BOOKS ON THE


CATHERINE NIXEY


SIDE OF THE HELPLESS


Edith Cavell Diana Souhami


QUERCUS, 416PP, £25 ■Tablet Bookshop price £22.50


01420 592974 W


alk north from Parliament, past Churchill’s statue, past Field Marshal Haig’s and on past Nelson’s, and the observant visitor


to London might notice a fourth statue; this time of a woman. She wears a calm expression, religious-looking robes and, often, a pigeon on her head. Beneath her are the words, “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” Most visitors do not observe her, however, and her pigeons roost undisturbed. People did not always walk on past Edith


Cavell. As Diana Souhami’s wonderful biog- raphy shows, her death in 1915 inspired “men to join up [and] brought America closer to joining the war”. But although her death would bring men into the First World War, her life was devoted to getting them out of it. While working as a nurse in occupied Belgium, she saved perhaps 1,500 trapped Allied soldiers from firing squads by smuggling them to safety. Firing squads from which nobody, when she was arrested, would save her. Although her life would have international consequences, it began parochially – in both senses of the word. The daughter of a Norfolk vicar, Cavell was born into a village of black- smiths, blackberrying and almost pre-modern archaism. As archaic as her family’s village were its values. Her father schooled his chil- dren (in sermons Edith found “so dull”) in service and self-denial. Before Edith could


eat her Sunday lunch, she had to take portions of it to the poor. Her own share, when she ate it, was often cold.


But although her father’s words may have bored her, his meaning moved her. “Some day, somehow, I am going to do something useful … for people,” Cavell wrote. “They are, most of them, so helpless, so hurt and so unhappy.” That “something useful” turned out to be nursing: a profession not lacking in the “hurt and unhappy” – particularly not after they had spent any time in the hospitals of Edith’s youth, where doctors went without washing “from conducting an autopsy, to a woman in labour” and nurses were those “too drunken [or] too stu- pid” to do anything else. By the time Cavell became a nurse, Florence Nightingale and Joseph Lister had gone some way to heal- ing this sickening profession. Now, doc- tors’ hands were treated with carbolic spray, patients with respect and nurses with disci- pline. Patients’ suffering decreased immeasurably, that of trainee nurses increased: Cavell routinely worked 12-hour shifts among patients with typhoid and diph- theria. In her copy of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, she underlined the words: “He is truly learned that doeth the will of God and forsaketh his own.”


Although nursing in Britain had progressed, in many European countries it remained medieval. So, in 1907, Cavell set out, a “pio- neer”, to found a nursing school in Belgium. There, after the outbreak of the Great War, she found herself trapped behind enemy lines experiencing not medieval nursing but medieval barbarism as the occupying German


22 | THE TABLET | 13 November 2010


army looted and burnt, raped and executed. “Spies were planted, suspects stalked … house an English … soldier and you may be shot.” To Cavell, a woman so gentle she once pre- vented one of her nurses from treading on a spider (“A nurse’s duty is to save life, not to take it”), such violence was anathema. Despite being afraid, she felt she must act, feeling that if she did not, and one soldier was then “caught and shot it would be [my] fault”. And so this “most honest and straightforward of citizens” took to a life of deceit and danger: housing soldiers, feeding them, sewing disguises for them. And, in 1915, being betrayed by one of them.


Cavell was made to sign a


confession in German even though she spoke no German. She was not allowed to see her lawyer before her trial


Once arrested, things moved swiftly. Souhami relates the events of her final hours with the same clinical precision and cleanli- ness of prose that she uses in the rest of this remarkable book; sutur- ing letters from Cavell to historical evidence and surreptitiously dosing her reader with factual information – on law, or history – where neces- sary to produce an account of tremendous strength. Cavell was, she writes,


made to sign a confession in German even though she spoke no German. She was not allowed to see her lawyer before her trial. During her trial, she was accused of treason against Germany despite not being a German national. Yet still Cavell was hopeful. It would, she felt, be “all right as long as [she didn’t] get shot”.


It was not all right. Edith Cavell’s sentence was passed one afternoon, carried out the next morning. That last night, she spoke to a priest: “I have no fear or shrinking,” she told him. But she now realised, she said, “that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone”. The following morning, with tears in her eyes, she was tied to a post and shot.


The monument to Edith Cavell in St Martin’s Place, central London


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