Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  Those were the tactics they were all reduced to. They were tense, unnerved and malevolently stalked. Even in the operating theater Edith Cavell would pull aside the curtain to look into the street. She started at unfamiliar sounds, was trepidatious of any knock at the door. Sister Wilkins and Sister Whitelock urged their matron to leave this work. But Edith Cavell would not make intimidation by her oppressors her prime concern.

  On the last day of June she as usual visited the new building. She was discussing, with Sister Wilkins, a group of nurses and one of the doctors, where taps should be positioned in the various rooms, when a probationer burst in to tell her German police were at rue de la Culture asking for her. She told her to tell them where she was. Sister Wilkins thought she did not expect to be present for the move to the new School. Edith Cavell kept pointing out to her things that must be done and care that must be taken, as if she would not herself be the one to implement and supervise. She confided no thoughts about punishment, no personal fear, no shrinking from a path she knew to be right. She did not doubt that the new School must open, the war must end and Belgium must be restored to its people. As she saw it, God’s will would in time shine through these dark days.

  As the net closed she destroyed all remaining evidence. She went on working hard, for there was much to be done. Throughout July she and the nurses moved furniture and equipment into the new School. They pushed it there on handcarts to save money. And despite the men outside ostensibly cleaning the road, the probing by strangers of Marie and Pauline and the vegetable growers in the opposite field, the arrival of unconvincing refugees who knew no passwords and were vague about who sent them, the dirigibles that hovered over the streets, the unannounced searches of the School by police, Edith Cavell still managed to take Patrick Bowen, Sergeant Shiells and Private Revely on the tram to Schaerbeek to hand them over to a trusted guide. She had them all dressed in white as if from a silent order of monks. Their regiment was the Royal Irish Rifles.

  31

  ARREST

  The 21st of July was Independence Day in Belgium and a national holiday. Its celebration dated from 1831 when Leopold I became the country’s first king and Belgium declared independence from Holland. As the day approached in 1915, posters were put up in all public places in Brussels, signed by von Bissing, prohibiting celebrations, demonstrations, assemblies or parades. Edicts had already been passed forbidding the display of flags, emblems, or ribbons in the national colors of red, yellow and black. Belgians responded by taking a new symbol for themselves—the ivy leaf with the legend Je meurs où je m’attache15.

  By word of mouth, Brussels decided to make July 21 a day of mourning. Every shop, café and public building would close. Handbills went round telling people not to go to work, and to pull down blinds and close shutters. La Libre Belgique published an invitation to everyone, Catholic or not, to assemble at the cathedral of Ste Gudule, near the Grande Place, where instead of the day’s customary Te Deum of celebration, High Mass would be held to mark the nation’s grief.

  The Kommandantur heard of this plan and posted affiches saying the closing of shops would constitute a demonstration, a defiance of the prohibition, and invoke heavy punishment. None the less, on the day, every shop closed and every house drew down its blinds. Only a few German beer houses, and the Palace and Astoria hotels, taken over for German officers, stayed open. All along the city streets women handed out ivy leaves and little bouquets of red and yellow flowers. Crowds gathered at the Place des Martyrs and threw these flowers round the monument to those who died fighting the 1830 war of independence. The cathedral was packed to capacity and the crowd spilled out into the street. After Mass the organist played “La Brabançonne,” the Belgian national anthem, at first softly then with all stops out. The crowd sang its words, muted, and then with defiance:

  O Belgique, ô mère chérie,

  À toi nos cœurs, à toi nos bras,

  À toi notre sang, ô Patrie!

  Nous le jurons tous: tu vivras!

  Tu vivras toujours grande et belle

  Et ton invincible unité

  Aura pour devise immortelle:

  Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberté!16

  The organist played it five times. They sang it five times and cried when they came to the words Le Roi, La Loi, la Liberté. They shouted out “Vive le Roi,” “Vive la Belgique.” Their patriotism was forgivable, for their king was in exile, their law replaced by brutal power, and their freedoms all denied. Repression only provoked their defiance. Throughout the city in all the parishes the churches were filled from early morning.

