Silent in an Evil Time (12 page)

Edith changed her mind about not taking more British soldiers into the clinic. In July, she accepted six or seven of them. In her opinion, this was unavoidable because the soldiers had nowhere else to go. She hid them in the cellar, gave them whatever they needed to get to the Dutch border, and provided money and guides.

Two of the soldiers, Matty Shiells and Pat Revelly, were from the Royal Irish Rifles, and for them, Edith thought up a clever disguise. She dressed them as monks from a religious order whose members wore white robes and observed a vow of silence. Edith and the soldiers found the outfits
amusing, but the laughs ended when the three sat down in the streetcar that was taking them to the outskirts of Brussels. Edith noticed that a German officer across the aisle was staring at Revelly's feet.
What was so fascinating?
Then Edith caught on. When Revelly's white robe was hiked up, the German could see that Revelly was wearing British army boots. She hurried the two soldiers off the streetcar and pointed them on their route north to Holland. Within a few weeks, Shiells and Revelly rejoined the Royal Irish Rifles.

Helping the two Irishmen successfully was probably Edith's last piece of work for the secret organization. Time was running out. Through July, the German political police conducted more searches at the clinic, and a Frenchman named George Gaston Quien, who worked as a German secret agent, infiltrated both the clinic and the Mons-Bellignies part of the organization. Quien claimed to be a French army officer who fought at Charleroi. His story might have been believable since he had a damaged foot, which he claimed he suffered in battle. That wasn't true; the injury resulted from a civilian accident. Nevertheless, Edith's clinic gave him medical treatment, and Quien, who could be charming, took advantage of his stay in one of the wards to flirt with the nurses in hopes of getting information about the secret organization. Edith thought Quien was a phony from the start, but he still managed to gather several damaging facts before he left.

Edith sensed trouble all around her. She had documents that she was determined to save, and unknown to anyone else until much later, she hid the papers under a loose floorboard in a bar called Chez Jules, down the street from the clinic. Edith expected one day to retrieve the hidden documents.

Philippe Baucq was the first member of the network arrested by the German political police. Sergeant Henri Pinkhoff and six of his plain-clothes officers showed up at Baucq's house at 10:30 on Saturday night, July 31. It happened to be a night when Louise Thuliez, in Brussels to arrange for a group of Belgians to escape to Holland, was staying at the Baucq home. Pinkhoff knew all about Thuliez. He placed her under arrest along with Baucq.

Pinkhoff, a short-tempered man, came close to arresting Baucq's thirteen-year-old daughter, Yvonne, who was upstairs in the house. Hearing the German police on the ground floor and knowing that her father had just received four thousand copies of
La Libre Belgique
for distribution, Yvonne was frantic to ensure that the Germans didn't find the newspapers. She began to throw them out of a second-story window. Some of the papers were still in tied bundles. One bundle, plummeting from the window, hit a police officer on the head. The Germans rushed up the stairs and grabbed Yvonne. It was only her young age that kept Pinkhoff from arresting her.

When the Germans left the house, they took Baucq and Thuliez to Section B's offices, then to St. Gilles Prison, where the two would soon be joined in captivity by other members of the secret network.

In the next five days, in raids in Brussels, Mons, Bellignies, and other towns and villages on both sides of the French border, the Germans swept up virtually everyone in the network. Among those arrested were Princess Marie de Croy and Countess Jeanne de Belleville; the two miners, Auguste Joly and Désiré Richez; and the two pharmacists, Georges Derveau and Louis Séverin. They led away the men from Mons: Herman Capiau, the engineer, and Albert Libiez, the lawyer. Section B had good information on the network, and they caught guides, couriers, and even
the spouses of network members. Before they finished, Pinkhoff and his men carried off a total of thirty-five people to prison.

One person the Germans didn't catch was Princess Marie's brother, Prince Reginald de Croy. When the prince heard about Baucq's arrest, he hurried from Bellignies to Brussels to warn other members of the organization that they must go into hiding. Edith told him she hadn't a chance of escaping the Germans. She chose to wait and meet her fate. Edith was certain that imprisonment would come soon.

Prince Reginald went from the clinic to Ada Bodart's house. She was the Irishwoman who sheltered many escaping soldiers. Bodart had recently been widowed and lived alone with her teenage son, Philippe. She thanked the prince for the warning. When Prince Reginald told Bodart that he was headed for another network member's home to spread the word to him, she volunteered to do the errand, taking Philippe with her. They reached the network member's house, but Pinkhoff and his men were already there. They took Bodart and Philippe to prison. Prince Reginald escaped and remained free for the entire war.

