Edith Cavell, a Christian Nurse Killed by a German Firing Squad: ‘I Must Have No Hatred’

By David Mills Published on October 22, 2015

She helped heal German soldiers and at the same time helped Allied soldiers escape, and for that the Germans put her in front of a firing squad, and she forgave them for doing so. Edith Cavell, a nurse, died on the outskirts of Brussels 100 years ago, at the age of 49, on October 12, 1915.

An English pastor’s daughter, impressed by an Austrian hospital she’d visited, Cavell began training as a nurse at the age of 31. The next year, still a student, she was given a medal for her work during a typhoid epidemic, working 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every day and risking her life. In 1907 she moved to Brussels to work as a private nurse for a doctor’s family and in a few months the doctor put her in charge of a new school training nurses in Florence Nightingale’s techniques.

“By 1912,” the Edith Cavell site reports, “Edith was providing nurses for three hospitals, 24 communal schools and 13 kindergartens. In 1914 she was giving four lectures a week to doctors and nurses alike, and finding time to care for a friend’s daughter who was a morphia addict, and a runaway girl.”

Things Got Complicated

Then things got complicated. The Germans invaded Belgium and Cavell, who was safe in England with her family, decided to return. She had a job to do. While treating German and Austrian soldiers as well as Belgian and English soldiers, she became part of a network smuggling Allied soldiers, including Belgians and Frenchmen as well as Englishmen, into neutral Holland. She knew what she was doing and what the consequences would be if she were caught, and that she and the others were likely to be caught.

“She would have seen it as a necessary part of their care,” says Cavell expert Nick Miller. “If she just handed them over to the Germans they would have been thrown into a camp and left to fend for themselves. But the bravery required is mind-blowing. To shelter these men, take them to pick-ups, all under the noses of the Germans, is gallantry of the first order.” It is estimated she saved 175 soldiers and men of military age.

Eventually caught, Cavell confessed to the Germans, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. The Germans later explained that if they spared her because she was a woman, many other women would begin sabotaging their war effort knowing they wouldn’t be executed for it.

They ordered her executed the next day, along with the organizer Philippe Baucq, possibly to make sure no appeal for clemency was successful. (Of the 27 conspirators put on trial and convicted, only 5 were sentenced to death and only 2 actually executed.) She had been held in prison for ten weeks, the last two in solitary confinement.

Patriotism is Not Enough

After the sentence was announced, the German chaplain, Paul Le Seur, a Lutheran, arranged for a visit from an Anglican minister, who was still in Belgium serving the Church of England parish in Brussels, by sending him a note telling him one of his parishioners was dying and needed to see him. The Rev. Stirling Gahan came that evening and when told what he was to do “almost collapsed,” but went anyway. He gave Cavell communion.

“They have all been very kind to me here,” Gahan reported she told him. “But this I would say, standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

When told she’d be remembered as a heroine and a martyr, she said “Don’t think of me like that; think of me as a nurse who tried to do her duty.” Gahan and Cavell sang “Abide With Me” together and as he left she said, “We shall meet again.”

The German chaplain later told him, “She was brave and bright to the last. She professed her Christian faith and that she was glad to die for her country.” She died, he said, “like a heroine.”

Neutral America

America was then neutral and the head of the American legation in Brussels appealed to the German military governor, noting that her sentence was harsher than those given to others convicted of the same crime and that information she freely supplied made her sentence harsher.

He mentioned her great work for others: “At the beginning of the war Miss Cavell bestowed her care as freely on the German soldiers as on others. Even in default of all other reasons, her career as a servant of humanity is such as to inspire the greatest sympathy and to call for pardon.”

Spain also protested. They were both ignored. The head of the American legation wrote a year later:

We reminded [German civil governor Baron von der Lancken] of the burning of Louvain and the sinking of the Lusitania, and told him that this murder would rank with those two affairs and would stir all civilised countries with horror and disgust. Count Harrach broke in at this with the rather irrelevant remark that he would rather see Miss Cavell shot than have harm come to the humblest German soldier, and his only regret was that they had not “three or four old English women to shoot.”

The next day, Le Seur rode with Cavell from the prison to the execution grounds. Bauck, a Catholic, called out to the soldiers who were going to shoot him and his friend, “Comrades, in the presence of death we are all comrades,” but was then silenced.

The German chaplain blessed Cavell, who told him, “Ask Mr. Gahan 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.” She and Bauck were then shot at the same time by separate firing squads and immediately buried. “Then,” wrote Le Seur, “I went home, almost sick in my soul.”

Edith Cavell, rest in peace.

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