Belgium, 1915
Edith Cavell
In the village of Swardeston, Norfolk, in the United Kingdom in 1865, the daughter of a rector was born. Her name was Edith Cavell. In her early thirties, she worked as a governess in Belgium before training to be a nurse in London. In 1907, in an effort to fully utilize her nurse’s training, she accepted a position, offered by Dr. Antoine Depage in Brussels, as the Matron in Belgium’s first training hospital and school for nurses. In her new role, Edith pioneered modern nursing education in Belgium with the support of Queen Elizabeth, and her nursing school quickly became connected with three major Brussels hospitals.
She felt very dedicated to her nursing profession, and returned to Brussels after visiting her mother in Norfolk and hearing of the invasion of Belgium in 1914 by the Germans. The nursing school became a Red Cross hospital to treat military casualties on both sides, and served civilians also. In September 1914, she was asked to help two wounded British soldiers trapped in Belgium following a fierce battle. She agreed and even arranged for them to be smuggled out of Belgium into neutral Netherlands.
Soon afterwards, she became part of an escape network sheltering Allied soldiers and Belgians in the nursing school and at a number of safe houses in Brussels. In the next eleven months, she was responsible for helping nearly two-hundred British, French and Belgian soldiers escape to the border. However, the Germans caught wind of her escapades and arrested her for sheltering soldiers. She was sent to St. Gilles Prison in Brussels.
In October 1915, Edith Cavell was tried for her activity in the escape network, found guilty and sentenced to death. News of the sentence caused an international outcry, but calls for the sentence to be commuted went unheard. She prepared for death with her customary resolution, and said to the English chaplain the famous words:
“I know now that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred and no bitterness towards anyone.”
She was shot by a firing squad at Tir National, the Brussels firing range, on October 12, 1915. She became an instant symbol of the Allied cause. For the Germans, this was an international propaganda disaster, which contributed to the decisive entry of the United States into the war in 1917.
After the war, when Cavell’s body was repatriated to Norwich for burial, tens of thousands lined the streets of London to see the funeral cortège. Edith Cavell is widely remembered in Belgium and abroad, and a leading hospital in Brussels still bears her name.