Silent in an Evil Time (9 page)

When he reached England, Tunmore passed on the information to his superiors. January 19 arrived, and by that day, the British had mounted special defenses around London. The zeppelins arrived on schedule, but fell back when the pilots couldn't penetrate the defenses. Needing to get rid of the bombs before they started the return trip across the English Channel, the zeppelins dropped their explosives on the nearest area they flew over. That was Norfolk, home county to Edith and Tunmore.

From mid-December 1914 to mid-January 1915, the clinic hid ten French soldiers, survivors of the battle at Charleroi, and twenty British soldiers that fought at Mons. The escaping men were coming so often and in such numbers that Edith needed to find other people in Brussels willing to take them in. One was her neighbor, a pharmacist named Louis Séverin. Another was an Irishwoman, Ada Bodart, who had married a Belgian and moved to Brussels. Bodart didn't hesitate to join the secret organization, even though her son Philippe, a slim pale fourteen-year-old, was put at risk.

Hiding the soldiers and recruiting others to do the same was only the first part of Edith's role. She entered even more deeply into the secret organization's work by lining up guides to accompany the soldiers to the
Dutch border. Some of the guides wanted money to cover their services and expenses, so Edith asked for donations from those who supported the organization's work. No one turned down an appeal from Edith.

A potential source of trouble that she needed to deal with, though, was the heavy traffic of men coming and going at the clinic. Edith was afraid that the arrivals and departures of guides might attract the Germans' notice. To solve the problem, she helped choose six locations around Brussels where the soldiers and their guides could meet, far from Rue de la Culture. Each rendezvous had to be in a public place – a corner where a man hanging around for a few minutes wouldn't draw suspicion. Edith didn't miss a trick in thinking up ways of avoiding the Germans. In a pinch, when no guides at all were available, Edith acted as guide herself. She filled whatever role needed filling.

In late January, a lance corporal named Doman from Britain's 9th Lancers and a private named Chapman from the 1st Cheshires arrived together at Edith's clinic. Georges Derveau, the pharmacist who developed Princess de Croy's photographs, had acted as their guide from Mons to Brussels. Like others in the organization, Derveau was branching out into other activities, even though that made him more vulnerable. Once Doman and Chapman reached Rue de la Culture, they were anxious to set off for the Dutch border. But Edith ran into delays in her hunt for a guide, and the days of waiting stretched into weeks.

One morning, when Doman was upstairs in one of the clinic's wards, a group of German soldiers arrived for an unannounced inspection tour. Edith whipped the fully dressed Doman into an empty bed and pulled the blankets up to his neck. Doman still had his boots on, so Edith fluffed the blankets over the bulge. She was using the same trick that would save Private Arthur Wood a few weeks later.

“This man is a Belgian from the countryside,” Edith said, pointing to Doman as she spoke to the head of the German group. “He is suffering from severe rheumatic fever. A very serious condition.”

The Germans backed away, went on to another ward, and soon departed.

Edith now realized she could no longer delay moving Doman and Chapman north to the border. She took them to the rectory of a Catholic priest who was friendly to her network. The priest assured her that he knew a guide for Doman and Chapman. He tore a card in two and gave half to Edith. He instructed her to go back to the clinic with the soldiers, but to bring them and her half of the card to a certain Brussels bar at a certain time two days later.

Edith followed the priest's instructions to the letter, accompanying Doman and Chapman to the bar by streetcar. They sat down at a table. Since neither soldier spoke French, Edith took charge of ordering three glasses of beer from the waiter. She placed her half of the card on the table. Trying their best to look nonchalant, Edith and the soldiers sipped the glasses of beer and glanced around the bar. It was filled with German soldiers. The passing minutes seemed like hours, but soon a Belgian man stopped at their table. A stranger to Edith, he studied the half card. Then he took the other half from his pocket and fit it to Edith's half. It was the sign Edith needed that this man was the guide.

