Silent in an Evil Time (10 page)

The clinic was packed with men waiting to set off for the Dutch border, and the British soldiers grew restless when the wait lasted more than three or four days. The soldiers were young, full of energy, and frustrated at being stuck in the clinic's crowded cellars and attics. To give the men a chance to blow off a little steam, Edith allowed them out on strolls after dark. But she warned the soldiers to stick to the back streets, not to talk English, and to walk alone or in silent pairs. They were to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible.

Before long, the soldiers were ignoring Edith's rules. They got into the habit of stopping at neighborhood bars for a few beers. The local Belgian drinkers welcomed them. None of the British dreamed they were taking risks since German soldiers drank in different bars. But, one night, things turned dangerous. Edith was away from the clinic, staying with friends in another part of Brussels, on the night that six or seven Irish soldiers knocked back too many beers. When they stepped out of the bar and into the street at the end of the evening, they ambled down Rue de la Culture singing “It's a long way to Tipperary” – a popular Allied wartime song – at the top of their lungs.

Miraculously, no Germans rushed out at the sound of the loud Irish voices. Nobody appeared from the command post or from the boarding-house for German soldiers. Apparently they slept through the whole noisy episode. But a doctor at the clinic awoke. Alarmed at the racket, he rounded up the singing Irishmen and locked them in a ward.

Edith arrived back at the clinic before seven the next morning. If she was annoyed by the Irish soldiers' musical night, or frightened about what it might lead to, she kept her calm manner. Her concern was to get the Irish out of the clinic. She contacted members of her group, who agreed to take in the soldiers. In the quiet of the early morning, the Irish were hurried through the streets to their new quarters. Edith braced herself for a visit from German officials, asking questions about the singing. But no Germans appeared. Edith hoped she had survived another crisis.

When Charlie Scott came to Edith in early April, he was running a high fever and felt so weak that he could hardly stand. Scott was the young soldier from the Norfolk Regiment who had been hidden for eight months by the miner Désiré Richez at his cottage in Wiheries. During this long time, the wounds to Scott's chest had grown worse. He needed expert medical care, something Richez hadn't a hope of providing. Besides the worry about Scott's health, Richez was nervous that the Germans had targeted his cottage. It was probably a matter of days before they would discover Scott's hiding place in a hole inside the kitchen wall. Richez acted quickly, and with the help of other members of the secret network, he smuggled Scott to Brussels and to Edith.

She put Scott into a bed and dressed his wounds. Since Edith and Scott were a couple of Norfolk natives, they shared happy stories of their home county. Scott felt relieved and protected. But his sense of comfort ended late the next night, when Edith shook him awake. “I am in trouble,” she said. “You will have to come with me.”

Edith helped the young soldier down the stairs and across the yard behind the clinic to a shed, which held large barrels of green apples. Edith cleared one barrel of enough apples to make room for Scott to fit inside. Then she covered him in apples, spreading them loosely so that he had enough air to breathe. Scott squatted down and listened for sounds in the silent night.

Soon, he could make out the thump of boots on the stairs inside the clinic. He knew that German soldiers had arrived, though he was never told how Edith learned in advance that they planned a raid on Rue de la Culture that night. The boots came closer, into the backyard. Scott heard German voices. He held himself rigid, not daring to move, as he listened to the soldiers poke around the yard. But nobody disturbed his barrel, and after a while, the Germans strode back into the clinic. Several more minutes of Scott's excruciating wait went by before silence fell once again. The Germans had left the building.

Edith pulled Scott out of the barrel, and in the next days, she hired guides to take him to Holland. Charlie Scott was home in England
before the middle of April, another soldier saved by Edith's ingenuity and nerve.

For some British soldiers, escape from the Germans was an adventure full of excitement. For others, it was a necessary part of their jobs as soldiers, one they would have preferred to avoid. Since they had no choice, they made the best of the situation. For a few soldiers, the challenge of avoiding the clutches of the Germans became a terrible strain that affected their health for the worse. Ernest Stanton of the 4th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment was one of the men whose health suffered from the stress.

When Stanton was left behind after the fighting at Mons, Auguste Joly and his wife, Sidonie, hid him in the small cottage where they lived in Wiheries. Joly was the miner known in the secret organization mainly as a guide who led the escaping soldiers to Brussels. But Auguste and Sidonie took one soldier into their home, and he was Ernest Stanton. The Jolys kept him in the little cottage for seven months, a time of almost unbearable tension for Stanton.