  Von Bissing was more than angered. He criticized von Kraewel for letting it happen and he poured more officials, military and civilian, into the city. They took over the Bois, had all the tables at the smart restaurants, turned Belgians out of their apartments, and punished any Belgian on the slightest complaint from a German.

  A week later, on July 29, the Chief Constable of Norwich delivered a letter to Mrs. Cavell from Ruth de Borchgrave, who was staying at Brougham House in Crowthorne, Berkshire. She had been on the

  Nursing School management committee in Brussels. Her husband Count Camille de Borchgrave had sent a warning message from Brussels. He had been at the School visiting Edith Cavell when two German police officers and a red-faced Englishman with a cockney accent called to question her. The red-faced man told her he could go to England whenever he wanted and get information from her mother and from the Belgian consul in Rotterdam. “Dear Mrs. Cavell” Ruth de Borch-grave wrote:

  I have had a message from Brussels asking me to write and tell you not to speak to anyone of your daughter there. Also to warn you against a certain man—reddish face and fair short military mustache, real cockney accent, who says he has a flower shop at Forest Hill, London. I am sending you this letter through the Chief Constable of Norwich whom I have asked to take note of its contents.

  Your daughter is an old friend of mine and I would gladly help her in any way.

  Please let me know that my letter has reached you.

  Yours sincerely

  Ruth de Borchgrave

  Berkshire police passed the warning to MI5 who found no florid man in Forest Hill.

  The net of intimidation closed. In Brussels the military police watched, and waited for a time to strike. Bergan and his team had spent months amassing evidence. They did not want to arouse suspicion with single arrests. They intended to trawl in all involved. They named as principal suspects the Prince de Croÿ of Bellignies and, in Brussels, Edith Cavell, head of the Berkendael Institute, and Philippe Baucq, architect. Others in their sights were Louise Thuliez, schoolteacher; Herman Capiau, engineer; Ada Bodart, Louis Séverin, chemist; Albert Libiez, barrister; Georges Hostelet, engineer; Princess Marie de Croÿ, Philippe Rasquin, coffeehouse keeper … They had thirty-five suspects. Most were Belgian Walloons. Edith Cavell was the only English national.

  On July 2 Bergan had filed a report of his findings to the Governor General: about the actions of all suspects, safe houses, disguises, passwords, guides who led Allied soldiers over the frontier, the distribution of La Libre Belgique, the collating of information for Les Petits Mots du Soldat.

  On the night of Saturday July 31 the military police struck. Louise Thuliez had planned that night to help six Belgian metalworkers from the Maubeuge region cross the border. She had arranged to meet them in a Brussels café near the Gare du Midi then take them to the rooms she had booked for them in a small hotel owned by a resistance worker, a M. Godefroid. In the afternoon she met up with Philippe Baucq to discuss the logistics of this plan. He suggested that, because it would be late after she had seen them into their lodgings, she spend the night at his house at 49 avenue Roodebeek in Schaerbeek. From 8:30 in the evening she waited for the metalworkers in the agreed café near the station. They did not show up. At 10:00 she got a tram to Baucq’s house. She half noticed four men in the shadows, hats pulled down, scarves knotted round their necks. They were part of a team who fo
r months had been watching his house, twenty-four hours a day.

  Baucq was indoors with his wife, his two daughters aged fourteen and eleven and two nieces aged fifteen and sixteen. They were all folding for distribution the following day the newly printed edition of La Libre Belgique—issue No. 37, the issue that prided itself on the success of the July 21 celebrations, and described the day as a slap in the face for von Bissing, von Kraewel and all the “execrated oppressors.” Louise Thuliez told him the metalworkers had not found the café and that she would have to go to Maubeuge in the morning to collect them. She helped fold the paper and they all talked until about 11:30. Mme. Baucq then showed her to her room while Baucq went to take their dog Diane, a German shepherd, for a bedtime walk. As he opened the door, police pushed through. The dog barked furiously. “Good evening, Monsieur Baucq,” Sergeant Pinkhoff said. “I know you very well.” He demanded to know where the woman was who had recently entered the house. There were police guarding the street. Baucq shouted to his wife and the girls, who threw bundles of the newspaper from top-floor windows. Pinkhoff told Baucq to shut up or he would hit him. The dog barked hysterically. Louise Thuliez had not stayed in Baucq’s house before and did not know its layout. She dashed to the nearest room—the bathroom—and tried to hide her handbag behind the bath. The police seized it. In it was her notebook and a receipt paid only hours before: “To lodging of six men for four days … 66 francs.”

