deliberately shot by Germans for housing refugees, will run the
sinking of the _Lusitania_ close in the civilized world as the
greatest crime in history. There is one thing about the incident
which, perhaps, was not taken into account by those who perpetrated
the crime. It will settle the matter once for all about recruiting
in Great Britain. There will be no need now of compulsion. I wonder
what Nelson would have said if he had been told that an
Englishwoman had been shot in cold blood by the members of any
other nation? He would have made more than the diplomatic inquiries
which have been made by a great neutral into this crime, right and
proper as those inquiries are. He would have made his inquiries by
the thunder of the guns of the British Fleet, and pressed the
question with the Nelson touch which won Trafalgar, as, indeed, our
own Fleet at this moment is only too ready to do. But is it
possible that there is one young man in England to-day who will
sit still under this monstrous wrong? The three million new
recruits asked for will be there. Why was she put to death? Why was
she murdered? Three thousand thousand Englishmen, and Scotsmen and
Irishmen too, will know the reason why. God's curse is on the
nation that tramples underfoot and defies the laws of chivalry
which once relieved the horrors of war.'
The following is the Rev. F. B. Meyer's eloquent contribution:
'We may thank God for the chivalrous reverence in which the British
race holds womanhood; and how nobly that reverence has been
responded to is evident in the unparalleled service which the women
of our time have been giving to fill the depleted ranks of labour
and to render invaluable service in all departments, from the
hospital to the harvest-field.
'The crowning horror of the German treatment of womanhood is the
atrocious murder of this woman, who lived to alleviate suffering,
and who only did what any one of us would have done in saving the
lives of refugees who sought the shelter of a home. There should be
no necessity for executing a woman in war-time; and if it is said
that crime is committed in passion, the murder of Miss Cavell is
inexcusable even on that ground, because she was executed in cold
blood.
'It is impossible for any British men who are of suitable age and
physical fitness for the army to hold back, because it is certain
that the measure meted out to Nurse Cavell would be gentleness
itself compared to the treatment which would befall our womanhood
if once the German invasion triumphed over our resistance.
'If only the crime that we deprecate to-day would lead us to
concentrate our thought on the War, we should be doing more than we
realize towards bringing it to an end. The pessimist, the croaker,
the grumbler, the critic, work in a contrary direction. Our
enemies, with their Hymns of Hate and concentrated venom,
endeavour to hurt us, and they forget that passions of that sort
recoil on their instigators as poisonous gases roll back with the
wind to those who sent them. We do not concentrate in a spirit of
revenge or hatred, but in the stern resolve of an entire nation
that we shall never stay our hands until our Empire is free from
all fear of menace.
'Miss Cavell has set the world an example of how we should bear
ourselves in a supreme crisis. Her heroic conduct, her calm
composure in the face of death, cannot be accounted for merely by
her temperament. They were due to her religious faith.
'She died as a Christian, looking towards the Redeemer, and forgave
her persecutors, and she will go on ministering still.
'A life like hers will reverberate through the world. Thousands
will be inspired by her example, and long after the War has passed
away her name and character will shine like a beacon light in
history.'
The Rev. Lord William Cecil contributed a special sermon to the columns
of the _Daily Telegraph_, of which is quoted only the final portion:
'Edith Cavell lives in the heart of the nation; nay, in the esteem
of the world.
'She by her deed has won undying renown, and has made England more
glorious. Far and wide will they tell the tale, and add--"Of such
are the English."
'The work of the statesman passes. New generations arise, with new
problems and new combinations. The victories of the general are
forgotten or live in the musty pages of history with dates and
sententious comments of the historian. But glorious deeds of
sacrifice never die. They live and grow mightier as years roll on.
'The old English chronicler, Hall, after discussing the question
whether Joan of Arc was justly killed or no, adds this
comment--that "it matters not, for in a few years the whole story
will be forgotten." Poor fool! He forgot that good deeds live, and
therefore can never be forgotten. So we shall tell the story of
Edith Cavell to the wondering children, and they on their knees
will lisp in childish words a prayer that they may grow like such a
holy woman.