He was a large man, over six feet tall, with a husky build. His size made him an awkward fit for the tiny room where he spent most of his time. Even tinier was the place where Stanton hid when the Germans made one of their frequent inspections. At each German raid, Stanton squeezed into an empty cistern, under the cottage's floor. The cistern was the size of an ordinary barrel, barely wide enough to hold him. As soon as he slid into the cistern, Auguste Joly popped a lid on top, and Stanton sweated out the wait until the Germans left the cottage.

By the time Stanton was led to Edith's clinic in April, he had become a nervous wreck. He felt worn down, as if he couldn't go on for another day, and one morning, he made the frightening discovery that he was unable to speak. The worry and trouble of the past seven months had caused the power of speech to desert poor Stanton.

Edith took special care of the soldier. She spent as much time as she could with him, trying to ease his anxieties. By the time he left the clinic, guided on his way back to England, his speech had finally returned.

At home, Stanton's general health improved. He married his sweetheart and settled down after the war. But the strange loss of speech returned to Stanton one more time. As in Belgium, it was temporary, and he was soon able to speak again. The loss lasted for just one day. It was the day of Edith's funeral.

Edith did her best to conceal the strain that the secret work put her under. It wasn't her nature to complain or express regret. If it was too much for Edith to deal every day with raiding Germans, with Irish soldiers who made too much noise in the night, with a maid who might be a spy, with the potential dangers to her own nurses, with the hundreds of British soldiers coming to her for help, and with all of the burdens that were heaped on her, nobody heard a word of protest. She was strong, and she had been given a duty to carry out.

Still, during the winter and spring of 1915, Edith showed small signs that she was aware of the far less stressful life she once led and might yet be leading if her fate had been different. On March 11, she wrote a letter to Eddy Cavell, the man she had once thought she would marry. The letter, which reached Eddy through an escaped British soldier, told him some of the details that were safe to reveal about her activities in Brussels. She hoped Eddy was well and wondered if he was still managing the small farm. Then she ended the letter with a longing for the way she lived years earlier. “I like to look back on the days when we were young,” Edith wrote to Eddy, “and life was fresh and beautiful and the country so desirable and sweet.”

Philippe Baucq was a Brussels architect who served valiantly in the secret organization that aided escaping British, French, and Belgian soldiers. The Germans punished him for his brave defiance by sentencing him to the same fate as Edith.
(The Royal London Hospital Archives)

P
hilippe Baucq was probably the first member of the secret organization to warn Edith about the German threat to her and the clinic. Baucq was a latecomer to the organization, joining it in February 1915, but once in, he became an aggressive operator. By profession, he was an architect. He was in his midthirties and lived in the Brussels suburb of Schaerbeck with his wife and two daughters. As a young man, he swam for Belgium in international competitions, and as an adult, he still kept fit. He was a man who had lots of energy and, as he later revealed, a taste for drama.

Baucq began his anti-German work by distributing copies of
La Libre Belgique
, an underground newspaper that carried reports about the war in defiance of the German ban on a free Belgian press. The paper printed twenty-five thousand copies per issue and published five issues each month. For the entire war,
La Libre Belgique
kept to its schedule, which drove the Germans mad with frustration.

Even though Baucq had plenty to handle in his distribution work, he threw himself into every level of the secret organization's activity. First, he arranged for places where escaping soldiers could hide in Brussels. Then he connected with the guides. Finally, he became a guide himself, escorting the soldiers through occupied territory to the border. It was as if Baucq wanted to test his courage against the greatest possible dangers.

He developed contacts with politicians in Brussels. They were people who didn't necessarily support the German occupiers, but knew everything that the Germans were up to. From one source, Baucq learned in late April that the Germans had assigned a new agency to arrest everyone who aided Allied soldiers in escaping from Belgium. The agency, called Section B of the German political police, was under the direction of two fanatical officers – Lieutenant Ernest Bergan and Sergeant Henri Pinkhoff. Though the two were committed to bringing down the entire escape organization, they took particular aim at Edith. They suspected that she was at the core of the organization, and each day, Bergan and Pinkhoff repeated a mantra to one another: “The Cavell woman must go before a firing squad.”

Philippe Baucq reported what he learned to Edith. It was the first and only time that the two met privately, and at the meeting, Edith gave Baucq the impression that she wasn't surprised by his news. She told him that strange things were happening at the clinic. Men she described as “suspicious persons” called on her for help in leaving Belgium. They wanted money, rooms to hide in, and guides to take them to the border. Edith sensed that the men weren't genuine escapees, and she pretended not to know what they were talking about. Edith presented herself to them as just a nurse who looked after the sick and injured.

