Today, Edith Cavell. The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our civilization
run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
"What's that mountain," we ask the bus driver in Jasper, Alberta.
There it looms, eleven thousand feet high and marked with diagonal rock strata that glow
pink in the morning and evening sun. "That," he tells us, "is Mount Edith Cavell."
So we learn that Edith Cavell was born in a village near Norwich, England, in 1865 --
the daughter of an Anglican priest. She went on to become a governess, working in Belgium.
Then, at the age of forty, she decided to take up the new field of nursing.
She trained in the Royal London Hospital and went back to Belgium. There, she was soon
matron of the Berkendael Medical Institute -- a Belgian nursing school -- and a noted
figure in the field. She even created a new nursing journal.
Cavell went on leave back in England in the summer of 1914. Just then, the guns of August
erupted. The Germans quickly overran Belgium. Yet Cavell, despite protests of friends and
family, went back to her work under German occupation. She found herself treating allied
soldiers. So she became part of an underground railway system to get them out of Belgium
through neutral Holland. Soon she was smuggling unwounded soldiers as well.
Within the year, the Germans were on to her. The arrested her and held her incommunicado.
She couldn't even talk to her lawyer. The charge was treason, and she refused to lie to
save her own skin. She freely admitted smuggling 200 soldiers out.
The Americans put the most pressure on the Germans to show leniency. And the German civilian
authority was inclined to do so. But the German military rushed to put her and a young Belgian
architect, Philippe Baucq, before a firing squad. Just hours later, the Germans authorized
the death penalty for her crimes.
The head American diplomat in Belgium had warned the Germans that that her execution would
greatly hurt their cause.
The sinking of the Lusitania
had taken place three months earlier -- now this! He was right, of course. Edith Cavell
became a martyr.
The press offered two versions of her story. One portrayed a young innocent who'd taken up
spying on the Germans. The other was a sober woman who meant to do the right thing -- let
the chips fall where they may. Both versions became wildly embroidered propaganda. That
American diplomat was right: she became as big a rallying cry for America entering the war
as the Lusitania sinking.
And yet, the night before her execution, she made her most famous remark:
"I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone."
That hardly matches the jingoism that followed her death.
Still, if anyone deserves her many monuments and memorials, Edith Cavell does. We find them in
Trafalgar Square, in the Tuileres, in Brussels. But none are quite as dramatic as that huge
mountain -- that great protective bulwark -- looming over the lovely little tourist town of
faraway Jasper, Alberta.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
See the Wikepedia and
The Great War Society sites
for more on Edith Cavell.
Images: Edith Cavell and WW-I poster courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Mount Edith Cavell
photo by J. Lienhard.
This propaganda photo reflects one of the myths that circulated about Cavell's death. It was that
she'd refused a blindfold, that she'd fainted when she saw the firing squad, and that a
German officer had cold-bloodedly shot her as she lay unconscious. In fact, she had been
quite composed. She told a chaplain before she was shot,
"I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me."
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2010 by John H. Lienhard.