Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  Could you send me 3 or 4 stamps in your next letter as I cannot stamp this and am afraid you may have to pay double postage from London. The house next door is let in flats and the walls are so thin that we can hear a good deal of what goes on—a disadvantage, but compensated by the fact that our house is warmer and drier than in previous winters.

  The new School progresses very slowly—some of the glass and the iron work of the doors is stuck on the railways and has been since August—also the workmen are unable to come from any distance on account of the standstill in all traffic. We shall not be in next year now I expect.

  My very dear love to you all

  Ever your affectionate daughter

  Edith

  She needed stamps because the letters she sent would be posted by escaping soldiers in England. She needed information about the arrival of these men—needed to know escape routes were safe, for those whom she was yet to help. She worried about her family’s safety, about invasion of England and bombardment from the sea. “We hear the guns at night,” she wrote, and feared the fighting would engulf them too. Lilian returned to hospital nursing again as her part in the war effort; Jack was a special constable and “doing his share.” “The lady next door to Cumberland Cottage” was the schoolteacher Mrs. Tapscott, who she had hoped would find news about one, or some, of the escaping men. A disadvantage of thin walls between the School and the next-door house was that it was hard to impose rules of silence on young soldiers.

  Her life in Brussels was less quiet than she conveyed in letters home. She told her mother about privation: the black bread, the empty hospital, lack of money, the slow progress on the new School. Only by allusion, though, to her mother or anyone, could she confide news about disguised soldiers who knocked at the door with the password Yorc, her contacts for safe houses, the money she raised, the guides she procured, the false papers she acquired.

  The “cruel vindictive foe” tightened its clampdown. In December 1914 the Kaiser sent a new Governor General to Brussels: General Baron Moritz von Bissing. Brand Whitlock at the American Legation described him as “a man whose name was destined to stand forth to the world as the symbol of one of the darkest, cruelest and most sinister pages of its miserable history.” He was in his seventies, tall, thin, with gray hair plastered back and a wide mustache. He wore a ceremonial saber, and silver spurs in his boots. He liked shooting deer and hanging their antlers on the commandeered walls. His first act, by a decree of December 8, was to impose on the Belgian population a war levy of 480 million francs. After that he policed and circumscribed every aspect of their lives. One of his more grisly edicts was that the bodies of dead animals not fit for food be delivered up to the Oelzentrale to be rendered into grease. Word went round that he was using the bodies of dead soldiers—of which there were plenty. La Libre Belgique lampooned him mercilessly and incensed him. One issue showed him sitting at his desk reading a copy of it; another showed him bowed down under the weight of arrest warrants for the publishers of the paper; yet another had a cartoon of the Kaiser in hell. Von Bissing offered large rewards for the arrest of those writing, printing and distributing La Libre Belgique, declared it espionage to carry a copy across the Belgian frontier, and ruled that to possess it was a crime punishable with a fine of 5,000 to 75,000 francs and imprisonment of up to a year.

  Early in the new year he decreed that notices be posted instructing all British, French and Russian nationals to register at the École Militaire on prescribed dates. The decree had previously applied only to men. Now it was extended to women too. Severe punishment was threatened for those who failed to register, or who sheltered anyone required to do so.

  Ruth Moore discussed the edict with Edith Cavell who told her she was not going to comply: she belonged to a Belgian training school and was working for the Belgian Red Cross. She advised Ruth Moore not to register and, if questioned by any official, to refer him to her. Ruth Moore felt uneasy at this advice. She thought it might bring trouble to the Red Cross under whose flag she was working, and to herself. As she saw it she was an Englishwoman who had complied fully with the authorities. She had done nothing they might construe as wrong. She had letters from German patients whom she had nursed so well that they had returned to the fighting lines. She sought an interview with the head of the Brussels Red Cross. He said there was no doubt she must register. He told her to get to the École Militaire at rue du Méridien early on the appointed day and wear the Red Cross armband. She had to walk between two rows of German soldiers with fixed bayonets. Some were her old patients. She was given an identity card with her name, nationality and age, and told to check in every fortnight with this card. She wondered why her matron chose not to obey this summons to report and thought it a mistake.