'And the ages that are to come will learn her name. Yes, long after
other great actors in this awful tragedy are forgotten--when the
names of kings and kaisers are lost in the obscurity of the
past--the sacrifice made by Edith Cavell will be remembered as we
remember the holy deeds of saints and the martyrdom of the
Christian virgins.
'This foul world needs some saint to save it.
'The world that tells lies, breaks sworn treaties, murders and
kills, needs a ransom. Vile as it is, so vile that those who look
on it marvel at the depravity of human nature, and now, as a
sin-offering, a woman has been offered by the blood-lusting
Germans.
'The sacrifice will surely tell in the great world beyond, and a
blessing will come from her death.
'The heavenly trumpets sound the victory. Fear and cruelty shall
not prevail. Honour, love, and sacrifice are conquerors. And this
world will be saved from that combination of human power and
vileness which is revealed to the world by the Prussian military
system.
'Edith Cavell, by her sacrifice, pleads with God to send
righteousness again on this war-torn earth.
'She will conquer.'
Mr. T. P. O'Connor delivered more than one eloquent speech, and that
which we quote may be accepted as the voice of Ireland:
'If ever we had any doubts as to what our duty is in this War, it
must have been removed by the events of the past few days. We have
given to this cause of liberty one of the noblest figures that ever
appeared in the martyrology of liberty throughout the history of
the world.
'I like to think of Miss Cavell as a symbol of our race. By her
devotion to duty, her assiduity in her work, her determination to
stand by her post, her humanity to the enemy as well as to the
friend, her words of courage, and at the same time of broad pity
and humanity, even under the shadow of death, that woman has done
more to inspire our race in our fight than the gallantry even of a
hundred thousand men.
'I am glad to see that a great newspaper has opened a fund for the
purpose of raising an adequate monument to her memory; but no
monument of marble or of bronze will speak as her own personality,
her own life, and her death.'
The following is extracted from a powerful article by Professor J. H.
Morgan in the _Graphic_:
'The execution of Miss Cavell is not, perhaps, the most revolting
of the innumerable outrages committed by the German army, but it
is certainly the most callous and the most authoritative. Hundreds
of women and young girls have been outraged by German officers and
men; many have been shot, and others burnt alive. But what
distinguishes the case of Miss Cavell--not forgetting the singular
nobility of her character--from these obscurer tragedies is the
fact that, owing to the presence of the vigilant and high-minded
Minister of a neutral State, the veil has been lifted upon the
whole proceedings, from their inception to their mournful
conclusion in the courtyard of the prison of St. Gilles, and the
world has had revealed to it in the most lurid light the sinister
character of German "justice."
'The noble woman who, out of the abundance of her charity, sought
to save men from these things has been condemned and executed on a
charge of having offended against military law. I know nothing more
tragically ironical than that the Power which has broken all laws,
human and divine, should seek to justify the condemnation of Edith
Cavell with all the pomp of a tribunal of justice. While thousands
of ravishers and spoilers go free, one woman who had spent her life
in ministries to such as were sick and afflicted is handed over to
the executioner. Truly there has been no such trial since Barabbas
was released and Christ led forth to the hill of Calvary.'
Mr. G. K. Chesterton contributed a scathing indictment to the
_Illustrated London News_:
'There is not much that can be said, or said easily, about the
highest aspects of the murder of Edith Cavell. When we have said,
"Dear in the sight of God is the death of His saints," we have said
as much as mere literature has ever been able to say in the matter.
'The thing was not done to protect the Prussian power. It was done
to satisfy a Prussian appetite. The mad disproportion between the
possible need of restraining their enemy and the frantic
needlessness of killing her is simply the measure of the distance
by which the distorted Prussian psychology has departed from the
moral instincts of mankind. The key to the Prussian is in this
extraordinary fact: that he does truly and in his heart believe
that he is _admired_ whenever he can manage to be dreaded. An
indefensible act of public violence is to him what a poem is to a
poet or a song to a bird. It at once relieves and expresses him; he
feels more himself while he is doing it. His whole conception of
the State is a series of such _coups d'etat_. In Poland, in Alsace,
in Lorraine, in the Danish provinces, he has wholly failed to
govern; indeed, he has never really attempted to govern. For
governing means making people at home.
