Silent in an Evil Time (14 page)

It seems certain that the officials at St. Gilles told Edith that another of the five defendants sentenced to death was to join her in the execution next morning. Philippe Baucq would be shot at the same time as Edith.

In their cells that last night, Baucq and Edith wrote love letters. Baucq's was to his wife. Edith's was to her nurses at the clinic. She told the young women that they might have felt she was unjustly hard on them at times during their training, but the truth was that she had loved them much more than they knew. She warned the nurses against the danger of causing unhappiness to others through a careless word. “Never speak evil,” Edith instructed them.

In the early morning of October 12, Elisabeth Wilkins and another English nurse from the clinic, Beatrice Smith, stood outside St. Gilles Prison in the rain that was falling on Brussels. Both knew about the execution, and they had been waiting for almost two hours to say a silent good-bye to their Matron. At five o'clock, they watched as two German military cars drove out of the prison. Edith, wearing the same clothes she wore at her trial and carrying her beloved book,
The Imitation of Christ
, sat in the backseat of the first car. Two German soldiers were on either side of her, and Pastor Paul le Seur rode in the front seat. Philippe Baucq, two German soldiers, and a Catholic priest named Leyendecker were in the second car. Wilkins felt sure that Edith realized the two nurses were in the street, though Edith neither waved nor nodded in their direction. She was a woman who would never make the slightest scene.

The place of execution was Belgium's national shooting range, the grounds where soldiers practiced their accuracy with rifles and pistols. The range,
a sprawling building with a large open space at the rear, was in Schaerbeck, the Brussels suburb where Baucq had lived with his family.

When the two cars reached the range, German soldiers whisked Edith, Baucq, and the two clergymen down the corridors that led to the execution ground in the back. Just before the party reached its destination, Pastor le Seur offered Edith a bottle of smelling salts to calm her nerves. Edith said she had no need for smelling salts, but she asked le Seur to do her a final favor. Borrowing a pen, she wrote her name in
The Imitation of Christ
, followed by “With love to E.D. Cavell.” She closed the book and asked le Seur to see that it reached her cousin Eddy. At the very end of her life, she was thinking of the cousin she might have married. Le Seur promised he would do as Edith asked, and he was as good as his word. (It's not certain when Eddy received the book, but after it came into his hands, he published
The Imitation of Christ
in what he called the Edith Cavell Edition. It included all of Edith's underlinings and notes, including her last inscription to Eddy.)

As Edith and Baucq arrived at the execution ground, a company of 250 German soldiers stood to attention. Several German officials silently received the two prisoners. Among the officials was Eduard Stoeber, the prosecutor who took a leading role in each fateful event in the last days of Edith's life.

Stoeber's final job was to read aloud the sentences of death to Edith and Baucq. The two of them stood in front of the company of soldiers, le Seur alongside Edith and Leyendecker with Baucq. But before Stoeber could begin, Baucq spoke out in loud clear French. “Comrades,” he said to the 250 soldiers, “in death we are all comrades….”

Baucq wanted to say more, but an officer warned him to be silent. Then Stoeber read the sentences in German and French. When he finished, le Seur stepped closer to Edith and softly recited a short prayer. Edith pressed his hand. She spoke for the last time.

“Ask Mr. Gahan,” she said to le Seur, “to tell my loved ones later on that my soul, as I believe, is safe and that I am glad to die for my country.”

Le Seur led Edith a few steps to a pole. He waited while a soldier tied her loosely to the pole and blindfolded her eyes. At the same time, Baucq was escorted to a second pole by the Catholic priest, Leyendecker. The two poles stood several meters apart. Facing the poles, six paces away, were two firing squads of eight soldiers each.

Le Seur moved away from Edith. He expected that the command to shoot would come immediately. But a delay followed, one that le Seur later wrote felt like an eternity. At Baucq's pole, Leyendecker and Baucq were still speaking. Baucq, who refused to wear a blindfold, had a few final words to get off his chest. He refused to rush his own execution. Edith stood waiting, patient and enduring to the end.

