Nurse Edith Cavell

NURSE EDITH CAVELL

Remembrance Sunday 2015 is located exactly half way between the 100th anniversary of the execution of Nurse Edith Cavell (12th October 1915), and the 150th anniversary of her birth (4th December 1865).

Throughout October 2015 many events commemorating her life were staged throughout Norwich which she called home; in London where she commenced her career as a nurse and where she has a statue; and Brussels, where she spent many years helping Dr Antione Depage and his wife, Nurse Marie Depage, establish the Berkendael Medical Institute as a training establishment for nurses.

In 1914, when the Germans entered Belgium on their way to invading France, they took over the Government of Belgium. They allowed the Berkendael to continue working although they knew Edith was English. They did not know Marie Depage was a member of the Underground Resistance Movement. While continuing to train nurses, Edith transformed the Berkendael into a hospital for wounded servicemen of all nationalities, whether friend or foe.  This came about because so many soldiers, British and German, wounded at the Battle of Mons and separated from their units, came calling upon the hospital for help.

The German ‘authorities’ told her that when German soldiers recovered from their injuries she should return them to their units.  British soldiers, however, were prisoners-of-war and as such, when they were fit enough to leave hospital, she was to hand them over to the Germans for onward transportation to prisoner-of-war camps.

Edith Cavell did nothing of the sort.  Instead of handing them over to the Germans, she, working with the Underground Resistance Movement, utilized an Escape Route along which Allied soldiers were directed by guides across the border into neutral Holland from where they would sail back to England. Working under the very noses of the Germans she paved the way for over nine hundred British and Colonial soldiers to escape from Belgium into Holland.

While Edith was so engaged, the doctor’s wife, Marie Depage, spent two months in America touring cities from Washington to Pittsburgh raising money for the Red Cross and for the Berkendael Hospital, so they could treat the thousands of soldiers and refugees it was envisaged the war would bring. She raised 100,000 dollars in money and 50,000 dollars in supplies. She had planned to return to Europe on the steamship Lapland but managed a last-minute change to the Lusitania because it was a faster ship which, she thought, would get her to Europe that much earlier.

On 7th May 1915, 10 miles from the coast of Southern Ireland, a German submarine fired a torpedo at the Lusitania.  There were two large explosions and the ship capsized and sank in 18 minutes. Marie Depage tried to jump from the port side, got tangled in ropes on the deck, struggled free, but fell in the water and drowned.  They found her body washed up on the Irish coast.  Dr Antoine Depage was called upon to identify her body.  He had her buried near the hospital, and named his research unit after her: The Institut Marie Depage.

Apart from the sorrow at the loss of a friend, for Edith this was another blow to all her hopes, for money was running short.  The ideal of Heaven on Earth seemed ever further away.

Among the soldiers brought to her for urgent medical treatment was a German, Private Karl Rimmell.  He was suffering from typhoid, and a broken leg.  They spent two months attending to his needs with care and compassion, as they did with all their patients, and eventually he was able to leave hospital and return to his unit.

Edith kept her rescue activities separate from her nursing work. Although her nurses helped her get the soldiers away, she was determined to ensure that whatever happened to her, the nurses would remain safe.

The Germans arrested her on August 5th 1915 and charged her with Treason. They could not speak English, and she could not speak German so she made her statement in French. Her statement was translated into German and she was told to sign it. She did not recognize her statement at her trial, for in it she appeared to confess to certain activities she knew nothing about. The German translation, therefore, was not what she had written in French. The Germans had altered it to unjustly apportion blame onto her.

She was imprisoned for eight weeks during which she was able to rest after a hectic life.  She derived much comfort from her reading material: The Holy Bible, and ‘Imitation of Christ’ by Thomas a Kempis in which she underlined many of its texts including: “Vanity it is, to wish to live long, and be careless to live well.”

She was eventually brought before a German Court Martial where she proudly confessed to healing soldiers, including German soldiers.  She also admitted helping British soldiers into Holland because, as a nurse, she did not want them caught and shot after she had spent so much effort healing them.  This, she said, was her duty as a nurse.

She was determined her nurses would never be implicated. She took upon herself sole responsibility for the sins of her nurses all of whom had willingly assisted with the Escape Route. On the evening of the last day, when the Rev Stirling Gahan came to her cell and they shared Holy Communion, she told Him: “Please tell my friends I willingly give my life for my Country. Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realize I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anybody.”

When Edith was found guilty at her trial, the German soldier Karl Rimmell was ordered onto her firing squad. It was he who put her blindfold on. As he did so, they recognized each other. He hesitated and she sensed it. She told him she had done her duty, now he must do his. He was nineteen, and he had his whole life in front of him. In any case, the war would not last for ever. But he could not shoot the nurse who had brought him back to life from typhoid and a broken leg. He called out to the officer in charge of the firing squad: “This is not War – This is Murder” and threw down his rifle. The officer shot him dead and replaced him with another.

At seven o’clock in the morning of October 12th 1915, Edith Cavell was placed before a firing squad: and shot. Five of the eight guns fired wide

After the war they brought her into Dover on a British destroyer. Thousands lined the route as her cortege travelled to London where they gave her a State Commemoration in Westminster Abbey on 15th May 1919, followed by her funeral in Norwich.  Edith Cavell is now laid to rest in her grave in the grounds of her beloved Norwich Cathedral.

Anthony Reeve