'Wherever he goes, and whatever success he gains, he will always
make it an occasion for sanguinary pantomimes of this kind. And
awful as is the individual loss, it is well that now, at the very
moment when men, wily or weak, are beginning to talk of
conciliatory possibilities in this incurable criminal, he should
himself have provided us with this appalling reply.'
Mr. Hall Caine attended the great Memorial Service in St. Paul's
Cathedral; and below is a short extract from his impressions as recorded
in the _Daily Telegraph_:
'What has brought this multitude together? A great victory? The
close of a great campaign? The funeral (as at this time last year)
of a grand old warrior who, after many glorious victories, has
died, as is most fit, within sound of the guns in the War he
foretold, and is being borne to his lasting place amid the
acclamations of his countrymen and the homage of the world? No, but
the memory of a poor woman, a hospital nurse, who has been foully
done to death by a barbarous enemy, condemned for acts of mercy and
humanity, tried in secret, shot in haste, and then buried in a
traitor's grave!
'What a triumph for religion, for Christianity, for the Church!
What an answer to Nietzsche! What a rebuke to Treitschke! What a
smashing blow to the all-wise philosophers who have been telling us
that Corsica has conquered Galilee! That in these dark and evil
days the people of London should assemble in tens of thousands to
thank God for the shadow of the scaffold and to find inspiration in
thinking of the martyr's end is proof enough that not lust of
empire, not "the will to power," not war for its own sake or for
the triumphs it brings in its train, but religion, with its
righteousness, is still the bread of our souls.'
XIII
THE LASH OF THE WORLD'S PRESS
SELECTIONS FROM BRITISH JOURNALS
_The Times._
'The ordinary German mind is doubtless incapable of understanding
the "horror and disgust" which the military execution of Miss
Cavell will arouse throughout the civilized world. We shall be
surprised if within the next few days the press of all neutral
lands does not re-echo these feelings with an intensity which will
astonish the disciples of "Kultur." Here we have in its highest
development that boasted product of the Teutonic intelligence and
the Teutonic heart. The very spirit of Zabern, but of Zabern in
war-time, broods over the whole brutal and stupid story. There is
not in Europe, outside Germany and her Allies, a man who can read
it without the deepest emotions of pity and of shame. The victim
was a lady who had devoted her life to the noblest and the most
womanly work woman can do. She was the head of a great nursing
institute which has trained numbers of nurses for Germany as well
as for Belgium. She herself nursed many wounded Germans at the
beginning of the War. She has been sentenced to death by their
officers, and shot by their comrades. So is it that the Germans
requite the charity of strangers. She had been guilty of a military
offence--the offence of harbouring her own wounded countrymen and
Belgians amongst whom she had lived and worked, and of getting them
across the Dutch frontier. That was enough for the uniformed
pedants who tried her, and for their civilian subordinates. She was
perfectly straightforward and truthful with the court. They sent
her to her death upon her own admissions. They could not, even by
their own harsh law, have convicted her without these admissions.
Her frankness did not profit her any more than did her sex, her
calling, or her services to the Kaiser's wounded troops. There was
the fact: she acknowledged certain acts which could be twisted into
"conveying soldiers to the enemy," and the legal penalty for this
offence under the German military code is death. That was enough
for her judges. They sentenced her on a Monday afternoon, and had
her shot in the dark at two o'clock next morning. Napoleon ordered
a similar "execution" in the ditch of Vincennes. It cost him and
his Empire dear.
