IN 1907 Edith Cavell, a forty-two-year-old nurse and former governess, moved to Brussels to help Dr Antoine Depage establish a training school for nurses. Within four years, she had three hospitals and over thirty schools under her care, and had founded a new medical journal.
Soon after the Great War broke out in 1914, Cavell began using her position to smuggle over seventy soldiers and a hundred civilians out through Holland to safety in England. But she was betrayed to the authorities, and arrested on August 3rd 1915.
After ten weeks in prison, Cavell was court-martialled despite being a civilian, convicted of treason despite not being German, and executed by firing squad on October 12th.* She offered no apology for her actions, and her final words were ‘I am glad to die for my country’. Yet Edith, daughter of a Norfolk clergyman, had also confided to her English chaplain in prison: ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’
Something similar happened to Captain Charles Fryatt, a ferryboat captain captured by the Germans.
Précis
Edith Cavell was an English nurse who in her early forties was recruited by a Brussels clinic to help train nurses. When the Great War broke out, Cavell helped almost two hundred servicemen and civilians to escape occupied Belgium, before she was arrested and executed. Her patriotism is especially remembered because it was without bitterness, even towards her murderers. (59 / 60 words)