Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  50

  GERMAN REACTION

  Ordinary citizens in Germany were dismayed at Edith Cavell’s killing and the way the German character was portrayed around the world. The Frankfurter Zeitung on Sunday October 24 wrote of how the military authority in Brussels “by the device of classing as espionage deeds of widely varying nature and of twenty different categories, has been able to provide a motive for assassinating twenty times the number of people and maddening two hundred more.” The Kaiser distanced himself from the killing, ordered that no more women be shot without his sanction and after investigation recalled Sauberzweig and had him posted to the Western Front in the north of France. “Cavell Case Causes Official’s Removal” was the story in the New York Times for November 2. Stoeber, the military prosecutor, was also recalled.

  German officials in Brussels were humiliated. They banned the sale of the Rotterdamsche Courant and other Dutch papers. Von der Lancken blamed Brand Whitlock for disseminating false information. On Monday October 25, thirteen days after Edith Cavell’s execution, he summoned him to the Politische Abteilung. It was raining heavily. Whitlock was convalescing: “The Baron von der Lancken, just back from his morning ride, booted, with his Iron Cross and other ribbons, the white cross of St. John on his side, and a large dossier under his arm, received me with a dark, glowering face, and asked me upstairs to his little workroom where a fire was burning.”

  He had highlighted passages from The Times and Morning Post with blue and red pencils. All this, he raged, was based on false information sent out by Whitlock. It made it seem that he, von der Lancken, had broken promises. It was untrue Whitlock had made frequent inquiries on Edith Cavell’s behalf. He was in Brussels by courtesy of the German government. His Legation was in service to England, Germany’s enemy. He had compromised American neutrality. He must publicly express regret for the press coverage and clear the German authorities from blame. His lawyer, Gaston de Leval, should be dismissed. Arrangements were under way to arrest and deport him …

  The tirade went on. The Spanish Minister, the Marquis de Villa-lobar, joined them. Von der Lancken pointed to coverage in the Graphic. Villalobar sighed at the photograph of himself in a yachting cap at Cowes taken thirty years previously. Von der Lancken gave Whitlock pencil and paper and commanded him to make a statement, in writing, admitting falsehoods in the published account. Whitlock refused and offered to leave Belgium. “We talked all afternoon—a terrible afternoon. I was weary and depressed—weary of the long strain, weary of negotiations in French of all accents, and I was still seedy and under the horror of that awful night.” Next day von der Lancken went to discuss the affair in Munich, the Governor General again went to Berlin and Whitlock prepared a report on the whole case for Washington.

  Two days later in Brussels a new affiche about what had become known as “the Cavell affair” was posted in public places:

  The United States Ambassador in London has passed papers relating to the Cavell affair to the English Government. These papers include correspondence between the United States Legation in Brussels and the German authorities in that city on the subject of the trial. The English Government immediately gave these documents to the Press and had them published by Reuters Agency. They reported the most essential facts in an inaccurate manner. They made it appear, especially, that the German authorities had, by false promises, put off the United States Minister and kept him ignorant of the fact that the death sentence had already been pronounced and by proceeding hurriedly with the execution prevented him intervening on behalf of the accused.

  Because of these published comments Sir Edward Grey considered it particularly reprehensible that the German authority did not respect its promise to keep the United States Minister informed of the progress of the trial. Such a promise was never given by the German authority which therefore could not have broken its word. The United States Minister in Brussels, in an interview with the German authority, recognised that this was the case. The Ambassador of the United States in London has been misinformed. He has been led into error by the report given by the Belgian lawyer who was legal adviser to the American Legation in Brussels. The United States Minister has now declared that the publication of these documents greatly surprised him and that he would, without delay, apprise his colleague in London and his Government of the difference between the actual facts and the story published in the report written by the Belgian lawyer.

  It was calculated to set all mentioned against each other. In this it succeeded. Whitlock made no further public comment. He arranged passports and permits to get de Leval out of Belgium to Holland then England, and within a week was himself “invited” by Washington to take a vacation in America. “My journey has no political significance whatever,” he told journalists. The Times, on November 9, reported him as “looking tired and worn by the responsibilities and anxieties of office.”

  To exonerate himself, von der Lancken also maligned Sauberzweig to the German government. He wrote a complaining letter about him to Albert Zimmermann, the German Undersecretary of State. He said the effect of “the Cavell case” had been as he predicted to Sauberzweig “in our nocturnal conversation.” Sauberzweig, he complained, even after much damaging publicity, went on making high-handed punishing decisions without consultation. “His first consideration is his own self-importance even though precious interests should suffer in consequence. He does not see that no measure taken by the German authorities in Belgium can be an end in itself but must always be a means to an end.”

  Zimmermann sided with Sauberzweig. On October 25 he gave an interview to the New York Times:

  t is a pity Miss Cavell had to be executed but it was necessary. She was judged justly. The shooting of an Englishwoman for treason has caused a sensation and capital against us is being made out of the fact.

  It is undoubtedly a terrible thing that the woman had to be executed; but consider what would happen to a State, particularly in war, if it let crimes aimed at the safety of its armies go unpunished because committed by women.