'There is not much more to tell. The Councillor to the American
Legation was refused permission to visit the prisoner after
sentence, and a like refusal was at first given to the English
clergyman, Mr. Gahan. This last refusal, worthy of the Jacobins who
refused a confessor to Marie Antoinette, was, however, not
persisted in, and the doomed Englishwoman had the consolations of
her own Church, and received the Holy Communion from Mr. Gahan's
hands. He found her "admirably strong and calm." She admitted again
her guilt according to German military law, but assured him that
"she was happy to die for her country." Her country with one voice
acknowledges the claim. She did in very truth die for England, and
England will not lightly forget her death. That she had committed a
technical offence is undeniable; but so did Andreas Hofer and other
victims of Napoleonic tyranny whose doom patriotic Germans never
cease to execrate. We do not know whether the hide-bound brutality
of the military authorities or the lying trickery of the civilians
is the more repulsive. Both were determined that Miss Cavell should
die, and they conspired together to shoot her before an appeal
could be lodged. They have killed the English nurse, as Napoleon
killed the Duc D'Enghien, and by killing her they have immeasurably
deepened the stain of infamy that degrades them in the eyes of the
whole world. They could have done no deed better calculated to
serve the British cause.'
_The Morning Post._
'Often as in the course of the past fifteen months we have been
astounded by the relapses into elemental barbarism which our
adversaries have exhibited, perhaps there is no case that shows up
so much as this the ghastly descent of the German character into
primitive brutality. When it is admitted that the charge was proved
true, by the accused's confessions, and that it was a charge that,
according to the military code in force at Brussels, might be
visited with the penalty of death, all is said that can be said for
the real criminals. A proclamation of martial law usually invests
the military authority with the power of inflicting the severest
penalties over a wide range of offences. This does not mean that
that authority is to deal in nothing but death sentences. But it
is quite useless to look for any colourable pretext for German
remorselessness in this matter. They were resolved from the first
to commit this deed of cruelty, but they were feverishly anxious
that it should be kept secret until beyond recall. From the moment
that the American Legation was known to have got news of Miss
Cavell's arrest and to be concerned in seeing that she was properly
defended, the German local Government begins to adopt every means
for throwing dust in the eyes of the United States representatives.
Surely such a story has never been presented to the modern world as
is here unfolded.
'All who have given attention to Napoleonic literature must have
recollections of prints of the death of the Duc D'Enghien--the
firing party under the glare of the torches, the prisoner standing
on the brink of his newly dug grave. In Napoleon's lifetime, and
for many years after, nothing hurt his personal reputation more
than this summary, furtive execution in the dead of night that
seemed to proclaim its own blood-guiltiness. But the great
Frenchman acted in this matter with the motives and in the manner
of an Eastern Sultan. He saw a man whom, rightly or wrongly, he
believed to be a danger to himself; he arrested him lawlessly on
foreign soil, and struck him down lawlessly. But what is there in
common between such an episode and the midnight execution of a
defenceless woman who never meant harm to any human being, who only
came within reach of the criminal law by her superior regard for
the higher precepts of mercy and compassion?
'When we think of the scene in that Brussels jail we may well
wonder that at this time of day it should be possible to get men to
participate in such a deed. Is it that insufficient blood has been
shed during this past year that men should hunger after one
harmless life? Yet we should evidently make a great mistake to
treat our heroic countrywoman's end as if a mere case for
compassion.
'One cannot mourn beyond a certain point for such a death. Who
could have dreamed a few years ago that English womanhood would be
producing such a heroine--the counterpart and realization in actual
life of the Antigone whom the tragedian's inspired imagination has
held up to the world's admiration for so many centuries?'
_The Daily Telegraph._
'We do not know whether any comment would be adequate in a case
like this, or whether, indeed, all comment is not superfluous. We
have had large experience of the brutality with which the enemy
conducts his warfare, and especially the inhuman recklessness with
which he pursues his vengeance against the civilian population of
the countries which he invades. We venture to think, however, that
in the case of a nurse, a woman whose life is dedicated to the
alleviation of pain, cruelty of this kind, cruelty that presses
against her the very extremity of martial law, is more diabolical
even than all the other counts of a growing indictment. No other
nation in Europe, we believe, would have put a nurse to death in
circumstances of this kind. They would have made some allowance for
her woman's tender heart, even though she had been guilty of an
offence, and therefore deserved some punishment. Nothing, probably,
can now brand with fouler infamy the German name, stained as it is
by all the damning items in its past record, from Louvain and the
_Lusitania_ down to the murder of an English nurse.'