  La Libre Belgique February 1, 1915. Its faked picture shows the German Governor General Moritz von Bissing “searching for the truth” in the paper

  Edith Cavell did not lightly disobey an order. Obedience to male command had been impressed on her from the cradle. Her authoritarian father had preached the sermons and made the decisions. His word was law. Eva Lückes had impressed on her that as a nurse hers was a serving role: “The Doctor prescribes; it is left to the Nurse to carry out that prescription.” But Edith Cavell had traveled far, seen much and grown in independence. Her views were hard won, her courage tested. At the age of forty-nine she was quite sure where virtue lay. This military domain of conquest and suppression was anathema to her. She would not obey the commands of von Bissing and his henchmen. She was too brave a woman to bow to threats of punishment and violence.

  “My darling Mother,” she wrote on January 8, 1915 soon after the registration edict was passed:

  I take another opportunity to write to you and hope the letter will arrive. I have heard nothing from you since the two letters of Dec 17 one dated Dec 2nd & the other Nov. 24th. I know you must have written since then but nothing has reached me. I give you again the best address I can.

  My name & address here, & then

  c/o Mr. d’Aubrie de Bournville

  Bergen op Zoom

  Holland

  All is well here still, tho in the country people are in great difficulty for food—bread is scarce & in many places there is none at all, the difficulty of transport is so great with no trains & no petrol & very few horses.

  We are more & more shut in and are beginning to feel it a good deal. The frontiers are watched so that no one may leave the country & there is little news & no letters. A vigorous search is still being carried on for all E. men & now all foreign women have to register. The town is quiet & sad, the big shops are partly shut and some threaten to shut down entirely—that means great numbers of people out of work. Numbers of rich Belgians are in England which means that tailors & dressmakers are out of employ. Belgians here are angry about it and say they should have remained to help.

  The Avenue Louise is almost entirely shut up and so are other good residential quarters.

  The man who takes this letter has just come so I must close. Don’t be anxious about us; we are quite well & not in any danger. Gracie is back from her visit & very much better after her 6 weeks change. Will you please send on her letter.

  We hear the Gs are getting demoralised & I think they are less & less sure of the victory. The town is full of them.

  My dearest love to you all & Best Wishes for a much better & Happier New Year. I hope you are well & enjoying your stay at Henley—

  Ever your affectionate daughter

  Edith

  26

  THE MEN WHO DIED IN SWATHES

  The men who obeyed Kitchener’s pointing finger and were inspired to defend their country, vanquish evil and safeguard freedom, died in swathes. They came from every village, hamlet, town and city, from every class and occupation. “The British Empire is fighting for its existence,” they were told. “I shall want more men and still more,” Kitchener said, “until the enemy is crushed … Every fit man owes this duty to himself and to hi
s country.” They were given a uniform and brief training. They were fit when they went to Flanders, in summer, to fields of corn that sparkled with red poppies. In the days and years that followed engulfing horror echoed back: in statistics—250,000 of them dead in a day; in the poetry and prose of Hermann Hesse, Rudyard Kipling, Guillaume Apollinaire, Erich Maria Remarque, Siegfried Sassoon; in the paintings of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Paul Nash, Gino Severini, Wyndham Lewis; in incoherent photographs of craters, men impaled on barbed wire, mutilated horses, donkeys stuck in mud, gleaners raking for morsels of food, the stumps of what was a town, forest, church or leg; fat uniformed leaders covered in medals; dead horses and donkeys, German soldiers goose-stepping down boulevards, dogs pulling gun carriages, corpses in mud, women searching casualty lists, palls of smoke, refugees carrying bundles of bedding; and in the anguish of letters home from battlefields and trenches, censored if they revealed too much pain, but for many the last they heard of the young men they knew. By November 1914, along the border of Belgium and France violent battles for conquest had turned to the stagnation of trench warfare. Two warring lines of trenches stretched 600 kilometers from Switzerland to the Channel coast. Attacks staged by both sides saw advances of no more than 10 kilometers until the spring of 1918.

