[Illustration:
_Frontispiece._ [_By the courtesy of the Illustrated London News._
NURSE CAVELL.]
_The Martyrdom of
Nurse Cavell._
[Illustration]
_The Life Story of the Victim of
Germany’s Most Barbarous Crime._
_By William Thomson Hill._
[Illustration]
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS._
[Illustration]
_LONDON: HUTCHINSON & CO._
_PATERNOSTER ROW_ ᛭ 1915
NURSE CAVELL’S
LAST MESSAGE TO THE WORLD.
“But this I would say, standing as I do in view of God and eternity,
I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or
bitterness to anyone.”
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
=The latest portrait of Nurse Cavell.= (_From
Photo Copyright Farringdon Photo Company_) (_see cover_)
=Nurse Cavell= (_Photo by courtesy of Illustrated
London News_) _Frontispiece_
=The Rev. Frederick Cavell, father of Nurse
Cavell.= (_Daily Mirror Photograph_) _facing page_ =16=
=Mrs. Cavell, mother of Nurse Cavell.= (_Daily
Mirror Photograph_) ” =17=
=Nurse Cavell when a child, with her mother
and elder sister.= (_Photo Copyright Farringdon
Photo Company_) ” =32=
=The Rectory, Swardeston, where Nurse Cavell
was born.= (_Daily Mirror Photograph_) ” =33=
=Nurse Cavell in her garden.= (_Daily Mirror
Photograph_) ” =48=
=Nurse Cavell, from a photograph taken in
Brussels.= (_Photo Copyright Farringdon Photo
Company_) ” =49=
CHAPTER I.
CHILDHOOD.
In the early seventies there were living at the country rectory of
Swardeston, near Norwich, a clergyman and his wife and little family.
There was a “New” and an “Old” Rectory. Both are still standing, much
as they were then, except that the trees are older, and the “New”
Rectory has long ago lost any signs of newness. It is one of the ways
of Old England to call some of its most ancient things New, as if it
could never learn to tolerate change kindly, even after centuries of
wont.
There is a Newtimber Place in Sussex whose walls were built before the
Armada. There is a New Building in Peterborough Cathedral which was
completed before the Reformation. New Shoreham took the place of Old
Shoreham before Magna Charta was signed.
The Rector, the Rev. Frederick Cavell, lived with his family at the
New Rectory. It is a pleasant sunny house with a large garden. Such
parsonages are common in all the unspoiled rural parts of England. A
little gate leads to the churchyard close by.
In a great city no man would live willingly close by a cemetery.
In such a village as Swardeston the nearness of the graveyard is a
consecration. New graves appear among the old ones from time to time.
The oldest of these others have faded gently into the grass. Nobody
is left to tend them or to remember whose bones they cover. Yet the
history of many a family can be traced back for three centuries on the
lichen-covered stones.
Some day, when the war is over, another grave may be dug in this quiet
spot. If the poor mutilated frame of Edith Cavell is ever permitted
to be brought back home, her countrymen will come here to look upon
the place where she lies. In this October of 1915 she sleeps in a land
ravaged by war, and those who killed her will not stoop even to the
tardy pity of giving back her body.
But in those early seventies the village churchyard was not a place of
sadness to the Rectory children. They played hide-and-seek among the
sloping tombstones. The church and churchyard were, as they still are,
the centre of the village life. Gay doings, such as a wedding, took
place under the shadows of the elms and yews.
The whole community assembled there on any day of special interest.
The churchyard was the Trafalgar Square of Swardeston. For it was
not remote from the houses, as many village churchyards are. Norfolk
labourers swung their heels on the wall in the long evenings of the
days before village institutes and reading rooms were invented.
In these early seventies the village talk still harked back sometimes
to the War of the French and Prussians. Its politics dealt with such
names as “Dizzy” and Gladstone and Joseph Arch, the agricultural
reformer--and, what was more to the point, a Norfolk man. In later
years the village church saw the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s two
Jubilees and King Edward’s Coronation--“a Norfolk landlord, and a rare
good ’un,” as they liked to say in Swardeston.