Edith Cavell faced a German firing squad saying patriotism was not enough
On the eve of her execution in 1915, the British nurse Edith Cavell told her chaplain she felt no hatred or bitterness toward anyone, because patriotism was not enough. She had nursed German and Allied soldiers alike in occupied Brussels, while quietly smuggling about two hundred Allied men out toward the neutral Netherlands.
Cavell came to nursing late. The daughter of a Norfolk vicar, she worked as a governess, including five years with a Brussels family, before caring for her sick father persuaded her to train. She entered the London Hospital as a probationer at 30 and served in a typhoid epidemic at Maidstone. In 1907 the Belgian royal surgeon Antoine Depage recruited her to run a new nursing school in Brussels, where she founded a professional journal and soon supplied nurses to three hospitals, twenty-four schools and thirteen kindergartens, earning a reputation as a pioneer of modern Belgian nursing.
After Germany occupied Brussels, she joined a network run partly from Prince Réginald de Croÿ's château near Mons. Hidden soldiers and young men of military age received false papers, then stayed with hosts such as Cavell, who gave them money and guides to reach the Dutch border. In August 1915 she was betrayed by Georges Gaston Quien, later convicted in France as a collaborator, and she admitted in her statements that she had sheltered most of the escapees in her own home.
The charge was not espionage but 'war treason', a death penalty offence under German military law even for foreigners in a war zone. Because the 1906 Geneva Convention withdrew protection from medical staff whose work covered belligerent activity, Britain felt powerless. American diplomat Hugh Gibson warned that executing her would stir horror worldwide. Brussels's military governor rushed the sentence to prevent any appeal for clemency, and of five people condemned, only Cavell and the architect Philippe Baucq were shot.
Her death on 12 October 1915 provoked outrage around the world. Debate over her role has continued: former MI5 head Stella Rimington said in 2015 that Belgian archives showed her network also gathered intelligence. Her words about patriotism are carved on her memorial near Trafalgar Square and on a statue in Melbourne.
Source: Edith Cavell
