Read Silent in an Evil Time Online
Authors: Jack Batten
Silent in an Evil Time
As a nurse, Edith often cared for children. She looked after this young boy in 1903 at the Shoreditch Infirmary for London’s poorest patients.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)
THREE
The Woman Who Invented Nursing
FOUR
Nurse Edith
EIGHT
The Secret Network
NINE
Worry
ELEVEN
The Trial
TWELVE
Edith's Legacy
FOR MADDY
____
These young graduates from Edith's clinic became the first fully trained nurses to provide services in Belgium's hospitals, schools, and private nursing homes.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)
EDITH'S NARROW ESCAPE
E
dith Cavell heard the crash of soldiers' boots at the front door below. The sound could mean only one thing – the Germans had come to the clinic! Looking after a ward of patients on the second floor, Edith knew that she had no more than five minutes to get Arthur Wood out of sight. If the Germans caught an English soldier among the clinic's patients, Edith would lose her freedom and possibly her life.
It was a February morning in 1915, six months after the Germans occupied Belgium in the invasion that began the First World War. Edith, an English nurse, lived and worked in Belgium's capital city of Brussels, where she ran the country's only training clinic for nurses. Unknown to the German occupiers, Edith was using the clinic to smuggle British soldiers back to England.
Hundreds of the soldiers were caught behind enemy lines during the German advance through Belgium, and Edith joined a secret organization dedicated to hiding the soldiers and guiding them north to the Dutch border, on a route that took them home. On the February day when the Germans made their surprise visit to the clinic, one of the escaping Englishmen was with Edith in the second-floor ward. The soldier was an army private named Arthur Wood.
Edith thought of Wood as a special case among the dozens of soldiers she had already helped to escape. He was barely twenty, and looked even younger. With his smooth innocent face, Wood could be mistaken for a boy in his middle teens. An energetic young man, impatient after several days concealed in the clinic, he was keen to be on his way to Holland. Edith put Wood to work as an orderly to keep him occupied during his restless wait. He handled simple duties, assisting the nurses as they tended to the sick and injured Belgian citizens. And he was doing precisely that when the sound of German soldiers echoed from down below.
Arthur froze.
“Be quick, Arthur, and do what I tell you,” Edith said. “And please stay calm.” Edith, herself, was always calm. She was also a fast thinker.
She told Wood to remove his clothes down to his underwear and to put on a hospital gown. As he followed Edith's instructions, she turned back the covers on an empty bed and motioned him to climb underneath them.
The crack of German boots became louder. Edith knew that the soldiers had started up the stairs from the first floor.
“Stay in the bed, Arthur,” she said. “You are going to be a patient. Please see if you can act like a person who is sick. But whatever you do, Arthur, don't open your mouth.”
In appearance, Wood could pass for an ordinary Belgian kid, but he could never talk like one. He spoke little French, which was one of Belgium's national languages, and he certainly knew no German.
The sounds of the German soldiers told Edith that they had reached the top of the stairs. She placed a screen around Wood's bed. Then she turned to the door, just as a German officer and his soldiers entered the ward.
Edith was sure that German officials hadn't caught on to the secret activities that were happening in the clinic. She and the others in her organization were careful to keep the English soldiers out of sight. The Germans must be making this unannounced call to show Edith that they were in charge in Brussels. German soldiers were running the city, and they could barge in anywhere they wanted.
“Yes?” Edith said to the officer in French. “How can I help you?”
The officer was brisk and demanding. He let Edith know who was giving the orders. He said he intended to inspect the ward. In fact, he was going to take a tour of the entire clinic. Edith informed him that all of the patients were Belgians. The officer walked around the ward, looking at the men in the beds, asking them questions about their health. The patients answered in few words. As the officer checked the men, he seemed to accept that nothing was out of the ordinary.
Then he came to the bed with the screen around it.
“The boy in this bed is far too ill to be disturbed,” Edith said. She was polite, but firm. “He cannot possibly answer questions.”
