. I can only feel the deep and tender pity of the friend within the gates, and observe with sympathy and admiration the high courage and self-control of a people enduring a long and terrible agony …

  A German officer on a tram politely asked a gentleman for a light; he handed him his cigar without a word, and, on receiving it back, threw it in the gutter. Such incidents happen often and are typical of the conduct of this much-tried nation.

  “You would think every day a Sunday,” Edith Cavell told her mother:

  so few shops and houses open and so many people walking about with nothing to do. The streets are strangely quiet with no motors, it makes it much easier and pleasanter getting about, you would certainly prefer it. We have the trams as usual, but at night they may not go through certain parts of the town and have to alter their usual course. There are fewer lights too in the evening in the streets, some of which are as dark as in the middle ages, all the houses shuttered and the shops shut. It looks very gloomy and strange.

  Survival was the effort of each day. Even when the banks opened there was a restriction on how much of their own money people could draw out. Coal was scarce and Edith Cavell was glad of the blue woolen jacket her mother had knitted for her: “I wear it every day when I am sitting still over accounts or writing,” she wrote to her. She said it was a great comfort, a reminder of ordinary life. “I often wish you were here at teatime to pour the tea for me.” She lived on pittance money for herself and gave what she could to those who needed it more. She asked her sister Florence about the possibilities of adoption in England for orphaned Belgian children. She was concerned to feed and care for her Brussels family: her devoted deputy Sister Wilkins, José the Rumanian housekeeper, Pauline Randall, Marie her German maid, Grace Jemmett and the ever-faithful Jack. Grace Jemmett became depressed. The war and an atmosphere of anxiety exacerbated her illness and she took to her bed. Edith Cavell tried to get medical help, but not much was on offer for mental illness. Grace’s mother was unconcerned that her daughter was in a war zone. “She seems to feel no anxiety,” Edith Cavell wrote. The Jemmetts’ only involvement with their daughter had been to send a monthly check.

  A Belgian priest wearing the armband of the Red Cross passes German soldiers, Brussels 1915

  Edith Cavell urged her own mother not to tell Grace’s parents about their daughter’s relapse and to keep the money meant for her board and care, not try to send it on. Before this war Edith had sent her mother a monthly allowance. The Jemmett money might serve instead.

  She became one of the few English people left in the city. Most left, and many Belgians too. The Church of the Resurrection, where she used to worship, closed, when there were not enough worshippers to make the Reverend Philip Stocks’s time in Belgium worth while. He returned to England. He had been a curate in Hoxton in the late 1880s. Edith Cavell moved to Christ Church in rue de la Royauté and a new chaplain, the Reverend Horace Stirling Townsend Gahan, who had been curate of St. Thomas’s church in Southborough in Kent.

  She was not by nature a looker-on at “people enduring a long and terrible agony.” It was her grief not to be nursing. Antoine Depage planned to smuggle her out of Brussels to work at h
is Océan hospital. But by late autumn her war effort had altered. “The sick have magically disappeared,” she wrote to her sister Lilian on November 9, “there is much to do beyond our reach.” Her determination to help had not diminished. She was well known in Brussels, respected and influential, fluent in French and English. In defiance of injustice and hardship people looked out for each other with food, clothing and money. Information was by word of mouth. Resistance to the occupying enemy grew into a network of small deeds and large: the giving of food, carrying a message, the provision of a map, shelter, false papers and disguise, helping an endangered Allied soldier escape to safety.

  23

  THE LOST CHILDREN

  The longed-for British Expeditionary Force, the BEF, had reached Belgium on August 21, by which time the German army had wreaked destruction on Liège, Namur, Louvain, killed tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, seized Brussels and was on its way south and west to Paris. The BEF was the best trained in Europe. Its soldiers had seven years of training against the German conscripts’ three. But it was small—150,000 men, short of officers, ammunition and guns, and in peril because of failures of strategy at top level.

  On August 22 the BEF headed down from the Belgian coast to meet up with General Lanrezac’s forces at Charleroi. Near Mons Sir John French, Britain’s commander-in-chief, was surprised to encounter heavy cavalry patrols from the German First Army. This was contrary to advice he had received from France’s headquarters. He decided to take on this army and stop its advance by destroying the bridges over the Mons-Condé canal. The Battle of Mons ensued, the first battle between British and German forces on the Western Front, one of the Battles of the Frontier fought that August at Mulhouse, Lorraine, the Ardennes, Charleroi.

  Harry Beaumont was a private with the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, a unit of the 13th Infantry Brigade of the BEF. He did not know about the Schlieffen Plan and prior to this war had not heard of Mons. He and his unit advanced when told to advance, retreated when told to retreat. They marched down the Belgian lanes: columns of men, horses and wagons dragging munitions and armaments. In the first two weeks of the war 57,000 horses from Britain had been requisitioned: Clydesdale horses from the brewers’ drays and railway vans, unused to military harness. During this war a million horses from Britain were killed and 250,000 mules.

  Harry Beaumont had been called up sixteen days before from the Army Reserve. He, like all his company, was optimistic that the war would be over by Christmas. “We had faith in our leaders and confidence in our ability to win through any task that we might be called upon to perform.” He was thirty, not particularly fit and had married the previous year. That August, in ninety degrees of heat, wearing thick khaki and woolen underwear, and carrying a pack and equipment weighing eighty pounds, he and his regiment marched toward Mons. The landscape was hilly and cut by canals and railways. They washed in duck ponds and slept in hay.

