Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  Prisoners must rise at 6 a.m. in summer and 7 a.m. in winter. They must wash and clean their cells. They are forbidden to write their names on the walls or to draw thereon. During daytime the window may be opened for change of air but it is strictly forbidden to stand close to an open window.

  Prisoners are forbidden to throw pieces of bread or other food through the window or in the toilet, to make a noise, to talk to other prisoners in loud voices or in sign language, to sing, whistle or tap on the pipes, or to give letters or pieces of paper to each other.

  Any attempt to escape will be severely punished. If any prisoner is aware of an attempt to escape and does not inform the Warden he will be severely punished.

  Smoking is strictly forbidden.

  The condemned prisoner is permitted to write a two-page letter or postcard once a week to his family. He is permitted to receive mail after the Warden has examined it.

  The prisoner is permitted to have Twenty Francs on his person. All other money must be handed to the Warden.

  All prisoners will be fed by the Prison Administration. Prisoners will be allowed to buy other food occasionally with their own money. They may also receive some clothes and food once a week. Wine and beer and all kinds of alcohol are strictly forbidden.

  Signed Bohmer

  Chief Warden of the Prison

  For half an hour each day Edith Cavell was allowed out of her cell into a circular high-walled yard for air and exercise. For this she walked round and round with other prisoners, without stopping, at a distance that precluded speech, watched by guards and with a hood over her face with holes cut for the eyes. Prison food was cleanly prepared. Breakfast was a bowl of coffee and a piece of bread. Lunch, served on a wooden board and bowl with a knife, fork and spoon, was soup, potatoes and a piece of meat. At five there was more coffee and bread with a piece of cheese. On Sundays a piece of meat was added to this, which prisoners had to eat with their fingers. At 9:00 a bell rang for bedtime.

  Bergan and Pinkhoff intended to interrogate her again after they had got what they wanted from others in the network. Until then she was not allowed visitors, or to speak to other prisoners, or to inform anyone what was happening to her, or attend the prison chapel or see the prison chaplain. The one weekly letter she could write was pored over by Bergan and Pinkhoff. Nurses’ letters to her were declined or cut until bleached of any but the blandest news. Sister Wilkins came each day to the prison gates. She brought her roses and white chrysanthemums, small amounts of money, clothes, pieces of linen to embroider. Each Sunday she brought a boxed meal and hoped it was given to her. Edith Cavell heard of her freedom and for that was relieved. She asked to see her to discuss practical matters to do with the administration of the School but this request was at first refused.

  Her main concern was that she had left her affairs in disarray and that her nurses would find it hard without her to manage the move to the new School. But the move continued, though German soldiers oversaw it. Sister Wilkins said she managed “the whole caboodle.” Each day José pushed a handcart back and forward from rue de la Culture to 32 rue de Bruxelles. There were seventeen nurses there at the School’s start. The German maid Marie vanished, giving strength to rumors that she had aided the military police.

  Edith Cavell had known it was a matter of time before she was apprehended. She supposed she would be sent to a German prison for the duration of the war. She found the prison warders kind. She was not a woman who could be demeaned by being made to wear a cagoule to conceal her face or by being obliged to eat scraps of meat with her fingers. Her cell became a place of sanctity, its austerity monastic. Though her demeanor was solitary, throughout the unceasing demands of her working career she had seldom been literally alone. From early childhood she had had the habit of prayer. In times of repose her inner conversation was with what to her was God. Through devotional words she found courage. Her hopes were for her mother, her nurses, the work of the School, Grace Jemmett, Pauline Randall, dear old Jack pining for her return. She submitted to the prison routine and awaited further interrogation, trial and sentence. Each night at eleven she heard the sirens of the German police cars as they brought more prisoners, the sounds of marching feet, shouted orders, doors clanging, keys turning, the cries of newcomers and at times silence.

  34

  THE OTHERS

  Bergan and Pinkhoff rounded up thirty-three others from the resistance network. They knew the organizer was Prince Reginald de Croÿ, but he eluded them.

