Silent in an Evil Time (6 page)

Edith Cavell took the Sunday-evening boat across the English Channel to Ostend, on the Belgian coast, where she caught a train that would reach Brussels early Monday morning.

In Brussels, King Albert I of Belgium summoned his military leaders to the Senate chamber late on Sunday night. For hours, past midnight and into Monday morning, the men discussed Belgium's answer to the German ultimatum. Albert, an honorable man, didn't want Belgium to be the cause of a full-scale European war. On the other hand, Germany's bullying made him furious. The answer that Albert and his generals drew up said, in the most dignified language, that Belgium would oppose any attack on its borders. A document with the answer was delivered to the German legation in Brussels at seven o'clock on Monday morning. That was just about the time when Edith arrived back in the city to take charge of her clinic.

As six of the clinic's nurses in training were Germans, Edith's first order of business was to get them out of Belgium. None of the European countries had yet fired a shot, but Edith knew that Brussels could soon become a dangerous spot for the six young German women. She wasn't worried about her German maid, Marie, who was older and could handle herself
in Brussels. The risk was different for the youthful and inexperienced nurses. Edith took the six to the train station and saw them off to their fatherland.

When she returned to the clinic, Edith began preparations to care for soldiers wounded in battle. If Germany invaded Belgium, Edith expected that the Belgian army would need all the hospital beds in the city to look after casualties from the war front. She was also certain that the clinic would come under the rules and regulations of the International Committee of the Red Cross when war broke out. This meant that Edith and her nurses would be called on to treat the wounded from every country, both allies and enemies, both Belgian and German. The clinic had to be ready to play its part.

Later on Monday, Germany pushed Europe to the brink of all-out war. Confident that the Schlieffen Plan would bring an early victory, the Germans declared war on France. A few hours after the declaration, when Germany's ultimatum to Belgium expired, German troops massed along the border between the two countries. In the darkness of early Tuesday morning, the Germans crossed into Belgium.

With Germany's invasion of Belgium, the old treaty signed by France and England guaranteeing Belgian neutrality came into effect. By midnight, Tuesday, August 4, Britain was at war with Germany. So were France and Russia. The countries of the British Empire, Canada among them, declared war on Germany, and within a week, Austria-Hungary joined Germany in the war against England and all of the other Allied nations.

The war had begun. Everybody called it the Great War because it involved all of Europe's powers. It was expected to settle rivalries that had existed
over the past century. For this reason, it was also called the War to End All Wars. It would become known, finally and officially, under a third name, the First World War, in 1943, four years after the start of the Second World War.

Under all its names, the war lasted from the summer of 1914 until late in 1918, and it didn't come near to ending all wars. But it was the most deadly war in history until then. Millions from both sides died in the fighting. The overwhelming majority of deaths resulted from soldiers shelling and shooting at one another in massive artillery and infantry battles. But among the others who gave their lives were men and women who never picked up a gun. Edith Cavell was one of them.

OPPOSITE:
The men in the spiked helmets are German soldiers posing in front of the beautiful town hall in Brussels, which the Germans occupied in August 1914.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

At the outbreak of the First World War, Edith had developed the assurance and courage she needed to take up her dangerous work against the invading German troops.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

E
dith was astonished at how quiet it was in Brussels during August 1914. To the east, the small Belgian army in its old-fashioned uniforms, equipped with out-of-date guns, was doing its best to slow the German powerhouse. The Germans expected no opposition at all, and they grew impatient at the Belgian resistance. In several villages, they took out their anger on the local people. The German soldiers lined up men, women, and children in the main square of each village and shot them. Reports of these horrors reached Brussels, shocking everyone. But few soldiers wounded in the battles had yet turned up at the clinic. Edith and her nurses had little work on their hands.

The Germans needed three weeks to conquer Belgium. During those weeks, Edith told her English nurses that they still had time to get back to the safety of England. All refused. Edith told the same thing to Grace
Jemmett. Not wanting to be separated from Edith's protection, Jemmett chose to stay. But she went to her bed and remained there for several weeks. As for Edith, it never occurred to her to leave for England. Whenever anybody brought up the subject, she replied with the same answer she had given her mother – her duty was with the clinic and her nurses. The clinic was now under the auspices of the Red Cross. That made little difference in the way Edith ran it, but as Matron at a Red Cross institution, Edith's status allowed her to remain in Brussels, even after the Germans occupied the city.

The occupation took place on August 20, when the German army marched into the middle of Brussels. No fighting in the city preceded its arrival; all of the battles were out in the countryside and in the smaller towns. Twenty thousand German soldiers in their gray uniforms paraded to Brussels' town hall. They took down the bright tricolor flag of Belgium and replaced it with the German black, white, and red. The city had become occupied territory.