  On the evening of August 22 they limped exhausted into the mining village of Hornu. Villagers told them they were 10 kilometers west of Mons, gave them beer, cigarettes and food and brought their children to see the British troops who had come to their rescue. Next day was a Sunday. The men were ordered to stay at Hornu for a day of rest then march to Mons on the Monday. There was the sound of church bells, there were cattle grazing. After Mass the German army attacked. There was fire from field guns and the scream of shells and villagers.

  Beaumont’s regiment was ordered to advance along the nearby canal until they reached the village of St. Ghislain where a bridge spanned the canal. They discarded their packs because they were so heavy. Beaumont’s platoon took up position in a glass factory outside the village at the canal’s edge. They fired at German soldiers with machine guns and rifles and killed many men. When night came they left the factory and took up a new position on the embankment. They again saw the German army advancing and again killed many of them. They felt they were doing well. In a day’s fighting only one of their men had been killed and two wounded. But at 1:00 a.m on August 24 they received orders to retreat. They were told that this retreat would be total. They could not believe it or understand why. They blew up the bridge and moved off into the night.

  The men doing the fighting did not know of the confusion of their generals—how Sir John French too late realized the superior strength of the German First Army; how he had heard that General Lanrezac had retreated and could offer no support from French troops; how he thought the BEF would be encircled, cut off and decimated; how he had told the British government he feared for the safety of the Channel ports and was going to pull back to Valenciennes, Longueville, Maubeuge—they only knew they were in retreat.

  As they moved back along the lanes—long columns of uniformed men, exhausted horses, tanks and guns, they were joined by even longer columns of refugees as the country folk of Belgium fled from their villages, hamlets and farms. Villagers piled themselves and their possessions onto horse-drawn carts, carts drawn by oxen and mules, pony carts, handcarts, landaus, barrows. They rode on bicycles, trudged on foot, carried whatever they could and did not know where they were going. Behind them was the smoke and fire of the enemy drawing nearer.

  At dawn on August 24 Beaumont’s regiment reached the mining village of Wasmes, 3 kilometers south of St. Ghislain and 10 kilometers south-west of Mons. Within hours the German army started to shell this village too. The soldiers of the Royal West Kent were told to make their way to fields where trenches had been dug a few hours before by the Royal Engineers. From these trenches they were to fight a rearguard action, holding back the enemy so that the rest of the Force could retreat. To get to the trenches they had to go through a wood and a cornfield. The corn had been cut and bound in stooks. “In blissful ignorance we advanced across the stubble.” German soldiers rose from the trenches they were intending to occupy and wiped most of them out in withering close-range fire. Beaumont was hit in the groin. He lay as if dead and watched his fellow soldiers drop dead around him. In a few minutes, four officers and forty-five men were killed. When the gunfire died down he scurried to hide behind a heap of manure. Three other men were there, all wounded. When it was quiet the four of them limped to adjacent woodland. There was a wall close by and Beaumont tried to slide down a bank to it to be shielded from shellfire. A shell hit the base of it and it collapsed on him. When he came to, it was another day and he was alone.

  He had become one of those the French called les enfants perdus. The Germans called them derelicts. In the bitter fighting of the rear-guard action of the retreat from Mons small groups of men got cut off from their regiments. They were wounded by shells, shrapnel and bullets. They had no brandy, morphine, bandages, or splints. They lay in the trenches or in the mud until dark, for only when the fighting stopped could stretcher bearers search for them. If they were undiscovered, their wounds became a mess of pus and gangrene and they were left to their wits, to luck and the kindness of strangers. They crawled to where they could under cover of night. Even if they got to field hospitals, often they died, for there were no antibiotics. If they surrendered they were sent to prisoner-of-war camps. Some organized themselves into guerrilla groups, or tried to get to Louvain, Brussels or south-west to Liège, Huy, Namur Dinant.

  Wounded Allied soldiers retreat from Mons, August 1914

  Like Harry Beaumont, Colonel Dudley Boger was another of the lost children after the retreat to the Dutch border and to freedom. They scattered the land, for the German army’s thrust through Belgium was in many directions: north to Antwerp, Furnes, Ostend and Ypres; west to Tirlemont and Mons. He was forty-nine, Sandhurst trained, had served in India, Malta and Ireland and was commander of the 1st Cheshires, a battalion of a thousand men. His orders on August 24 were to protect with a rearguard action a mile of the front line near the village of Audregnies. The two regiments in front of him were decimated. Men and horses from the 9th Lancers and the 1st Norfolks were mown down, decapitated by wire, shot at by nine German batteries. Instr
uctions to retreat did not get through to Boger and in the afternoon his battalion fought for three hours against massive infantry attack. Only two hundred of the thousand men were left alive. Most of those surrendered and became prisoners of war. The severely wounded lay where they fell in ditches and cornfields and died.

  Boger was shot three times. He was wounded in his side and a spur went through his foot. He lay in a field beside three other wounded men. German soldiers took his revolver and binoculars, broke the men’s rifles and left the four of them lying there.

  After dark Boger crawled to the nearby village of Wihéries, where the convent hospital was under German guard. About forty other wounded British soldiers were there: Sergeant Fred Meachin, Sergeant Tunmore, Private Lewis, Lance-Corporal Doman … Boger’s wounds were treated with primitive equipment and makeshift facilities by Dr. Valentin van Hassel. When the guards were having breakfast, Colonel Boger and Sergeant Meachin escaped over the convent wall. Van Hassel directed them to the house in the village of his son-in-law, Albert Libiez, a barrister. Libiez and his wife hid them in a barn in the garden and for weeks fed and clothed them. Boger grew a beard, wore a black hat, and tried to look Belgian. Meachin wore laborer’s overalls and padded his shoulders to look like a hunchback.