  No criminal code in the world makes such a distinction … Man and woman are equal before the law and only the degree of guilt makes a difference in the sentence for the crime and its consequences.

  Countless Belgian, French and English soldiers again fighting in the ranks of the Allies owe their escape to the activities of the band now found guilty whose head was the Cavell woman. Only the utmost sternness could halt such activity, carried out under the very nose of our authorities, and a Government which in such a case does not resort to the sternest measures sins against its most elementary duty toward the safety of its own army.

  Were special consideration shown to women we should open the door to such activities on the part of women who are often more clever in such matters than the cleverest male spy …

  The story was distorted each time it was told. Only by distortion could justification for State brutality be couched in moral terms. Edith Cavell transmogrified into a spy, the head of an espionage band and of a recruiting agency for soldiers, and all the more clever at her job because she was a woman.

  Gottfried Benn, the doctor who sat through the military tribunal and was present at her execution, endorsed Zimmermann’s view. He too claimed she was both architect and head of an espionage ring:

  Every movement of the German front was widely known within minutes, you could read it on the faces of the passers-by. Everything we did, every military event behind the front was immediately radioed to the Allies. Above all there was the activity of collecting, recruiting and organising Belgians able to carry weapons, and their transport each night by stages over the Dutch frontier to the centres of the Entente.

  Countless espionage trials were conducted by the German military courts every time with the same result: women had been involved. Women had thought up the plans and implemented them but women were never executed. Women were moved to Aachen and made to work in prison and at the end of the war they could count on being rewarded and tr
eated like heroes. Every time the men were found to have been harmless and done the cooking.

  The Governor General von Bissing expressed bewilderment at all the fuss: “When thousands of innocent people have died in the war why should anyone become hysterical over the death of one guilty woman?” he asked. To his cousin he wrote on October 23 that had a pardon been granted it would have been a crime against the Fatherland.

  She ignored military law and through her efforts caused the death of many of our brave soldiers.

  Our enemies regularly cloud the real issues by calling attention to social position or sex when neither is relevant. They are happy to use a woman to work as a spy so that after her execution they can count on the sentimentality of the masses to avenge her.

  After he was hurried out of Belgium, the Legation lawyer Gaston de Leval made public his blame of Edith Cavell’s defense lawyer Sadi Kirschen. In interviews with the press, and lectures in Britain and the United States, he said he viewed him as negligent and in part responsible for “the fatal ending of the tragedy.” He implied Kirschen frustrated his attempts to meet him at the time of the court martial and “paralysed the power of action of the Legation.” In various newspapers Kirschen was then accused of treachery and deceit. A feud began between the two lawyers that went on long after the war’s end.

  Edith Cavell’s hasty execution, within hours of sentence, was at the insistence of General von Sauberzweig out of his hatred for Britain. There was no other reason why she should have been shot and Louise Thuliez and the others spared. His authority might have been checked if von Bissing the Governor General had not been out of the country the night before the execution, if Brand Whitlock had not been ill in bed and had galvanized intervention in the preceding days, if Foreign Office ministers in London had not raised their hands in helplessness and said there was nothing they could do, if Sadi Kirschen had not angered Stoeber and his henchmen, if Thomas Braun or his father had been allowed to defend her, if she had worn her matron’s uniform at her trial, if Libiez had spoken out at the tribunal, if von der Lancken had put a call through to the Kaiser…

  The motive for her judicial murder was political not military. Sauberzweig blocked the chance of appeal by his order that hers and Philippe Baucq’s executions should be “immediate.” In the summer of 1916 Herbert Hoover and Vernon Kellogg, who headed American food relief in Belgium, were in Berlin. Sauberzweig asked them to have tea with him at his hotel. They described the meeting to Brand Whitlock who wrote of it in his memoir:

  The General at once entered into a justification of his course in the case of Edith Cavell. He referred to himself, in lugubrious irony, as “the murderer”; and to her—he was speaking German in which Mr. Kellogg was thoroughly proficient—as “die Cavell.” His explanation, advanced in justification of his conduct, was that Miss Cavell had been at the head of an extensive conspiracy to send young men to the front to kill Germans; his own son had just been the victim of a terrible wound, blinded for life by a bullet that traversed his head just behind the eyes; perhaps, argued von Sauberzweig, the boy had been shot by one of these very young men whom Miss Cavell had aided to reach the front. He said that Miss Cavell was entitled to no sympathy as a nurse since she was paid for her professional services, and that he could not have reversed or altered the judgement of the military court that had tried and sentenced her, without it reflecting on the judgement of his brother officers.

  General von Sauberzweig insisted upon discussing the case much to the embarrassment of his guests, who were of another mind about it, and he gave them the impression of a man haunted by remorse and pursued by some insatiable, irresistible impulse to discuss this subject that seemed to lie so heavily on his mind.