Brussels turned into a duller, darker, more anxious place. Many kinds of food ran short, and people were afraid that their supply of coal for the coming winter would be cut back. The use of electricity at night was restricted, and Germany allowed no Belgian newspapers to be published, leaving Edith and everybody else unaware of events in Belgium and the world beyond. The Germans imposed martial law on the conquered country. All citizens were required to carry identification papers. German soldiers could stop them at any time to check name, address, and other personal details. If anything seemed fishy, the Germans dragged the poor citizen off to jail.

It was three days after the occupation of Brussels that the German army fought a fierce battle against the British near Mons, a town thirty-five kilometers south of the capital. Sticking to the Schlieffen Plan, the Germans had driven toward the border between Belgium and France. When they reached Mons, they discovered that eighty thousand troops from the British Expeditionary Force, which had just arrived from England, were dug in for thirty kilometers along the Condé-Mons Canal, waiting for the Germans to show up.

At noon on August 23, the British opened fire. Their soldiers included veterans from the Boer War of a dozen years earlier. These men were crafty fighters, and they were equipped with fine new Lee-Enfield rifles, which shot at the amazing rate of fifteen rounds a minute. The British blasted away and brought the German advance to a halt. They killed or wounded five thousand German soldiers, while suffering just fifteen hundred casualties themselves.

But the
BEF
's generals, knowing that the German army was still far stronger than theirs, never intended the battle at Mons to last more than a few hours. The day before, on August 22, the French army was badly beaten by the Germans in a battle at Charleroi, a village not far from Mons. French soldiers went into an immediate retreat, and on the morning of August 24, the
BEF
joined the French in falling back into France.

One result of the retreat was that hundreds of British soldiers were left behind enemy lines. In the speed and confusion of the fallback, many soldiers missed the orders to move out. Others couldn't keep up, or were slowed by wounds, or were pointed in the wrong direction. These soldiers were caught in the rear of the German advance, and their only choice was to go into hiding in the Belgian countryside and in the thick French forests.

The Schlieffen Plan, which promised the capture of Paris within forty-two days, came close to succeeding. Before the fortieth day of the war,
Germany's soldiers needed only another day or two of fighting to make their way into Paris. The French were so concerned that they prepared to blow up one of the city's most renowned structures, the Eiffel Tower, which served as the transmitting station for French army communications. But at this crucial moment, the German army weakened under the strain of almost six weeks of marching and warfare. The French and British tightened their resistance against the flagging Germans. Paris was saved, and the war settled into a stalemate of fighting in the trenches of northern and eastern France. Neither side made much headway for the rest of 1914 and all of 1915.

Through September and October 1914, Edith was frustrated at the lack of activity around her clinic in Brussels. “We are actually doing no work among the wounded,” she wrote in a letter to her sister Florence. Even in the occupied city, Edith discovered ways of getting a letter to the outside world. “Everything is out of our hands at the present,” she went on. “The enemy have made their own arrangements.”

Edith and her nurses filled the hours by sewing and knitting clothes for Belgian refugees from towns and villages that the Germans had destroyed. They worked on long-term plans for a children's Christmas party. And from time to time, they treated wounded German soldiers, under the supervision of German doctors. Edith continued her usual training of student nurses, though there were fewer of them in wartime and almost all were Belgian. The senior nurse, Millicent White, and some of the other nurses were often sent to care for the wounded in hospitals throughout Brussels.

But life on Rue de la Culture was slow for Edith. She was used to being of service to her patients and her nurses. For now, she had few of either, and the empty days filled her with aggravation. What she couldn't know
was that an adventure was unfolding south of Brussels that would wipe the dullness from her life.

Dudley Boger and Fred Meachin, two men whose names would soon become familiar to Edith, were members of the British Expeditionary Force that fought at Mons. Boger, forty-nine years old, came from a family with a long record of military and naval service. His own career was distinguished, and by 1914, he held the rank of colonel and commanded the 1st Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment. When the war broke out, Boger told his wife that he expected to be killed in action, or taken prisoner of war, or appointed to the rank of general. He was right about one of the three. Fred Meachin, in his twenties, was a noncommissioned officer and served as a sergeant with the 1st Cheshires. He was affable, brave, and devoted to his commanding officer, Colonel Boger.

On the morning of August 24, as the
BEF
retreated from Mons, the Cheshires' assignment was to fight a rearguard action against the Germans, stalling the enemy long enough for the other British troops to get further down the road into France. It was a necessary but hopeless battle. The Germans killed dozens of the Cheshires' soldiers and wounded many more. Fred Meachin was one of the first to be hit – once by a bullet, then by a piece of shrapnel that ricocheted off a tree. The hits knocked Meachin unconscious, and he lay in a field for hours. Dudley Boger took even more shots than Meachin. He was wounded in the hand, the side, and the right foot. Unable to walk, he crawled to a nearby house. To his unpleasant surprise, the house turned out to be a headquarters for German officers, who took Boger prisoner.