Edith was one of the last members of the network arrested by the Germans. Henri Pinkhoff, Otto Mayer, and a small squad of soldiers drove to the clinic on the afternoon of August 5. It was a moment that Pinkhoff relished, putting an end to the career of the infuriating woman who smuggled so many British and French soldiers back to their own countries. He made the most of the occasion, stomping around Edith's office, throwing her papers on the floor, shouting at Edith and her nurses. His performance lasted almost two hours, and when Pinkhoff was done, he placed Edith under arrest. He arrested Elisabeth Wilkins too, though she was soon released. There would be no release for Edith. When Pinkhoff and his men drove her away in the German army car, Edith's freedom had come to an end.

When the Germans arrested Edith in August 1915, they locked her in Brussels' dark and forbidding St. Gilles Prison. Edith remained in St. Gilles for over two months.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

T
he Germans locked Edith in cell number 23 at St. Gilles Prison. St. Gilles was vast, ancient, and frightening; Philippe Baucq wrote that “it gives one the cold and sad impression that one feels before a funeral monument.” Cell 23, 4 meters by 2½ meters, had a sink, a small open cupboard, a metal bucket, one chair, and a folding bed, which was converted into a table during the day by closing it and laying boards across the top. Edith ate her prison meals at the table: coffee and bread for breakfast; potatoes, grilled meat, and a glass of weak beer for the main meal at noon; coffee, bread, and cheese for supper. On Sunday evenings, she was allowed a special dinner cooked at the clinic and delivered to St. Gilles by the nurses.

Edith passed the hours in her cell embroidering, reading, and worrying. Her most treasured book,
The Imitation of Christ
, brought her relief. Over and over, she read her copy, making notes in the margins and underlining passages that enlightened her. One sentence she marked seemed to speak directly to the ordeal she faced with the Germans: “It is no small prudence to keep silent in an evil time, and inwardly to turn thyself to Me, and not to be troubled by the judgment of men.”

Edith's worries weren't about herself, but about those on the outside who depended on her. She was concerned for Grace Jemmett, for her dog, Jackie, and for the young nurses in training at the clinic. She wrote to Elisabeth Wilkins, telling her to make sure the nurses studied hard for their October exams and to ask that a clinic doctor named Heger continue Jemmett's morphine treatment. As for the dog, Edith wrote in another letter, “If Jackie is sad, tell him I will soon be back.”

Twice, Wilkins got permission to visit Edith in her cell. The trouble was, Otto Mayer sat in the cell during both visits. Mayer said he was assigned to make sure Wilkins didn't give Edith a capsule of poison to commit suicide. Edith was disgusted that anyone thought she was capable of something as contrary to her beliefs as suicide.

Wilkins delivered one piece of welcome news: The clinic had moved into its new building. Wilkins supervised the transportation of furniture and equipment from Rue de la Culture to Rue Brussels. It was all done by handcart and took several days to complete. Edith was happy about the opening of the new clinic, but saddened not to be a part of the life and work in the building she had done so much to plan.

To brighten the hours in prison, the nurses sent her a bouquet of fresh flowers. Edith wrote to them, encouraging the young women in their work and thanking them for the bouquet.

“Your lovely flowers have made my cell gay,” she wrote. “The roses are still fresh, but the chrysanthemums did not like prison any more than I do. Hence, they did not live very long.”

Edith's cell at St. Gilles Prison was small and spartan, but efficient. The table on the left turned into a bed at night, when the boards on top were removed and the mattress and blankets folded out.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

For three days during Edith's first weeks in prison – on August 8, 18, and 21 – Lieutenant Bergan and Sergeant Pinkhoff put her through hours of interrogation in Bergan's prison office. Pinkhoff asked most of the questions, always in French. Since Bergan spoke no French or English, Pinkhoff repeated the questions and answers to him in German. When Bergan asked Edith his own questions in German, Pinkhoff again translated the questions and answers back and forth. Otto Mayer, who spoke English as well as the other two languages, was present during the questioning, but no English was used during the sessions. A German clerk named Neuhaus wrote down the proceedings in German. Later, Pinkhoff
edited Neuhaus' record into a document that became Edith's official statement that was submitted to the military tribunal for her trial.

The confusion of languages, together with Pinkhoff's final edit of Edith's statement, allowed the Germans to put their own interpretation on the answers Edith gave. It hardly helped her position that she wasn't permitted to consult a lawyer before or during the interrogation. In fact, Edith had none of the normal rights that Britain gave to a person preparing for a trial proceeding.

