Silent in an Evil Time (8 page)

Equipped with Edith's careful directions, Boger and Meachin set off separately toward Holland, agreeing to meet in a town just across the Dutch border. Even with his impeccable French, Boger caught the eye of a German officer before he got out of Brussels. He had stepped into a bar for a drink, and the German, sensing something not quite Belgian about Boger, took him to army headquarters for questioning. Boger spent the next four years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. One of the three predictions he'd made to his wife had come true.

Wearing his fisherman's disguise, Meachin, too, came close to getting nabbed by the Germans. A real Belgian fisherman, hired by Edith to guide Meachin to the border, panicked when the two stopped at a restaurant and found it filled with German soldiers. The guide went back out the door and rushed away, never to be seen again. From his shopping excursions with Edith, Meachin was accustomed to handling himself among the enemy. He kept his cool in the restaurant and attracted no stares or questions. But he was now on his own in occupied territory, not sure of the best route to Holland. He slept one night in a pigsty and another in a woodshed. He lived on a diet of raw turnips. By luck, he met a man who was sympathetic to the Allied cause. The man changed Meachin's disguise from fisherman to turnip picker, and led him to the frontier.

Meachin and his new friend found a spot to cross into Holland that seemed to be clear of German guards. They checked both ways, then set out at a trot toward the other side of the border. What neither noticed was a lone German sentry. The sentry raised his rifle and fired at the backs of the fleeing men. The shots flew wide. Running for their lives, Meachin and his guide speeded up until they were clear of the border.

When Meachin returned to England, his army superiors thought he must have deserted his regiment. What else explained the three months he had been on the loose in Belgium? The army brass intended to send Meachin to a court-martial. But they finally believed the sergeant's remarkable story of Edith Cavell, the secret organization, and Meachin's dash for freedom. After a short holiday with his wife and two small daughters, Meachin rejoined his regiment and fought again for the Cheshires in Europe. He survived the war and lived to a good age.

Colonel Dudley Boger and Sergeant Fred Meachin were the first British soldiers who approached Edith for help in escaping the Germans. Guided
by members of the secret network, hundreds more came to Edith's clinic with the same request. A few of these men were captured, as Boger had been. But most of them went free in the way that Meachin had, and like him, they lived to fight on against the enemy. With Boger and Meachin, Edith's heroic work had begun.

The château was the home of Prince Reginald and Princess Marie de Croy, a brother and sister who were key members of the secret organization of French and Belgian citizens who worked with Edith to help soldiers escape from the Germans. The prince and princess hid many fleeing British, French, and Belgian soldiers inside the beautiful château.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

P
rince Reginald de Croy and Princess Marie de Croy lived in a château as grand as a castle. The prince and princess were a middle-aged brother and sister who came from an established family related to royalty all over Europe. The château, called Bellignies, stood just across the border in France, a few kilometers from Mons. That placed it close to the forests where British soldiers from the battle at Mons and French soldiers from the fighting at Charleroi were hiding to avoid capture by the Germans. Prince Reginald and Princess Marie were intensely patriotic, and they decided to make Bellignies a refuge for the Allied soldiers. They would take in the men, give them food and shelter, and put them on the path back to their own armies.

Part of the château consisted of an ancient tower that hadn't been used for centuries. In medieval times, the de Croy family imprisoned their enemies in the tower. Its walls were nine feet thick, and no sound could be heard from the inside. The prince and princess thought the abandoned tower was a perfect place to conceal British and French soldiers. From September 1914 until midway through 1915, it became the hideout for hundreds of men on their way out of the country. The Germans grew suspicious of the de Croys, but they never caught a hidden British or French soldier in the château, no matter how often they showed up to search.

On one sudden German raid, Princess Marie's swift action saved a dozen British soldiers from capture. At the time the Germans arrived, the soldiers happened to be chatting with the princess in one of Bellignies' drawing rooms. Princess Marie jumped up from her chair and pulled back a secret panel in the drawing-room wall. The panel opened an entrance to a hidden passageway. The princess pushed the soldiers into the dusty inner chamber, then slid the panel back into place.

In the drawing room, Princess Marie lay down on a sofa, covering her legs with a rug and placing a cloth over her forehead. She was pretending to be sick in the hope that her “illness” would discourage the Germans from spending much time in the room. The plan worked. The Germans concentrated on searching the château's other rooms. None of them spotted the secret panel leading to the passageway, and they all soon left Bellignies empty-handed.

Prince Reginald and Princess Marie made contact with other men and women in the area who were assisting the British and French soldiers. Together they formed a network to smuggle soldiers out of occupied territory. Louise Thuliez was prominent in the group, a schoolteacher from the city of Lille in northern France who was on holiday in a village near
Bellignies when war broke out. She stayed on to help hide soldiers from the Germans and steer them to shelter at the de Croy castle. Thuliez soon became one of the network's valiant figures.