  Philippe Baucq continued to respond to their questions with silence. He was interned in cell 72. He kept a diary on toilet paper and smuggled this out to his wife via one of the Belgian warders. He and his neighboring prisoner, the barrister Albert Libiez, communicated by laboriously tapping on the water pipes which ran between the cells: one tap for A, two for B and so on. Then they found they could actually talk by whispering into the crack where the pipes were sunk into the wall, and write messages and push them through. The only strategy left to discuss was their own defense. Each day the secret police broke apart a bit more of their resistance network.

  Despite repeated questioning Baucq would confirm nothing. After six weeks in prison, and his refusal to corroborate or sign anything, on September 15 at 9:00 in the morning Bergan planted an agent, a mouton, Maurice Neels, in his cell. Baucq trusted him, for he had often met him at a café in rue Victor Hugo. Neels told Baucq his house had been ransacked at 7:00 that morning and he had been arrested because the police found copies of La Libre Belgique, The Times and various French newspapers.

  Baucq told him to confess nothing to his interrogators and agree nothing. He boasted that he had held out against them for sixty-seven days, even when confronted by witnesses. Over the course of the day, he told Neels how he controlled distribution of La Libre Belgique and recruited for the resistance, and that during the search of his house two reports ready for dispatch to Le Havre had been found. He showed him how to communicate with other prisoners through the pipes in the cell.

  Neels was very interested and asked many questions about strategy. Baucq told him how he marked on ordnance maps the best routes for getting to Holland, and how under cover of night he himself often took young men to the border. He said Abbé van Lint was one of his main colleagues in this work, and another was Pastor van Gombergen, who lived at 37 avenue Louis Bertrand. He thought Neels’s transgressions would be viewed as mild, and asked him, when he was freed, to warn the Abbé and Pastor and also two Jesuit Fathers, Meus and Piersoul, of the danger they were in because the student Constant Cayron had given away a great deal of information.

  Neels was led from cell 72 at 4:00 in the afternoon. Baucq supposed he was going to be interrogated, wished him luck, and hoped the advice he had given him would prove helpful, and that he would continue the work. He felt optimistic when night came, Neels did not return, and his bed was removed from the cell. He supposed he had been released, so the priests would be warned, more lives of fugitive soldiers saved and more Belgians helped to enlist.

  Neels reported back to Bergan and Pinkhoff. He told them how Baucq communicated with Libiez in the adjacent cell, and that he saw him push bits of paper into the gaps in the walls where the heating pipes ran through. Baucq was moved to a windowless cell in a different wing on the ground floor. It was damp and cold and there was no one to communicate with on the other side of the wall.

  Louise Thuliez was incriminated by the coded addresses found in her handbag, and the bill, paid two hours before her arrest, for lodging six men for four days. But under cross-examination she also stonewalled and did not, like Edith Cavell, corroborate the facts Bergan and Pinkhoff put to her. She was alert to Bergan’s ploy of “Kniff”—the persuasion that facts were already known in order to trick her into admitting guilt. She insisted she had always acted alone and had never been into the forest villages near Mons. On September 20 her sister tried to visit her at the prison with a friend. They were turned away and followed home.

  But
Bergan and Pinkhoff did not persevere too much with Louise Thuliez. They wanted a conclusion, sentences passed, personal preferment, an example set to terrorize other civilians, not an endless unraveling of the myriad strands of resistance. That was not achievable. Louise Thuliez made no mention of Henriette Moriamé, the other Girl Guide—the brewer’s sister from the village of St. Waast, her partner with whom she had trudged through abandoned battlefields, woodland, and razed villages, looking for enfants perdus in need of help. She saved, too, from the inquisition of these policemen, other helpers like herself in the north of France who had harbored and risked their lives to protect many men.

  “In the circumstances I did not find the Germans very intelligent,” she was to write, some twenty years later, in her memoir Condemned to Death.

  Had they questioned a village child in St. Waast-la-Vallée, and asked him who I so often went out with, they would certainly have learned the part Mlle. Moriamé played in this work for the Patrie. As it was, she was not even suspected, and when after my sentence and reprieve my sister came back from Brussels, reassured as to my fate, Mlle. Moriamé called to see her. She told her she was going away to become a nun the very next day. She entered the convent of the Redemptorist nuns at Maffle, took the veil two years later, and died two months before the Armistice.