  Pinkhoff questioned her. She was not a good liar. She said her name was Mme. Lejeune. “Where is your husband?” he asked. She said she was separated. He asked where she lived. She could not give her family address for then her name would be known, nor the château at Bellignies, nor where she stayed in Mons—at the house of a friend of the Croÿ family, a Mlle. Duthilleul, nor the boarding house where she usually stayed when in Brussels because it was in rue de la Culture near Edith Cavell’s Nursing School. So she said she had no fixed abode. Pinkhoff said he would remedy that with St. Gilles prison.

  Baucq said nothing. He and Louise Thuliez were shut in separate rooms while the police searched the house. They found 4000 copies of La Libre Belgique No. 37, other “seditious” literature and lists of addresses. At 1:00 a.m. Philippe Baucq and Louise Thuliez were taken under armed guard to the police station at rue de la Loi where Lieutenant Bergan was waiting for them. He charged them with sending soldiers to the Belgian front, circulating seditious literature and prohibited newspapers, and with suspected espionage, and declared them under arrest. At 2:30 a.m., escorted by Pinkhoff, they were taken to St. Gilles prison. Pinkhoff went into long voluble explanations in German with the police there and kept saying endlich, endlich—at last, at last. He was pleased with himself. He had caught his prey. Promotion would follow.

  Baucq’s house was put under armed guard. His wife, daughters and nieces were allowed to touch nothing. At dawn more police came and ransacked it. They found thirty-two copies of the “Proclamation du Roi Albert,” seven documents stamped Ligue de la Propagande, incriminating visiting cards and recruiting addresses, copies of Petits Mots du Soldat, papers identifying Baucq as a member of the garde civique, a memorandum book and a report on two Belgians who were spying for the German police.

  In Louise Thuliez’s handbag they found copies of Petits Mots du Soldat, her false identity card and a notebook of coded addresses. It took them ten days to break her code. The town of Caudry she’d called Tulle—it was a center of tulle manufacture; St. Quentin was St. Ouen. The rue Barrat she called rue Viala because both were named after resistance workers.

  At 10:30 on the morning of that Saturday when she and Baucq were arrested, Constant Cayron, the student who helped the priest Father Piersoul get men to Holland, and Philippe Bodart, a schoolboy whose mother lodged fugitive soldiers, had gone to Baucq’s house. Next day the police arrested them too. Bodart at first refused to say anything about himself and gave false information. Both were imprisoned at St. Gilles.

  News of the arrests spread fast. Prince Reginald de Croÿ hurried from Bellignies to Brussels to warn other members of the group to destroy all evidence, lie low, say nothing to anyone. At rue de la Culture Edith Cavell told him she expected arrest at any moment and would not seek to escape. He asked her if she had destroyed all tangible evidence. She said she had: all addresses, letters, newspapers, diaries. Only the fragment of her diary about the occupation, later found sewn into a cushion, existed somewhere. She urged the Prince to leave the country if he could. He said he had never seen her look so tired. The Prince then went to Mme. Bodart, who had moved from rue Taciturne to rue Emile Wittman, and whose son was in prison. She offered to continue to spread the alarm. She was arrested as she crossed the city.

  Edith Cavell had not said much to her nurses about her secret work. Sister Wilkins had a fair idea of what was going on, but Sister White-lock, Nurses van Til, Waschausky, van Bockstaele, Wolf, Court, Hacks, Wegels and Brenez were all busy moving premises, taking handcarts of furniture, equipment and belongings from rue de la Culture to the new Training School at 32 rue de Bruxelles-Uccle. Thanks to Edith Cavell’s chivvying and determination the School, her achievement and pride, was finished despite all that was happening around her.