Princess Marie snapped the photographs of the soldiers that were needed for their fake identity papers. Like the princess, everybody in the network contributed different talents. A pharmacist named Georges Derveau, who owned a shop in a village close to Mons, developed Princess Marie's photographs. Auguste Joly a husky and fearless miner from Wiheries, had two specialties. He was resourceful at rounding up clothes to disguise the English soldiers, and he joined Prince Reginald in handling the tense business of guiding the soldiers from Mons to Brussels.

People in the network came from every background. Jeanne de Belleville was a well-to-do countess with a country home close to Bellignies. Désiré Richez lived in Wiheries, and, like Auguste Joly, he worked as a low-paid miner. Both took key roles in the network. Countess de Belleville began her association with the organization to help her young nephew join the French army, but she stayed on to assist countless other British and French soldiers to evade the Germans. Désiré Richez, who had a wife and two children, worked wonders in concealing one English soldier in his small home for almost eight months. The soldier was Charlie Scott, a private from the Norfolk Regiment who suffered severe wounds to his chest in the fighting at Mons. Richez and his family treated Scott with the little medical equipment they owned, and they were ingenious in improvising a hiding spot for Scott when the Germans arrived on searching expeditions.

Richez, Countess de Belleville, the de Croys, and the others linked up with such people as Albert Libiez and Herman Capiau, the men who sheltered Colonel Boger and Sergeant Meachin. The secret network continued to grow, all of its members cooperating to protect British and French soldiers from the enemy. They developed routes to guide the soldiers from Mons and Bellignies to Brussels. As their work proceeded, the
men and women in the secret network came to agree on the most reliable place in Brussels to deliver the escaping men. Without doubt, it was Edith Cavell's clinic.

Sergeant Jesse Tunmore belonged to the Norfolk Regiment. He was one of the soldiers who escaped with Colonel Boger from the convent hospital in Wiheries. For weeks he survived in the forest, until he had the good luck to meet Auguste Joly, the miner. Joly supplied Tunmore with food and clothes, and told him how to get to Edith in Brussels. Tunmore reached Rue de la Culture two days before Christmas 1914.

“How do I know you're really a British soldier?” Edith asked Tunmore. She was teasing. Tunmore should have realized that both he and Edith spoke English with the same distinctive Norfolk accent.

“Well,” he said nervously, pointing to a picture on Edith's wall, “I recognize that that's a picture of Norwich Cathedral.”

“You know Norwich, do you?” Edith said, with a smile. “I know Norwich too.”

Tunmore relaxed.

Edith explained that the clinic was a wartime Red Cross institution, and for that reason, she and her nurses were caring for wounded German soldiers. It was essential that she keep Tunmore out of the Germans' sight. Edith led him to the clinic's cellar, where Tunmore joined two other British soldiers in hiding. Edith arranged for the nurses to bring him food, and she visited Tunmore and the others each day. Years later, Tunmore remembered Edith as “slim, quiet, kind in every way – and clever.”

On Christmas Day, Edith served roast beef and plum pudding, from her mother's special recipe, to the soldiers in the cellar. Upstairs that evening, the clinic put on the children's Christmas party they had been planning for months. Thirty boys and girls and their parents gathered for food, gifts, carol singing, and a few hours when thoughts of the war were pushed aside.

These brave English nurses posed for this photograph just as they left the London Hospital in the autumn of 1914. They were on their way to serve in British field hospitals in France during the war's early fighting and couldn't know what horrors lay in store.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

A day or two later, Edith took a photo of Tunmore for a fake passport. Though she wasn't as expert at photography as Princess Marie de Croy, Edith owned an old box Kodak camera that she used for snapping pictures on her holidays. When the passport was ready, Tunmore was guided to the Dutch border, where he met disaster. A German guard pointed out to Tunmore something that neither he nor Edith had noticed: The passport was out of date. Staying calm, Tunmore nodded his apologies to the guard and made his way back to the clinic.

At 5:30 in the morning, a few days after New Year's, equipped with a properly dated passport, Tunmore started for the border once again. This time he was accompanied partway by Edith and her dog, Jackie. The new document passed the guard's inspection. Tunmore crossed into Holland. While he was there, he picked up what seemed a reliable tip about Germany's intentions to send a fleet of zeppelins to drop bombs on London. A zeppelin was a huge airship, with a cylinder shape and a covered frame that held gas cells. It could carry an impressive load of bombs. Tunmore's source even mentioned a date for the attack: January 19.