  She was the only friend I had with whom I might have shared the memories of our long night-journeys and all the alarms of forest life. I wrote to her once only from Siegburg17 on a card from one of my companions, whose name I borrowed so the Germans might suspect nothing. She replied indirectly, as I had written, but I understood that her mother superior preferred that our correspondence should cease. I never wrote again.

  Like the other thirty-three defendants, Louise Thuliez was instructed to sign the German deposition, typed up by Neuhaus, of whatever she was supposed to have said. She asked to check certain points. When translated back into French by Pinkhoff she told him, “I did not say that.” Pinkhoff said it was the fault of the transcription then let the deposition go without changing a word. “We ought never to have signed those depositions in German,” Louise Thuliez wrote, “for it was utterly impossible for us to verify the translation.”

  Among the accused, only Capiau knew German well. He kept quiet about it, so his captors spoke freely in front of him. He fully understood the ploys they were using to secure convictions and elevate offenses.

  On September 18 Pinkhoff visited Louise Thuliez in her cell and showed her a list of eight Englishmen she had supposedly helped. “I denied having had anything to do with them,” she wrote in her autobiography, “but all the same, on reading the names, I recognised with anguish that it was indeed one of the groups I had guided.”

  Disparate evidence was picked up by Quien, Neels, and other agents for the secret police—the men and women whom Brand Whitlock called “the scum and offscouring of the earth.” The story about the eight Englishmen had been published in a Dutch newspaper. It told how the men had been hidden in a château in the north of France, and of their dangerous journey through Belgium. The police collected pieces of the jigsaw until they had enough to make a picture. They intercepted the letters of other men who had escaped and, thankful for their safety and unaware of at quite what risk their freedom had been acquired, wrote incriminating notes of gratitude to Edith Cavell, Madame Bodart and others. One after another in September the group headed by Prince Reginald de Croÿ was rounded up. Albert Libiez the barrister was betrayed by a former employee, Armand Jeannes, who had tried to pass as a fugitive soldier at the rue de la Culture. On Bergan’s instruction Jeannes checked out all the coded addresses found in Louise Thuliez’s handbag. One morning at the château Bellignies the Princess de Croÿ saw a black car go by with Jeanne de Belleville in the back, flanked by German officers. She went round to try to console her friend’s eighty-year-old mother.

  The secret police took their time before arresting the Princess de Croÿ. They hoped to use her to snare her brother. She was followed and watched, and on a day in late August two cars arrived filled with German soldiers, and the road to the château was cordoned off. An officer demanded to speak to her brother. The Princess said she did not know where he was. Von Kirchenheim of the Maubeuge military police, who was given to hitting his prisoners’ faces with the butt of his gun, urged her to give them his address. This she genuinely could not do.

  They arrested the gardener, M. Legat, and interrogated him to try to find the Prince’s whereabouts. On September 6 at dawn Pinkhoff and Bergan arrived to arrest the Princess. They told her she was suspected of hiding a French pilot shot down in an airplane in the region, that she must make a statement in Brussels and would be free to return to Bellignies that evening. They took her by train to St. Gilles prison and questioned her en route. At the prison, they brought others in the network up from their cells and watched her reaction when she saw them. Bergan told her she would be released as soon as she let them know where her brother was. He said he was in trouble for letting the Prince escape.

  35

  THE ESCAPE OF THE PRINCE DE CROĔ

  A group of people not known to the secret police helped the Prince de Croÿ escape to Holland. The resistance movement had no fixed center and was always shifting. As guides were imprisoned or shot, safe houses raided, covers blown, communications cut and documents seized, others took up the cause in another house, convent or café.

  But by September 1915 it had become well-nigh impossible to cross into Holland. A Flemish workman, Henri Beyns, who lived on the outskirts of Brussels, was the Prince’s main guide to freedom. From the start of the war he had traveled between Holland and Brussels every ten days or so, each time carrying 10 to 15 kilos of letters, to and from the Belgian army. He collected these from, and delivered them to, a nun, who worked under the name of Mlle. Josephine, and who also helped repatriate Allied soldiers. Her main postman was an electrician, Michel Richard.