The guide joined them in a beer, and for a few minutes, he and Edith chatted like a couple of old friends. The ability to play the part of an undercover agent seemed to come naturally to Edith – in a room of enemy soldiers, she didn't give the slightest outward show of fear. Finally, she said a gracious good-bye to the three men. She walked confidently past the German soldiers and out into the street.

After another beer, the guide left the bar with Doman and Chapman. A day later, the three attempted to cross the border, but German sentries manned the checkpoint at the frontier where they intended to cross. One sentry called out to them with a question, and when their answer didn't
ring true, he fired warning shots over the men's heads. The three took off for the Dutch side of the frontier, running as fast as they had ever run in their lives. Their effort was so great that the muscles in Chapman's legs seized up. Doman grabbed one of Chapman's arms, the guide clutched the other, and the two dragged Chapman until all three reached Dutch soil.

At the clinic, Edith went about her undercover business as usual. More soldiers arrived. She gave them food and hiding places. She found them routes to Holland. The escaping soldiers were her responsibility and the source of the risks she lived with. Edith wouldn't have had it any other way. She developed a wonderful affection for every one of her soldiers. It was affection with a strong current of tension as Edith could never be sure how close the Germans were to exposing the clinic's dangerous secrets.

Edith loved her two dogs, Don (on the right) and Jackie. Jackie outlived his mistress by many years. On his death, he was stuffed, mounted, and put on display in Norwich as the loyal pet of the First World War's great heroine.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

A
s 1915 moved into springtime, Edith was worried. She talked to no one about her anxiety – not to her nurses nor to the people she worked with in the secret network. Her attitude remained positive, and the expression on her face was as serene as ever. But she knew she had to be on constant guard. The signs of trouble were all around, even inside the clinic.

Edith's first reason for concern arose in late November 1914, when Millicent White was forced to get out of Belgium. White had joined the clinic in 1912 as a senior nurse, becoming one of Edith's favorites. She was in her late twenties, Irish, strong-minded and attractive, with deep brown hair that fell to her waist when she let it down. Like many of Edith's nurses, White worked in outside hospitals during the autumn, when there was a lull in patients arriving for care at the clinic. White's nursing assignment took her to the Royal Palace, which had been turned into a hospital for wounded German soldiers. Somehow, possibly as a result of her forthright personality, she got on the wrong side of a German officer. He threatened to charge her with a military offense.

“What offense?” she demanded.

“Espionage!” the officer thundered.

White knew the Germans had no evidence of espionage against her. Still, she thought it was time to make herself scarce from Brussels and return to England. Edith agreed that her senior nurse had made an enemy who could take away her freedom. But White was determined not to leave Belgium empty-handed. She knew that Colonel Dudley Boger, who was still in the clinic at the time, had written dispatches containing information useful to the British army. She decided to smuggle them out of the country.

White bandaged the dispatches around her thighs, under her long skirt. Equipped with one of Edith's supply of fake passports, White traveled by barge on the canals and rivers from Brussels to the Belgian port city of Antwerp. At a lock on one of the canals, German officials boarded the barge to search the passengers. When the Germans reached White, they were entranced by her luxurious hair. Nothing else interested them, certainly not the possibility of dispatches bandaged to her legs. After they were finally done with the close examination of her hair, they allowed White to continue her trip on the barge.

Four days later, Millicent White reached England by ship and delivered Colonel Boger's dispatches to the British War Office. She was proud to say that the German officer at the Royal Palace was now right: She had committed an act close to espionage against the enemy.

The loss of Millicent White was far from the only problem that Edith dealt with in the clinic's operations. Marie, the German maid, presented concerns from the time Edith took up her secret work. Marie was well
aware of what was going on, and though Edith appreciated the maid's efficiency and hard work, she wondered about Marie's loyalties.
Could Marie be acting as an informant to the Germans in Brussels, revealing secrets that could bring the deepest trouble to the clinic?
Edith wasn't sure, and every day, doubts about Marie filled her with apprehension.

“Marie has been giving me a good deal of trouble,” Edith wrote in a letter to her mother, dated March 14, 1915. It was taken to Mrs. Cavell by one of the escaping British soldiers. “I expect I shall have to send her away one of these days,” Edith wrote, “but must wait in prudence, till after the war.”