None of this discouraged Edith. She had worked out a strategy for answering the questions, no matter what hurdles were put in her way. Her intention was to admit everything, as long as she was reasonably certain that the Germans already knew the answers. She wouldn't lie – that would be unthinkable for Edith, even to an enemy intent on giving her the death penalty – but would tell Bergan and Pinkhoff nothing new. On August 8, the first day of the interrogation, Pinkhoff advised Edith that the other members of the secret organization had confessed to their activities against the Germans. This wasn't true, though all thirty-five members gave statements to the Germans by the time of the trial. Edith had a good idea what the Germans had learned from their sources and from their weeks of surveillance of the clinic. She shaped her answers to Bergan and Pinkhoff to fit her own idea of their knowledge.

Edith admitted that she sheltered British and French soldiers at the clinic and helped them to escape, though she downplayed the numbers. When the German interrogators suggested she had allowed a couple of hundred soldiers to pass through her hands, she agreed, though Edith knew that the final figure was much higher. She admitted that Louise Thuliez, Jeanne de Belleville, and others whom she named brought soldiers to her clinic. And she gave Bergan and Pinkhoff the names of such people as Ada Bodart and Louis Séverin, who hid soldiers in their houses in Brussels. The Germans already knew these details, just as they knew the six locations in the city where escaping soldiers and their guides met
before the trips to the Dutch border. Edith felt sure she was revealing to Bergan and Pinkhoff nothing that came as a surprise to them.

In the view of the two German interrogators, Edith made her most damaging admission when she said that many of the English and French soldiers, in fact the majority, were not wounded. They were able-bodied and therefore capable of returning to service in the war against the Germans, after they'd escaped home to Britain and France. Under the German military code, this was one of the most serious offenses. “Conducting soldiers to the enemy,” as the offense was called, could get Edith sentenced to death. Bergan and Pinkhoff rubbed their hands in satisfaction over Edith's admission. Now, they thought, they were going to realize their aim of sending Edith Cavell to the firing squad.

Late in September, Edith wrote to Elisabeth Wilkins, asking her to come to the prison and bring clothes that Edith listed in the letter: her blue coat and skirt, white muslin blouse, thick reindeer gloves, and her gray fur stole. This was the outfit that Edith planned to wear at the trial. She wasn't yet aware of the trial's date, but she wanted to be ready. Certainly she wouldn't wear her nurse's uniform to court; she put on the uniform only when she was working in the clinic. The clothes she listed in the letter would be appropriate for the courtroom.

It wasn't until Tuesday, October 5, that Edith and the others were informed of the date for their trial. It was just two days away – October 7 – when all thirty-five of the secret network were to be tried as a group by a German military tribunal of five senior officers. Edith felt ready. She was anxious to get on with whatever the Germans had in store for her.

The trial began early on Thursday morning, not in a conventional courtroom, but in a grand setting that the Germans selected as a showcase for staging the important prosecution. The German army wanted all of
Brussels to know that it was dealing severely with anyone who dared to aid the occupying army's enemies. It was in Belgium's Senate chamber that the trial took place, in the same room where King Albert had met with his generals on August 2, 1914, to discuss Germany's ultimatum, which set off the war. The chamber was large, round, plush, and ornate; its color scheme gold and red, its seats covered in velvet. Edith and her colleagues, twenty-two men and thirteen women altogether, sat facing the judges. German army officers, who had come to see what they considered an entertainment that might send people to their deaths, were all around them in the spectator seats.

The man in charge of the prosecution was a tenacious and aggressive counsel named Eduard Stoeber, who was brought in from Bavaria to handle the case. Edith and the other defendants were allowed to retain lawyers, though none of the counsel met with their clients in the days before the trial. It was only on Thursday morning, in the Senate chamber, that Edith was introduced to Sadi Kirschen, a Brussels counsel who was assigned at the last minute to represent her and eight of the other defendants.

Stoeber's first witness for the prosecution was Edith. Stoeber called all thirty-five defendants as witnesses, putting them in the strange position of testifying against their own interests. The proceedings, including Stoeber's questions, were in German. A translator repeated the questions in French, and gave Edith's answers, which were in French, to the rest of the court in German. Stoeber's examination of Edith consisted of just twelve questions. Almost all covered the routine of Edith's activities in the secret network, including the names of her associates. But in the next to last question, Stoeber raised the issue that could lead to a death sentence. “Do you realize,” Stoeber asked, “that in [helping men to escape] it would be to the disadvantage of Germany and to the advantage of the enemy?”