_The Standard._
'Those who sorrow for the death of a good and brave Englishwoman
who died for her country as truly and nobly as any soldier in the
field must most warmly acknowledge the efforts made on her behalf
by the Ministers of the United States and of Spain. Everything
which could be done by gentlemen of kindly spirit and resolution to
save her was done. We are once more under a debt of unbounded
gratitude to those neutrals who have, from the first, striven to
maintain some of the mitigations of the horrors of warfare which
our enemy thrusts aside with contempt. They strained their
diplomatic prerogatives to the utmost in the cause of mercy, and,
if all their efforts were unavailing to combat the logical savagery
of the German military mind, the fault was none of theirs. We must
add also that, despite the horror at the outrage which they cannot
conceal, the representatives of the United States who have reported
are perfectly fair to the Germans. Although their own proposals for
the defence of Miss Cavell were rejected, they do not deny that her
trial was, in a sense, fair, and that the issue was in accordance
with the evidence and the provisions of the German military code.
The correspondence of Mr. Brand Whitlock with Mr. Page, and the
documents he forwards, gain the greater cogency from their frank
avowal of that fact. Murder by process of law is, of course, no
rare thing. Judge Jeffreys was a murderer of that kind. But it has
always aroused greater anger and contempt among men of right
feeling than murder of any other kind, and those, we are sure, will
be the feelings aroused throughout the world by the story of the
murder of this noble woman, who, if she offended against the laws
of her country's foes, could have been so easily rendered harmless
by means far less severe. The vengeance of the strong upon the weak
is the most abhorrent spectacle in the eyes of all right-minded
people which can be exhibited.
'It would be easy to pour forth vials of denunciation on the heads
of the Germans for this act. But it is utterly useless to do so,
and, if useless, then weak. A homely proverb says that you can
expect nothing from a pig but a grunt, and we know by this time
what to expect from our present enemy. Their standard of justice,
of manliness, of chivalry, is altogether diverse from ours, and
atrocities such as this done on Miss Cavell must simply confirm us
in our determination that it is our standard and not theirs which
is going to prevail in the world of the future. As one outrage
follows another the conviction grows the stronger that the world on
the Prussian model would be an intolerable place, and that every
man who loves freedom, mercy, and justice had better die than live
to see it so. The correspondence must be read in full. We shall not
attempt to discuss it in detail. In due course, as we most fully
believe, the blood of all those who have perished to slake the
brutal German thirst for dominion will be required at the hands of
the guilty. On the other hand, the name of Edith Cavell is
henceforth enshrined among the patriots and martyrs who have died
nobly for the honour of the Empire. May her relatives and friends
find comfort in that thought!'
_The Daily Mail._
'The story of Miss Cavell's arrest, trial, and martyrdom is one of
those sublime tragedies which make the deepest appeal to the heart
of man. The facts cover the enemy with eternal infamy. The Germans
did to death a woman whose whole life had been dedicated to the
service of suffering man, for a breach of a barbarous law which
they themselves had imposed. All efforts to save her were in vain.
The German authorities tricked and attempted to deceive the United
States Minister at Brussels, who made the most persistent exertions
in her behalf. They evidently hurried on the execution in order
that no chance might baulk them of their prey. This is a deed which
in its horror and wicked purposelessness stuns the world and cries
to heaven for vengeance.
'Miss Cavell neither grieved nor faltered when she knew her fate.
She was happy, she said, to die for her country; and a life which
had been generously devoted to a noble work was crowned by an
heroic death. It is difficult to say what inspiration a nation does
not draw from such an example as hers, which lifts up even the
meanest and most selfish heart to new heights of unselfish love and
devotion. "To weep would do her wrong." Her life and death are
beautiful as those of the saints of old, and will move mankind like
immortal music or song. In the truest sense she may be said to have
died happy. Her country will never forget her. Her memory will
brace our troops in the hour of battle, and when the grey forms
close in the North Sea it will be there. Those who die thus have
won immortality.'
_The Daily Chronicle._