  The entrenched armies were often only yards apart, separated by barbed wire from no man’s land between. The British army held a stretch of this Western Front along what was called the Ypres Salient for 35 kilometers south to the La Bassée Canal. In these fetid ditches between 1914 and 1918 over a million fighting men died. The Allies were determined the cathedral city of Ypres should not fall to German occupation. In the first battle of Ypres, from October 19 to November 22, British casualties were reported at 58,000.

  1914

  In December 1914 the weather in Belgium was wet and cold. “People think it is mud and wet we mind,” Corporal Parr wrote home to a friend. “That is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared with the nerve-racking hell of bombardment. I can’t think that human nature ever had to stand in any kind of warfare in history what the modern infantrymen has to stand.” He died a month later, aged twenty-seven.

  “Perhaps you don’t know the two sorts of shells,” Lieutenant Denis Barnett wrote to his mother: “There’s the big brute, full of lyddite or melinite or some high explosive, which bursts when it hits the ground, and makes a big hole blowing out in every direction, but chiefly upwards, and may kill you some hundreds of yards off … The other sort is full of bullets and timed to burst in the air when the bullets carry on forwards and downwards in a fan shape … The crescendo effect is rather terrifying.” He had joined the army after leaving school. He was killed on August 15, 1915, aged twenty.

  “As for the morals of the war, they are horrible,” Captain John Crombie of the Gordon Highlanders wrote to a friend. “For instance, listen to this … When you come to a dug-out, you throw some smoke bombs down, and then smoke the rest out with a smoke bomb, so that they must either choke or come out. Now when they come out they are half blinded and choked with poisonous smoke, and you station a man at the entrance to receive them, but as you have only got a party of nine, it would be difficult to spare men if you took them prisoners, so the instructions are that these poor half-blinded devils should be bayoneted as they come up. It may be expedient from a military point of view, but if it had been suggested before the war, who would not have held up their hands in horror?” He was killed in France in April 1917, aged twenty.

  “I have only had my boots off once in the last 10 days and only washed twice,” Julian Grenfell wrote to his mother from Flanders in October 1914. “Our poor horses do not get their saddles off when we are in the trenches. The wretched inhabitants here have got practically no food left. It is miserable to see them leaving their houses, and tracking away, with great bundles and children in their hands. And the dogs and cats left in the deserted villages are piteous …” He was killed in May 1915, aged twenty-seven.

  A stretcher party carrying wounded men, 1915

  Mules and men with the British ammunition corps, 1915

  Eight million horses were to die in this war. They too rotted into the earth like the ten million fighting men. Of the million horses requisitioned by the British Army, 62,000 returned. They came from safe stables, green fields and quiet villages. They had names when they left. They died stabbed in cavalry charges, caught in the path of battle tanks, enmeshed in barbed wire, blasted by shells in battle, or sunk in the mud of shell craters. They gnawed at the wood of gun carriages because they were so starved. They were worked to exhaustion and shot when they could do no more.

  “Oh the smell of the cows and the new mown hay, after being in the cage with 22 unburied Germans,” William Grenfell wrote home, two months after his brother Julian died. “Do you know I had not seen a corpus vile since I was fifteen, at the Morgue, and dreamed of it for weeks afterwards. I guess you could not show me much new now in that line …” He was killed in Flanders in July 1915. He was twenty-five.

  “Do you think that the experience of this War has made the general public realise that there must be other ways of settling points of dispute which are as satisfactory as the way of bloodshed?” Lieutenant Horace Fletcher wrote to his mother in 1916. “If man were to make a venture of faith, and believe that there is a way (if demanding more patience), such a way would be found.” He had wanted to be a priest. He was killed in March 1917, aged twenty-eight.