The German officer said he would make his own judgment about that. He pulled back the screen and peered in. Arthur Wood was playing his role. His heart may have been pounding, but he lay under the covers, eyes closed, his face still. He looked younger than ever, and he was giving his best imitation of a very sick boy. The officer hesitated, taking all the time he needed to satisfy himself that the young man in the bed was who he was supposed to be – a Belgian patient in a ward at Edith Cavell's clinic.
A minute or two ticked by while the officer examined Wood from the bedside. Edith was tense. She had no idea what the officer could be looking for. All she knew was that he was making her anxious, though she showed no sign.
Finally, the officer appeared satisfied. He stepped away from Arthur's bedside and turned toward the door. Edith hurried to put the screen back in place while the officer led his soldiers out of the room and off to inspect the other wards.
While the Germans completed the rest of their rounds, Edith followed. She knew that the danger hadn't passed; other escaping British soldiers were hiding in the basement. But, to Edith's relief, the German officer checked only the top floors. His tour lasted almost an hour before he and his soldiers finally marched out of the clinic's front door.
In the ward on the second floor, Arthur Wood hopped from the bed behind the screen. His heart had stopped racing, and he wore a broad smile. Edith told him he had done a fine acting job, and he should feel proud of himself. Wood wanted to hug Edith, but she was as old as his mother, not someone he should wrap his arms around. He thanked her sincerely, and that was enough.
A few days later, a man in Edith's secret organization guided Wood to the border. He had no trouble crossing into Holland, and within a week, he was home in England, reporting to his army regiment.
Back in Brussels, the close call with Arthur Wood didn't stop Edith from carrying on her dangerous work. In the months that followed, hundreds of other British soldiers fleeing the Germans came through the clinic. Edith had more close calls, but she never hesitated to take whatever risks were needed to save each one of her soldiers.
Edith's brave work made her the greatest English heroine of the First World War. She paid a terrible price for her service to her country, but she
remained forever in the hearts of young men like Arthur Wood, who owed their lives to her.
“I was hiding in the clinic of which your daughter was Matron,” Wood wrote to Edith's mother in England. “She treated me like my own Mother would have done and proved herself to be the very best friend I ever had.”
Edith was an athletic and confident teenager. She loved lawn tennis, ice-skating, and dancing at parties.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)
EDITH FINDS NURSING
E
dith's unexpected path to heroism began in the quiet and cozy English village of Swardeston, where she was born Edith Louisa Cavell on December 5, 1865. Swardeston lies five kilometers southwest of the city of Norwich, in the county of Norfolk on England's east coast. Norwich, the county's capital and its commercial center, is a handsome city most famous for its ancient and mighty cathedral.
Everybody in Swardeston recognized Edith's father as the village's leading citizen. He was the Reverend Frederick Cavell, vicar of St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church from 1863 until his death in 1910. The Reverend Cavell was punctual, strict, and industrious. He never missed a church service or any other obligation. Before he married his wife, Louisa, in 1863, he sent her to a finishing school to learn the rules of etiquette and the other social skills that he thought a vicar's wife needed for success.
Edith was born in 1865 in this eighteenth-century redbrick farmhouse in the Norfolk village of Swardeston.
(Jack Batten)
The Reverend Cavell was a man who paid close attention to every detail of his family's life.
Edith was the first Cavell child, followed by three more: Florence, born in 1867; Lillian, in 1870; and son, Jack, in 1873.
From the time she was a little girl, Edith was good-natured, athletic, and pretty. She loved to skate in the winter, and she was crazy about lawn tennis in the summer. She taught Sunday school at her father's church, and she developed a talent for painting in watercolor, a hobby that stayed with her for the rest of her life.
The Reverend Cavell took charge of Edith's education, enrolling her in Norwich's secondary school for only a short time and teaching her most of the lessons at home. (He also taught the other three children for different periods.) A demanding instructor, some of the subjects he gave Edith seemed beyond the reach of a young girl. When her father had her study the difficult writings of the German philosophers, Edith raised no objection. She liked hard work, and she liked to satisfy her father.
