Faith and sacrifice – An Irishman’s Diary on Edith Cavell

Two events in 1915 convinced the Allies that what they were facing was not an enemy, but a threat to civilisation. The first was the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 off the coast of Co Cork with the loss of 1,198 lives.

International outrage was compounded by press reports that dozens of babies had been trapped below deck when the ship went down. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was alive to the propaganda value of the Lusitania tragedy at a time when the Allies were desperately trying to entice America into the war. "The poor babies who perished in the ocean struck a blow at German power more deadly than could have been achieved by the sacrifice of a hundred thousand fighting men."

The other event in 1915 which sullied Germany’s reputation in the eyes of the world was the execution of the British nurse Edith Cavell on October 12th, 1915.

In all the theatres of war men were dying in their thousands on a daily basis. In February 1915 the Germans had executed 11 British soldiers, six of them Irish, at Iron in northern France. It had been a footnote in press reports.

Execution

Yet the execution of a woman caused such a level of outrage that it made the Germans quickly repent of their miscalculation. Such was the backlash that Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered that no further executions of women should be undertaken without his permission. The scandal may also be the reason why the British did not execute Countess Markievicz after the Easter Rising.

"Their foulest and latest crime was the murder in cold blood of a poor defenceless English – a crime dwarfing even that of the Lusitania," the bishop of London told a crowd in Trafalgar Square shortly after Cavell's execution.

Nothing in Edith Cavell’s life prior to the first World War had prepared her for the horrors of what she witnessed in the final year of her life.

Cavell was born in 1865 and grew up in Norwich, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. Her maternal grandmother was an Irish emigrant.

Her childhood was as imperturbable as a Victorian childhood could be. “Life was fresh and beautiful and the country so desirable and sweet,” she recalled, but the constant round of religious devotions was a drag on her free spirit. “Sunday school, church services, family devotions morning and evening. And father’s sermons are so dull.”

She first went to Belgium as a governess when she was 25 and became fluent in French. She was 30 when she applied to become a nurse. In 1907 she was offered a post as the matron of Belgium’s first secular training school for nurses in Brussels.

The tranquillity of the pre-war years was shattered when the Germans marched into Brussels on August 20th, 1914.

Cavell’s training school was turned into a makeshift hospital. It was there she first encountered wounded soldiers from all the warring nations, Belgian, British, French and German, and treated all of them the same.

While treating wounded Allied soldiers, she resolved to help them escape across the border into neutral Holland. Many of them were Irish, Munster Fusiliers and Connaught Rangers mostly, who became detached from their regiments in the early days of the war.

One was Pte Michael Carey from Tralee, Co Kerry. Later reports would state that he was the 12th British soldier who escaped when the Iron 12 (11 British soldiers and a French civilian) were captured and executed by the Germans earlier that year. This is disputed by Prof Hedley Malloch, who believes there are too many inconsistencies in his story.

Cavell’s actions came to the attention of the German authorities in Brussels. She was arrested in August 1915. Her last few months were spent mostly in solidarity confinement. She confessed to everything both under interrogation and at her short trial afterwards. Aiding Allied soldiers was regarded by the German authorities as an act of treason and therefore subject to the death penalty.

Cavell was resigned to her fate, but she believed that her sentence would be to spend the rest of the war in jail. She did not countenance that the Germans would execute her. Neither did the American legation acting on behalf of the British government. Too late they realised the Germans really meant to kill her.

Cavell was informed of her sentence on the afternoon before she died. The military governor of Brussels, Traugott Martin von Sauberzweig, ordered that the execution of Cavell and a fellow resistance worker, Philippe Baucq, be carried out immediately as an example to the others.

Cavell’s last words were spoken to the Donegal-born clergyman Rev Stirling Gahan, then the resident Anglican vicar in Brussels.

“Standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

These word would resonate around the world and endure to this day.

Edith Cavell was a remarkable woman who never flinched from doing the right thing, irrespective of cost.

“It was not feasible for her to stand aloof from the suffering and wrongdoing all around her,” her biographer Diana Souhami wrote. “As a matron and in her ambition to establish a nursing school of excellence she adhered to the need for authority, discipline and even regimentation. But it had to have a moral code, founded in love.”