  Slaughter continued worldwide. Despite the Kaiser’s order that no more women be shot without his sanction, this did not stop the execution of Gabrielle Petit six months after Edith Cavell’s death. She had nursed her boyfriend, wounded in the Battle of Antwerp, smuggled him to Holland then forwarded military intelligence to him. She was found guilty of espionage. On the day of her execution she wore a red, yellow and black rosette, refused to have her eyes bound and told her executioners, “You will see that a Belgian woman knows how to die for her country.” At the time, her death caused no stir. After the war she was revered as a symbol of Belgian resistance. Two months after her, Louise Depache was executed for “espionage” and helping men escape. Pauline Rameloo, Maria de Smet, Elize Grandprez and Emilie Schatteman followed in 1917.

  Before Brand Whitlock took enforced leave in November 1915 a messenger from St. Gilles prison delivered to the Legation Edith Cavell’s annotated copy of The Imitation of Christ and “a few francs and a few precious trinkets, all her poor little belongings. And yet—how vast, how noble, how rich an estate!” he wrote in his memoirs, in his not-always-helpful way of viewing things. He was away until January 1916. The “Cavell affair,” like the sinking of the Lusitania, contributed to America’s decision to shift its neutral stance. It joined the war on April 6, 1917. Nineteen months after that the fighting ended.

  51

  NO MONUMENTS

  In Britain she was a national hero. The Edith Cavell War Memorial Committee formed, chaired by Viscount Burnham who owned the Daily Telegraph. The Lord Mayor, the Bishop of London and the Chairman of London Council were on its all-male board. Asked by the committee how the family would best like Edith Cavell commemorated, Lilian Wainwright said “no monuments” and suggested a home for retired nurses. (Edith Cavell had spoken of a plan, when her Brussels work was done, to found such a home with her sister Florence.) It was an irony that more commemorative monuments were raised to her than to any other woman caught up in the First World War.

  Sir George Frampton sculpted the one commissioned for central London. The city of Westminster offered a site in St. Martin’s Place north-east of Trafalgar Square, close to Nelson’s Column, the Lions of Victory, and national pride in the glory of conquest. Edith Cavell was to be a lone woman in this setting. Frampton, known for his statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, took no fee and called it a labor of love. He began work in 1915, though the Italian marble for his ten-foot figure of her, incorporated into a high granite column, was not available until the war’s end in November 1918.

  He asked Lilian Wainwright for details of Edith Cavell’s uniform. She wrote to Elisabeth Wilkins who was back in Wales: “Was it navy blue? No apron. Stiff collar and cuffs and what sort of belt? Sister Dora cap. Strings or not? If you will, do send me a full description … It will take a long time before you feel all right again after the horrors you have been through.”

  The monument itself, in modernist mode, was of large stepped blocks of Cornish granite with at the top a solid cross—the Geneva cross of nursing, symbol of help for all—and a woman protecting a naked baby—the Mother Country protecting poor little Belgium. Beneath this FOR KING AND COUNTRY was chiseled large and then, on the four sides of the granite, HUMANITY DEVOTION FORTITUDE SACRIFICE. At the back was a lion—a British lion—“crushing the serpent of envy, malice, spite and treachery” and above it the words FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH. The white marble figure of Edith Cavell was to face Trafalgar Square, ten feet high, manly, with HUMANITY etched over her head. Beneath her feet were engraved her hour and place of death: EDITH CAVELL DAWN BRUSSELS OCTOBER 12TH 1915.

  Her words on the eve of her death—“I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone,” were initially omitted. They questioned hegemony and the integrity of war.

  The family was more enthusiastic about a fund for a retirement home for nurses at Hindhead. The Bishop of Durham sent Mrs. Cavell a check for three guineas: “It is miserably small but about a third of my income now goes in taxes,” he told her. This fund developed into a wider charity, “The Edith Cavell Homes of Rest for Nurses” and was in the tradition of Florence Nightingale and Eva Lückes who advocated better provision for nurses. “We all turn to the nurse when we are ill. What shal
l we do for the nurse when she is ill?” its brochure read. Queen Alexandra, its patron, wrote a foreword: “The name Florence Nightingale is for all time associated with the Crimean War. The martyred figure of Edith Cavell stands forth in this Great War for all that is symbolical of heroism. There can be no more fitting memorial to her than the proposed Edith Cavell Homes of Rest for Nurses.”

  On October 26, 1915, two weeks after Edith Cavell’s execution, Lord Knutsford, who as Sydney Holland had done much to transform the London Hospital when she nursed there, wrote to Lilian Wainwright from Kneesworth Hall in Royston. Queen Alexandra had sent for him that day and asked that a new nurses’ block being built at the Hospital, which was to have been called the Queen Alexandra Home for Nurses, should instead be called after Edith Cavell. “Do let her mother know this,” Knutsworth wrote. “I think it just one of the most charming acts I have ever known.”

  There was a need among people, that went beyond rank or class, to feel that decent living was again possible and that all the killing and misery were for something. So patriotism was ascribed to Edith Cavell, though she had warned against it as a goal with her dying words; heroism was accorded her, though what she had followed was a creed of kindness that cut through cultures; and martyrdom was assigned to her, and though she filled the criteria for it, it was visited upon her. She had not sought it or desired its glory. Her allegiance was far more to those unknown soldiers, martyrs all, who died in fields, unhelped by anyone, and whose only monument was a white cross with the inscription, “A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God.”