Edith Cavell

Life and Ministry

Edith Cavell was born at Swardeston in Norfolk in AD 1865, the daughter of the Anglican parish vicar, served as a governess in Brussels for six years, and trained at the Royal London Hospital under Matron Eva Luckes from AD 1896 to AD 1898. Recruited by Antoine Depage in AD 1907 to found the first secular nurses' training school in Belgium at the Berkendael Institute in Brussels, she introduced the English Florence Nightingale standards into Belgian hospital practice, taught nursing to a generation of Catholic and Protestant probationers, and was matron of the L'École Belge d'Infirmières Diplômées when the First World War broke out in August AD 1914. The German occupation requisitioned her hospital as a Red Cross station and she remained at her post nursing French, British, German, and Belgian wounded without distinction.

Circumstances of Death

From November AD 1914 Cavell joined an underground network organized by Prince Reginald de Croÿ that smuggled Allied soldiers separated from their units across the Dutch border. Some two hundred men passed through her clinic over the next nine months. Betrayed in late July AD 1915, she was arrested by the German military police on 5 August, held in the Saint-Gilles prison, and at her court-martial on 7 October confessed openly to the smuggling rather than implicate her co-workers. Condemned under German military law to death by firing squad, she received Holy Communion from the Anglican chaplain Stirling Gahan in her cell the night before execution and spoke the words for which her name is most remembered: I realize that patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone. She was shot at the Tir National rifle range at dawn on 12 October AD 1915.

Legacy

Cavell was reburied at Norwich Cathedral in AD 1919 with a state funeral and is commemorated in the Anglican calendar on the date of her death. Statues to her stand at St Martin's Place, London, and at the corner of the Rue de la Culture in Brussels. Her witness, in the words she gave the chaplain on her last night, is that Christian love passes through and beyond patriotism and survives the firing squad: the matron who had nursed German wounded was shot by the German army with no hatred toward her executioners. The gospel she had absorbed in her father's Norfolk parsonage came back at the end as the prayer of her death.