Edith Louisa Cavell was born on 4th December 1865 to the Reverend Frederick and ?? She was to grow up in Swardeston. Norfolk, UK, in the house financed by her father. This project nearly financially destroyed him and as a result, the family grew up in near poverty. She was educated at home and latterly Norwich.
After a period as a governess, including for a family in Brussels from 1890 to 1895, Cavell returned home to care for her father during a serious illness. The experience led her to pursue a career as a nurse after her father’s recovery.
She worked across London and Maidstone, Kent during the Maidstone typhoid epidemic, from 15 October 1897 until early January 1898.
Once fully qualified she was a private nurse employed by the Private Nursing Institution of the London Hospital, treating patients in their homes. In November 1903, she became assistant matron of St Leonard's Infirmary in Shoreditch, London.
In 1907, Cavell was recruited by Dr. Antoine Depage, the Belgian royal surgeon, and the founder and president of the Belgian Red Cross, to be matron of a newly established nursing school, L'École Belge d'Infirmières Diplômées. Within a year, she was training nurses for three hospitals, twenty-four schools, and thirteen kindergartens in Belgium. In 1910, Cavell was asked if she would be the matron for the new secular hospital at Saint-Gilles.
At the outbreak of war, Edith is back in Norfolk visiting her mother. She decides to return to Brussels to carry on her work as her clinic and nursing school have been taken over by the Red Cross. She writes, ‘My duty is with my nurses’. As the German forces approaches Brussels, she said ‘Any wounded soldier must be treated, friend or foe. Each man is a father, husband or son. As nurses you must take no part in the quarrel – our work is for humanity. The profession of nursing knows no frontiers.’
In November 1914, after the German occupation of Brussels, Cavell began sheltering British soldiers and arranging their escape out of occupied Belgium to neutral Netherlands. She would hide wounded British and French soldiers in her house and elsewhere and provide money and papers to aid their escape.
Cavell was arrested on 3rd August 1915 and charged with harbouring Allied soldiers. She had been betrayed by Georges Gaston Quien, who was later convicted by a French court as a collaborator. She was held in Saint-Gilles prison for ten weeks, the last two of which were spent in solitary confinement. She made three depositions to the German police (on 8, 18 and 22 August), admitting that she had been instrumental in conveying about 60 British and 15 French soldiers, as well as about 100 French and Belgian civilians of military age, to the frontier and had sheltered most of them in her house.
At her court-martial, Cavell was prosecuted for aiding British and French soldiers, and young Belgian men, to cross the Dutch border and eventually enter Britain. She admitted her guilt when she signed a statement the day before the trial. Cavell declared that the soldiers she had helped escape thanked her in writing when they arrived safely in Britain. This admission confirmed that Cavell had not only helped the soldiers navigate the Dutch frontier, but it also established that she helped them escape to a country at war with Germany.
The penalty, according to German military law, was death. Paragraph 58 of the German Military Code determined that "In time of war, anyone who, with the intention of aiding a hostile power, or of causing harm to German or allied troops", commits any of the crimes defined in paragraph 90 of the German Penal Code "shall be punished with death for war treason". Specifically, Cavell was charged under paragraph 90 (1) no. 3 Reichsstrafgesetzbuch, for "conveying troops to the enemy", a crime normally punishable by life imprisonment in peacetime. It was possible to charge Cavell with war treason s paragraph 160 of the German Military Code extended application of paragraph 58 to foreigners "present in the zone of war". While the First Geneva Convention ordinarily guaranteed protection of medical personnel, such protection was forfeit if medical practices were seen to be used as cover for belligerent action. This forfeiture is expressed in article 7 of the 1906 version of the convention, which was the version in force at the time and was used to justify the sentence.
German civil governor Baron von der Lancken is known to have stated that Cavell should be pardoned because of her complete honesty and because she had helped save so many lives, German as well as Allied.
Execution
The night before her execution, Cavell told the Reverend H Stirling Gahan, the Anglican chaplain of Christ Church Brussels, who had been allowed to see her and to give her Holy Communion, "I am thankful to have had these ten weeks of quiet to get ready. Now I have had them and have been kindly treated here. I expected my sentence and I believe it was just. Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." Cavell's final words to the German Lutheran prison chaplain, Paul Le Seur, were recorded as, "Ask Father 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."
At 7am on 12th October 1915, Edith Cavell was shot.
Her body was buried next to the prison but after the war her body returned for a memorial service at Westminster Abbey before being laid to rest at Norwich Cathedral. Cavell was one of only three sets of British remains repatriated following the end of the War.
Edith Cavell devoted her life to serving and saving others. She treated and cared for thousands of lives during her nursing career and while in wartime Belgium she treated soldiers on both sides of the wire.
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