Assuming that Marie was untrustworthy, Edith's dilemma was that the maid would go straight to the Germans with every piece of information the minute Edith dismissed her from the clinic. But if Edith did nothing about Marie, the maid would have the chance to pile up even more damning evidence against Edith. Either way, the secret network could come to grief.

Edith delayed making a decision about her maid for months. She kept Marie on the job through the spring and into July, when she finally told Marie to pack her bags and leave. Nobody ever established whether the mysterious Marie was or wasn't a German spy. She left behind nothing that answered the question of her allegiance. In the end, Marie's status probably made no difference to Edith's state of mind; a spy or not a spy, Marie brought anxiety to her employer for all the time of Edith's work with the escaping soldiers.

Through the spring, the Germans seemed to be everywhere in the clinic's neighborhood. In March, German officials set up a minor command post across the street from one of the four houses that made up the clinic. The location was probably just a coincidence and had no implications for Edith and the secret network. Still, the command post made her unsettled.

At the same time, a group of German soldiers took over a house on Rue de la Culture as their own personal barracks. At night, everyone in the top stories of the clinic could see the soldiers in their rooms, drinking and playing cards.

Edith didn't think of the soldiers as a threat, but their presence on the street meant that the British at the clinic needed to be especially alert in not drawing the Germans' attention. The slightest slip could bring the enemy to the door of anyone with even a mild connection to the Allied cause.

Louise Thuliez arrived at the clinic, escorting two British soldiers, in early April 1915. Thuliez was the schoolteacher from the village near Bellignies who had begun her secret work by leading British soldiers to the de Croys' château. Her activities grew to include trips into Brussels, where she put soldiers in Edith's care. On the journeys, Thuliez passed herself off as a Salvation Army officer, a disguise that the Germans always fell for. She visited the clinic so often that she became familiar with all the details of Edith's operations. Still, on the trip in early April, Thuliez was surprised at how many British soldiers were hiding in the clinic. She counted thirty-five of them in the four houses – a high number to keep from the Germans' notice indefinitely.

It wasn't just the steady stream of British escapees that made the clinic such a busy place in the spring months. Edith and her nurses were also caring for Belgian patients, who filled the beds in most wards. The Germans were no longer sending their wounded soldiers to the clinic; instead, they shipped the men back home for treatment. Now it was Belgian patients, suffering from illnesses or injuries, that kept Edith and her nurses occupied day and night.

The new clinic on Rue Brussels was another responsibility for Edith. In the early months of the war, construction of the clinic had come to a halt. Building materials were stuck on trains that no longer operated, and men
in the construction trades were swept into the Belgian army. But in the spring, work resumed, and Edith became hopeful that the building would soon be ready.

“The new clinic is advancing and becoming habitable,” Edith wrote in the March 11 letter to her mother, “but it will not be finished for May 1 when we should be installed.”

Edith was overly optimistic when she suggested the clinic was close to being finished. As things turned out, the new place wouldn't be up and running until the fall of 1915. Still, Edith's dream of working there filled her with excitement for many months.

In all her duties at the clinic, Edith worked without the guidance of the founder and chief surgeon, Antoine Depage. Early in the war, the doctor joined the Belgian army, taking his medical skills into the fight against the Germans. He stayed with the army when it was driven into France, and Edith accepted the realization that if she was ever to see the doctor again, it would be only when the war ended.

Dr. Depage's wife, Marie, was also gone from Brussels. She sailed to the United States in early 1915 to ask Belgian Americans for donations to help finance the new clinic. On her return trip at the beginning of May, Madame Depage left from New York for England on a majestic British liner named the
Lusitania
, which was carrying almost two thousand crew and passengers. As the
Lusitania
passed the southern tip of Ireland on May 7, a German submarine fired a single torpedo at the ship. The
Lusitania
sank in eighteen minutes, taking 1,198 passengers and crew to their deaths. In all, 761 men, women, and children survived. Marie Depage wasn't one of them.