  But Bergan and Pinkhoff were hard at work. On Monday August 2 Pauline Randall went for a walk with the daughter of the Flemish cook. A man who had stayed at the School invited them to a café. It was Quien. There were German soldiers in the café. Quien bought the girls drinks, flirted with them, then asked if Miss Cavell would get his friend to the frontier. He said he had been given her name. It seems Pauline Randall’s replies were indiscreet.

  Next day Edith Cavell turned away three callers who said they were English. On August 4 a uniformed German officer arrived. He inspected what was left in her office, looked through her books, asked her if she had received any letters from London. He commented that she had neglected the Institute’s accounts for the past three months, and said he supposed she had been too busy with other things to pay attention to them.

  After he had gone, Edith Cavell told Pauline Randall, Sister Wilkins, Jacqueline van Til and the other nurses to keep cool-headed and calm. The following day, Thursday August 5, they went on with the task of moving equipment and furniture to the new building. Late in the afternoon, at four, Henri Pinkhoff and Otto Mayer arrived. They ransacked Edith Cavell’s office. They could not find much, but anything was incriminating evidence now. They took an innocuous letter from England, sent through the American Legation. On the strength of that, she and Sister Wilkins were arrested. They were marched past the frightened nurses to separate cars. As she passed the nurses, Edith Cavell told them to be strong, that everything would be all right and she would be back soon. She could offer no such consolation to Jack, who whined.

  She and Sister Wilkins were taken to Court B in the Kommandantur, in the ironically named rue de la Loi. Bergan was waiting for them. He interrogated them separately. The seized letter was translated and passed to the “political department” so that “necessary steps could be taken.” “From the seal on the back of the envelope, and from the contents of the letter,” Bergan surmised, “it appears the American Consul in Brussels has taken part in the unlawful transmission of letters.”

  Pinkhoff’s official account read:

  On Aug. 5th 1915 in the afternoon officers of the Secret Police, Duisberg, Plank II and the undersigned presented themselves on the order of the chief of the station, Lieut. Bergan, at the Institute Berkendael, rue de la Culture, No. 149 and there proceeded to a search in the course of which was discovered a letter from England which had been transmitted, in spite of a law forbidding it, through the agency of the American consul. Miss Cavell and her head assistant, Miss Wilkins, were arrested at four o’clock in the afternoon and brought to police station B. After examination by Lieut. Bergan, Miss Wilkins was released. Miss Cavell was detained.

  Sister Wilkins wrote of her interrogation:

  I refused to admit anything and said as I had the first time t
hey questioned me, that I knew nothing. Otto Mayer finally said “You might as well admit these things for we know that you have harboured men in rue de la Culture and that Nurse Cavell has furnished them with guides and money to cross the border. Two of our men have given us that information—Quien and Jacobs.”

  I never knew why I was released but at eight that night I was told that I might go.

  All the way back to the School I kept saying, “Matron must be there when I get back.” But I knew that was only wishful thinking. For if what Mayer had said about Quien and Jacobs was true, then the police knew the part that she had played and she was too important a member of the organisation for them to release her as they had me … I did not see Edith Cavell again until several weeks later when I was allowed to visit her in her prison cell in St. Gilles. As she walked away from me that afternoon, I remember how erectly she carried her slight body. Her whole bearing was calm and composed …

  Sister Wilkins was driven back to the School at 9 p.m. where she and the nurses were kept under armed guard. They could move between the four houses, and go about their nursing business, but they could not go out without permission or unaccompanied. Before midnight they were told by one of these guards that their matron had been detained. Sister Wilkins became hysterical and her cries made neighbors look in through the windows.

  Edith Cavell was consigned to a crowded communal women’s cell at the Kommandantur. On August 6 she managed to get a letter out to Grace Jemmett. As ever her tone was soothing and her concern to reassure. “My dearest Grace, she wrote,

  I do hope you are not worrying about me; tell everybody that I am quite alright here. I suppose from what I hear that I shall be questioned one of these days and when they have all they desire I shall know what they mean to do with me. We are numerous here and there is no chance of being lonely. We can buy food at the canteen, but I should be glad to have one of your red blankets, a serviette, cup, fork, spoon and plate—not the best ones—also one or two towels and my toothbrush. In a day or two some clean linen. I am afraid you will not be able to come and see me at present. But you can write, only your letters will be read.