Leyendecker walked away from Baucq at last, and an officer called the command to shoot. The sound of sixteen firing rifles crashed through the stillness of the early morning. Edith dropped forward from her pole. One shot had hit her in the middle of the forehead; other shots caught her in the heart. No one at the scene doubted that she died instantly.

Two graves had already been dug at the execution ground. Edith's body was placed in a plain wooden coffin and lowered into one grave, Baucq's coffin into the other. Both graves were marked with simple wooden crosses, carrying only their names.
PHILIPPE BAUCQ
appeared on one cross.
EDITH CAVELL
was painted on the other. The Germans, so anxious to be rid of Edith, buried her in the most anonymous graveyard in all of Brussels.

OPPOSITE:
After Edith's execution, the Germans buried her in this humble cemetery on the shooting range just steps from the spot where the firing squad shot her. (The
Royal London Hospital Archives)

Britain issued thousands of posters and postcards after Edith's execution. The pictures, intended as propaganda to stir citizens against the Germans, weren't always accurate. This idealized poster shows Edith in her uniform, which she didn't wear on the day she died, nor does the poster reveal Edith's fatal bullet wounds to her forehead and chest.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

O
n October 21, a few days after word of Edith's execution blazed across the front pages of Britain's newspapers, the bishop of London preached about her in a special ceremony at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. He said that Britain didn't need a campaign to recruit more soldiers; Edith's execution was incentive all by itself for young men to join the armed forces. The bishop was right. In the two months preceding Edith's death, the enlistment rate into the British Expeditionary Force averaged just under five thousand men per week. In the two months following news of her execution reaching Britain, the weekly average jumped to over ten thousand.

The same thing happened in France and in the countries of the British Empire. Fired up by Edith's courageous example, and furious at the barbarian Germans, young men rushed to enlistment offices. Edith had inspired them to go to war. Britain's politicians seized on Edith as a propaganda tool, playing up the need to follow her path. “She has taught the bravest men among us the supreme lesson of courage,” Britain's Prime Minister Herbert Asquith said in the House of Commons. But his words were hardly needed. The story of Edith Cavell had already taken hold on the public's imagination, and fighting men marched to war in her memory.

In Brussels, in the days after Edith's execution, three other members of the secret network – Louise Thuliez, Countess Jeanne de Belleville, and Louis Séverin – waited at St. Gilles Prison to take their turn before the firing squad. But for them, death never came. The Germans were stunned at the worldwide revulsion stirred by Edith's execution. Germany's leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, announced that, from then on, no woman would be shot unless he consented. He gave the impression that consent would never come from him. The kaiser's announcement was too late to repair the damage that Germany had done to its reputation. But the lives of the three prisoners in St. Gilles were saved. The Germans converted the death sentences of Thuliez, de Belleville, and Séverin to terms in prison.

These three and their colleagues in the secret organization didn't go free until the end of the war. All survived their imprisonment, though Ada Bodart never recovered from the experience and died not long after, ill and penniless (the fate of Bodart's teenage son, Philippe, was never known). Princess de Croy returned to her château at Bellignies, and Louise Thuliez went back to teaching school. Everybody reclaimed their old lives. Albert Libiez, the Mons lawyer, took up his practice, and years later, in the Second World War, he once again worked secretly against Germany.

This time, when he was caught, the German Nazis sent him to a concentration camp where Libiez died, leaving behind a record as a fighter of injustice in two world wars.

In November 1915, Nurse Elisabeth Wilkins decided Brussels was too dangerous for her. The Germans had been rounding up evidence against Wilkins, and she thought her days of freedom might soon be over. When she fled back to Britain, she took Grace Jemmett with her. Jemmett went to live with her parents, while Wilkins continued her career in nursing, ending it as Matron at a hospital in Somerset County.