  Beyns knew most of the monasteries, convents and safe houses where men were hidden and communications printed. Though aware of it, he did not tell the Prince of his sister’s arrest, fearing he would try to go back to rescue her. His first task was to get him a false identity. He acquired the identity card of a Belgian, René Desmet, who had recently died. He then found a witness, “a brave young lady,” who went with the Prince to the Maison Communale to get him a travel pass. The Prince showed the papers of René Desmet. The brave lady affirmed he was Desmet and that she knew him as a neighbor and friend. The Prince was then issued with a pass that allowed him to travel with Beyns by tram to the town of Vilvorde.

  From there they continued on foot. They were joined by a M. Van Maldeghem who also wanted to escape from Belgium. A friend of Beyns ferried them across the river Dyle in the dark because all bridges were guarded. They slept in woodland and in farmworkers’ cottages. At Baelen they stayed five nights with a truly poor family who shared their potatoes, black bread and chicory with them. At the Abbey of Tongerlo they were hidden by monks. The guides who were supposed to take them to the crossing point did not show up. Seven kilometers from the Dutch frontier a guide known to Beyns agreed to get them and four other fugitives across the guarded canal at night. Only the Prince and Van Maldeghem could swim. Beyns was carrying packets of letters and military documents. He had a length of rope, and a canvas bag for the papers and all their clothes. The Prince swam the canal with one end of the rope and tied it high to a tree so that Beyns and the other non-swimmers could pull themselves across and keep the clothes and letters dry. Beyns got across with the clothes and papers, but the cord broke under the weight of the next man. The splash as he fell into the water alerted guards who turned a searchlight toward the noise. The two who had crossed the water hid in rushes until the light averted. There were four men without clothes on the other side of the bank and one in the canal who could not swim. The two safely across left the clothes of the others, with the hope they would find them, then made their own way through the marshes to safety. At the Hague
, the de Croÿs’ cousin Prince Albert de Ligne was Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary. Treatment was first class from there on.

  36

  THE SECOND INTERROGATION

  On August 18, after ten days alone in her cell seeing no one except the warders who passed food through the wicket in the door and escorted her to the exercise yard, and who were themselves victims of this occupation, Edith Cavell was interrogated again. It was the same trio—Bergan, Pinkhoff and Neuhaus, with Otto Mayer as witness, the same procedure and technique, the same scramble of languages and manipulation of evidence to support conclusions already reached. This time they sought to fit all the information they had acquired into seeming incrimination by Edith Cavell of others in the network. They wrote admissions as if she had made them, though in reality they put words into her mouth. She did not give them information but neither did she deny the evidence they said they already had. As before, she stayed quiet about the wider network, and made no mention of guides like Charles Vanderlinden or “Girl Guides” like Henriette Moriamé. Far more effectively than the others she had destroyed evidence. She was too meticulous over detail and concerned for the safety of nurses in the School and the guides and soldiers still in the enemy’s reach, to risk divulgence. The German police did not find letters or address books of hers, or copies of La Libre Belgique. All they could produce was a letter addressed to her which made reference to a soldier who reached England.

  In this second deposition it was written that she confirmed in every detail all she had previously signed. She was recorded as having said that men “seeking to cross the border to rejoin their regiments or enlist” were brought to her from Louise Thuliez, Herman Capiau, Georges Derveau, the chemist Maurice Crabbé, Georges Hostelet and Louis Séverin; that Capiau supplied all false papers for the soldiers; that Louise Thuliez knew her well, had stayed at her house and brought about twenty fugitive English soldiers to her at the instigation of Libiez, Capiau and the rest. “I recollect clearly that often the accused Thuliez said to me, ‘I come with the men from the lawyer Libiez,’” she was reported to have said. She was supposed to have admitted that on one occasion Louise Thuliez visited with her brother-in-law Auguste Joly, that Georges Hostelet, who lived in Uccle, introduced the chemist Séverin to her and gave her 500 francs to finance the journeys of Allied soldiers seeking to re-enlist.