Edith Cavell: The Nurse Who Smuggled 200 Men Out of Occupied Brussels

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Edith Cavell was born in 1865 to a vicar in a Norfolk village and spent much of her twenties as a governess, including five years with a family in Brussels in the early 1890s. After nursing her sick father she began formal training at 30 at the London Hospital and, while still a probationer, earned a medal treating patients in the 1897 Maidstone typhoid epidemic. Years as a private nurse followed. In 1907 the surgeon Antoine Depage brought her to Brussels as matron of a new nursing school meant to replace care by nuns with secular, scientific training. She launched a nursing journal, placed her nurses in hospitals, schools and kindergartens across Belgium, and by 1910 oversaw a new secular hospital.

When Germany invaded in August 1914 she was visiting her widowed mother in England, but she returned to occupied Brussels. By November she was hiding British and French soldiers and Belgian and French men of military age, gathered by aristocrats such as Prince Réginald de Croÿ, and passing them to guides for the Dutch border, about 200 in all. Betrayed in August 1915, she spent ten weeks in Saint-Gilles prison and freely admitted her actions. Charged with war treason, not espionage, she was shot on October 12, 1915, alongside a Belgian architect, despite pleas from American and Spanish diplomats. Military governor General von Sauberzweig rushed the sentence. Britain's Wellington House propaganda bureau then buried her message rejecting hatred and used her death for recruitment.

• The night before her execution she told an Anglican chaplain that patriotism was not enough and that she held no hatred.
• Stella Rimington, a former head of MI5, found evidence her network also passed intelligence to Britain.
• Propaganda falsely claimed she fainted and was shot in the head by an officer; witnesses described a standard firing squad.
• The Kaiser later ordered that no woman be executed without his approval.
• Her body was returned in 1919 with muffled bells at Dover, a Westminster Abbey service and burial at Norwich Cathedral, and Edith Piaf was named for her.