When Edith was a teenager, she drew these illustrations for greeting cards, which she sold to raise money to help pay off the debt on the vicarage that her father built in Swardeston.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)
When Edith turned sixteen, the Reverend Cavell admitted that she needed more education than he could provide. He sent her to three different boarding schools in the next three years. The first two were far from home, one in London and the other in the west of England. Edith's father thought it was good for her to spend time away from her mother because, in his opinion, his wife, Louisa, had grown too possessive of their oldest daughter. Despite Edith's absences from home – at the schools and during the long periods she later lived in distant parts of England and in Belgium – Louisa Cavell never lost the habit of depending on her more than on anyone else in the family.
Edith's father, the Reverend Frederick Cavell, became vicar of St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church in Swardeston in 1863 and remained in the position for the rest of his life.
(Jack Batten)
St. Mary's was a small village church, but the Reverend Cavell filled the pews for his sermons each Sunday until his death in 1910, at the age of eighty-five.
(Jack Batten)
The third of the three boarding schools had a lasting effect on Edith. It was called Laurel Court, in the town of Peterborough, in the county to the west of Norfolk. Among its subjects, Laurel Court taught French, a language that became crucial to Edith, and the school's piano lessons gave her another means of artistic expression besides her painting.
But it was Margaret Gibson, the school's principal and a woman of immense self-confidence, whose personal example opened Edith's eyes. A rare feminist, Miss Gibson offered living proof that a woman, granted half a chance, could match a man in accomplishment and authority. Miss Gibson naturally assumed that she was the equal of any male she encountered, and Edith was in awe.
By the summer of 1886, when she was twenty, Edith had blossomed into a mature and attractive young woman. She had a trim figure, striking blue-gray eyes, and dark brown hair, which she pulled back from her forehead in a dramatic sweep. She knew how to make conversation in any company, and at a party, she was first on the dance floor. During one Christmas festivity, she danced so often and so enthusiastically that her feet bled and ruined her brand-new shoes.
Of all the young men who were keen on Edith, one seemed to be the perfect match. He was Eddy Cavell, a second cousin, three years older than Edith – a pleasant-looking, redheaded man. Edith came to know Eddy well during the summers, when their families spent holidays together at a beach resort on the North Sea. The young couple often took long walks together. They caught shrimp from the sea. And Eddy read to
Edith from a book of Robert Browning's poetry as she painted. Everybody thought they made an ideal couple.
But one obstacle stood in the way. Eddy suffered from a “nervous disorder.” The condition also affected his mother. Because of it, Eddy couldn't deal with such ordinary activities as riding on a train. He often felt anxious, and he lacked the confidence to go into law practice, like his father and grandfather had. Eddy settled for a simpler job as manager of a small farm. For fear that he would pass on the nervous disorder to any children he might have, Eddy came to the conclusion that he should never marry.
Edith was disappointed by Eddy's decision, but she didn't let it crush her. She eventually applied to nursing the love and dedication that she would have put into her marriage. Like Eddy, Edith never considered marrying anyone else in later years.
To make her way in the world, Edith decided to become a governess. She got her first position with the family of a vicar named Charles Powell, who lived in the village of Steeple Bumstead in Essex County, south of Norfolk. The Reverend Powell and his wife had four children from the ages of six to eleven. As governess, Edith looked after everything: what the children ate, how they played, their schooling, their clothing, their music lessons, and their discipline. She was strict, but fair. Edith had a knack for keeping the Powell children under firm control and filling them with fun at the same time. They adored her, and Edith returned their affection. Three years later, the Reverend Powell decided the children had outgrown the need for a governess. The time had come for their beloved Edith to leave Steeple Bumstead, and the four young Powells wept. As she bid them farewell, tears ran down Edith's cheeks.