OPPOSITE:
La Libre Belgique
was an underground newspaper published by Belgian patriots throughout the war, bringing news to their fellow citizens in defiance of the German ban. The clandestine paper survived Governor-General von Bissing's “reward for the discovery of its office and made fun of him by faking a picture of him reading their condemned paper.” (The Royal London Hospital Archives)

Baucq cautioned Edith to take care. She assured him that she was keeping her wits about her. But the organization's work was essential, and she intended to carry on with it as long as could.

Within two weeks of the meeting with Baucq, Edith sent an urgent message to Jeanne de Belleville, the countess who lived near Bellignies. Like Louise Thuliez, the countess had become a guide escorting British and French soldiers from the Bellignies area to Brussels. Both women survived desperate adventures. On one trip, Thuliez was in charge of a British soldier who thought she might not be a real member of the escape network. He kept his pistol loaded and ready for firing; if Thuliez made a false step, he intended to shoot her. When Thuliez steered the soldier safely to his destination, he realized he had been mistaken. The soldier apologized. Thuliez shrugged, as if to say that the chance of being shot by someone on her own side was just one of the hazards of war.

Edith respected both Thuliez and de Belleville as her courageous colleagues, but, in mid-May in Edith's urgent message to de Belleville, she begged the countess and others at the Bellignies end of the network not to bring men to the clinic in the next week. “My situation,” Edith wrote, “is becoming more and more strained every day.”

British soldiers had been coming to the clinic in steady numbers, and even though they were now staying only a day or two before Edith moved them on their way to the border, the increased chance of drawing German surveillance alarmed her. Edith had taken Philippe Baucq's warning to heart, and, for a short time, she scaled back the clinic's escape operations.

But soon enough, by late May, the arrival of soldiers in the usual numbers started up again. Edith couldn't bear the thought of turning away her fellow countrymen. She was delighted when a lance corporal named Horace Sheldrake reached the clinic. At thirty-seven, Sheldrake was older than the other soldiers. Edith appreciated his maturity, but best of all, he was another Norfolk native. Though their meeting was brief, the two felt much warmth for one another, two people from the same rural English county caught in the horror of war. Edith gave Sheldrake money, a pipe, tobacco, and a comfortable hospital shirt. The gifts were intended to cheer him on his trip to the border.

To Sheldrake's dismay, the Germans caught him as he left Brussels. He spent the next years as a prisoner of war. When Sheldrake arrived home at the war's end, he still had the hospital shirt. He told his family how much he admired Edith, and he insisted that, on his death, he be buried in the shirt she gave him. When Sheldrake died in 1946, his family carried out the wish.

A few days after Sheldrake passed through the clinic, Edith had a warm encounter with yet another Norfolk soldier. He was Robert William Mapes of the 1st Norfolk Regiment, a private who had been wounded at Mons by a German bullet that drilled through his ankle. He recuperated while he hid for several months with a family in the nearby village of Quiévrain. When Jeanne de Belleville heard about Mapes, she organized the fake passport and the system of guides that led him to a large house in Brussels. Many English soldiers were staying at the house, and while Mapes was there, waiting to move on to Holland, he met Edith.

Mapes never knew who owned the house where he was sheltered, but the owner was part of the secret organization and a colleague of Edith's. She visited the house one day and immediately recognized, from Mapes' accent, that he was a Norfolk native. The two began a conversation, and
Edith soon learned that Mapes came from Hethersett, a village not far from Swardeston. Nostalgia overcame her.

“Dear old Norfolk,” she said to Mapes. “I would do anything to help a Norfolkman.”

Edith put her arms around Mapes and gave him a kiss, something that she did not do often. But, at that moment, with the Germans closing in on her, she must have felt homesick for the part of England she shared with the soldier she held in her arms. He was on his way back home. Edith may have sensed that it could be a long time before she saw Norfolk again.

Raoul de Roy was a young Belgian who lived south of Brussels. He wanted more than anything to get to England, where he could join the army and fight against the Germans. Jeanne de Belleville had known de Roy since he was a little boy and she promised to make his wish come true. Early in May 1915, she gave de Roy a fake passport and took him by train to Brussels.

As a precaution, since the countess had been active in the secret organization for so long and was aware that the Germans might have taken note of her activities, she and de Roy sat in different sections of the train. When they reached the station in Brussels, she wrote the address of Edith's clinic on notepaper and slipped it to de Roy whispering to him that he must memorize the address, then rip up the notepaper. De Roy not only ripped the paper into pieces, he also swallowed them.