Edith Louisa Cavell was a British nurse who is celebrated for saving the lives of soldiers in WWI (from both sides, without discrimination, saying “I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved”) and for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium.  For the latter act of bravery, she was arrested, accused of treason, found guilty by court-martial, and sentenced to death.  Despite a loud international cry for mercy, she was shot by a German firing squad …

 

In November 1914, after the German occupation of Brussels, Cavell began sheltering British soldiers and funneling them out of occupied Belgium to the neutral Netherlands. Wounded British and French soldiers as well as Belgian and French civilians of military age were hidden from the Germans and provided with false papers and conducted by various guides to the houses of Cavell, Louis Séverin, and others in Brussels; where their hosts would furnish them with money to reach the Dutch frontier.  This placed Cavell in direct violation of German military law.  Over time, German authorities became increasingly suspicious of the nurse’s actions, suspicions which were further fuelled by her blatant outspokenness about the war.

 

She was arrested on the 3^rd of August 1915, and charged with harboring Allied soldiers. She was held in Saint-Gilles prison for ten weeks, the last two of which were spent in solitary confinement.  She made three depositions to the German police, each time openly admitting that she had been instrumental in conveying about 60 British and 15 French soldiers, as well as about 100 French and Belgian civilians of military age, to the frontier and had sheltered most of them in her house.  This brazen admission was more than enough for her conviction and she died by firing squad shortly thereafter.  Resolute until the end, it was noted that on the eve of her execution she made the beautiful statement that “patriotism is not enough; I must have no hate in my heart.”

Filed under: In LOVE with Humanity by Scaughdt