Jackie, the dog, left Brussels too. After his mistress' execution, he was sent to Bellignies, where he lived until his death in 1923. Princess de Croy his last mistress, arranged for him to be embalmed. Then she shipped Jackie's stuffed body to Norwich, where, odd as it seems, it was put on display for decades as the faithful pet of Britain's heroine.

The war lasted until November 11, 1918. From mid-1915 to late 1918, the fighting raged on several fronts: in Russia to the east; in Turkey, where the Turks fought as Germany's ally; and at sea, where the Germans battled Britain's traditionally powerful navy. But the most decisive warfare took place on the western front in northeastern France and in parts of Belgium. It was in the trenches of the west that the armies fought the war to its conclusion.

The battle wasn't continuous, but more a long and terrible standoff interrupted by individual clashes. These were bloody and futile. Both sides, Germany and the Allied nations, faced one another along a front of 465 miles, from the border of one neutral country, Switzerland, to the border of another neutral country, Holland. Ten thousand Allied soldiers
were packed into each mile of the front lines, with thousands more ready to move up. When they went into periodic battle, the results were grim.

On a single summer day in 1916, in one episode at the Battle of the Somme in France, fifty thousand British troops died as they advanced straight into German fire. The deaths produced no strategic result, not moving the Allied front at the Somme from the spot it had been in at the beginning of the day. In the last three years of the war, 3 million men from the Allied armies died along the length of the western trenches. Throughout the slaughter, the front stayed essentially in place, the Allies pushing ahead not much more than five miles in the entire three years.

The Americans joined the war on the Allies' side in 1917, drawn into the conflict by two German blunders. The first came when Germany killed 128 American citizens in the sinking of the passenger liner
Lusitania
in 1915. The other involved German agents that set out to provoke a diversionary war in America's neighbor Mexico. Those events, plus America's lingering horror at Edith Cavell's execution, stirred the United States to combat. The country's entry into the war and the British invention of the tank combined to give the Allies an edge over the Germans.

But fatigue decided the war in the end. Over the years of fighting, both sides wore down. Millions of men died, and millions more suffered wounds. The soldiers grew sick of the massacre, which came to seem pointless. Everyone was tired, but the Germans tired first. As several historians later wrote, it could just as easily have been one of the Allies, perhaps France or Russia, who decided to quit the fighting before anyone else. But Germany was the country that surrendered on November 11, 1918, and the killing finally stopped.

On March 17, 1919, in a ceremony in Brussels, an official British party, which included the king and queen of England, removed Edith's body from the grave on the shooting range. The exhumation was the first step in her reburial at home in Norfolk. The trip from Brussels to Norwich proceeded in stages, lasting three days altogether, with several stops for ceremonies recognizing Edith's courage and sacrifice. Accompanying the coffin were Edith's two sisters, Florence and Lillian. Edith's mother had died less than a year earlier, distraught and bewildered by her oldest daughter's execution.

At a ceremony in March 1919, Edith's body was removed from its original grave in Brussels for reburial on the grounds of Norwich Cathedral in England. Attending the ceremony were King George V and Queen Mary of England and, in the rear wearing all the medals, King Albert I of Belgium.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

When the cortège traveled by train from Dover to London, church bells rang in every village and people lined the tracks, their heads bowed. In London, the first half of the burial service took place at Westminster Abbey, then the mourners got back on the train to Norwich for the rest of the service. Edith's brother, Jack, joined the crowd at Norwich's famous cathedral. So did the man who could have become Edith's husband, Eddy Cavell. At the service, Bishop Bertram Pollock of Norwich remembered Edith in her youth. He said she was “an innocent, unselfish, devout and pretty girl.”

Edith was reburied in a plot at the rear of the cathedral. Her final resting place was small and inconspicuous, marked by a plain white stone cross. Even the simple grave might have been too showy for the modest Edith.