  “The suffering of men at the Front,” Captain William Mason wrote to his father, “of the wounded whose flesh and bodies are torn in a way you cannot conceive; the sorrow of those at home who hear of casualties among their dear ones, and the ever present anxiety for those who are not casualties. And all that is being piled up day after day in France, England, Germany, Bulgaria and Turkey! What a cruel and mad diversion of human activity! Food indeed for pessimism if ever there was …” He was a lecturer at Bristol University. He was killed aged twenty-seven in July 1916 in France.

  “The road thirty yards behind us was a nightmare to me,” Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae wrote to his mother in May 1915. “I saw all the tragedies of war enacted there. A wagon, or a bunch of horses, or a stray man, or a couple of men, would get there just in time for a shell. One would see the absolute knock-out, and the obviously lightly wounded crawling off on hands and knees; or worse yet, at night, one would hear the tragedy—‘that horse scream’—or the man’s moan. Seventeen days of Hades …” He was a doctor. He was killed in January 1918 in France, aged forty-five.

  “Any faith in religion I ever had is most frightfully shaken by things I’ve seen,” Lieutenant Peter Layard wrote to his parents in March 1916, “and it’s incredible that if God could make a 17-inch shell not explode—it seems incredible that he lets them explode … I hate the whole thing, and so do we all, because it shouldn’t be.” He was killed in France in August 1918 at the age of twenty-two.

  “If I live I mean to spend the rest of my life working for perpetual peace,” Captain Thomas Kettle wrote to his brother a week before he died in France in September 1916. “I have seen war and faced modern artillery and know what an outrage it is against simple men … The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers.” He was a barrister. He was thirty-two when he died.

  “It is VILE that all my time should be devoted to killing Germans whom I don’t in the least want to kill,” Brigadier-General Philip Howele wrote to his wife in November 1914. “If all Germany could be united in one man and he and I could be shut up together just to talk things out, we could settle the war, I feel, in less than one hour. The ideal war would include long and frequent armistices during which both sides could walk across the trenches and discuss their respective points of view. We are really only fighting just because we are all so ignorant and stupid. And if diplomats were really clever such a thing as war could never be.” He was kil
led in France in October 1916 aged thirty-eight.

  In the trenches a third of Allied casualties were sustained. Shells turned them to graves. Snipers’ bullets killed those sent out to mend barbed wire, relieve others, bring supplies. There were infestations of rats, brown and black, gorging on dead men, spreading infection and contaminating food. Lice bred in the seams of filthy clothing and spread trench fever. Recovery took twelve weeks. Trench foot was a fungal infection caused by cold, wet and dirt. If the foot turned gangrenous it was amputated.

  Antoine Depage’s military hospital, the Ambulance de l’Océan at the coastal town of La Panne, was near the trenches. It had begun with 200 beds, had 900 by 1916 and 2,000 by the war’s end. Depage organized it into wings and segregated casualties according to their type of wounds. He set up a laboratory alongside it to analyze infected and injured tissue. He also sent mobile units from the hospital to the trenches—four cars to collect the wounded and a trailer fitted as an operating theater for immediate treatment of grievous wounds.

  The trenches of the Western Front were in fertile farmland, cultivated, manured and rich in pathogenic microbes. Seriously wounded men lay in mud until night fell, or a truce allowed them to be taken to medical care. The dead were left to rot in shallow graves: “mud and dirt pervade everything; and bacteriological investigations of the soil, of the clothing, and of the skin demonstrate the presence of the most dangerous pathogenic organisms in all three.” Alexander Fleming did many bacteriological studies in Depage’s research unit. Clothing samples from wounded soldiers contained the bacilli that caused dysentery, tetanus, and streptococcal and staphylococcal infection. Ten percent of casualties developed gangrene.