'There is not much that can be said, or said easily, about the highest aspects of the murder of Edith Cavell. When we have said, "Dear in the sight of God is the death of His saints," we have said as much as mere literature has ever been able to say in the matter.
'The thing was not done to protect the Prussian power. It was done to satisfy a Prussian appetite. The mad disproportion between the possible need of restraining their enemy and the frantic needlessness of killing her is simply the measure of the distance by which the distorted Prussian psychology has departed from the moral instincts of mankind. The key to the Prussian is in this extraordinary fact: that he does truly and in his heart believe that he is admired whenever he can manage to be dreaded. An indefensible act of public violence is to him what a poem is to a poet or a song to a bird. It at once relieves and expresses him; he feels more himself while he is doing it. His whole conception of the State is a series of such coups d'état. In Poland, in Alsace, in Lorraine, in the Danish provinces, he has wholly failed to govern; indeed, he has never really attempted to govern. For governing means making people at home.
'Wherever he goes, and whatever success he gains, he will always make it an occasion for sanguinary pantomimes of this kind. And awful as is the individual loss, it is well that now, at the very moment when men, wily or weak, are beginning to talk of conciliatory possibilities in this incurable criminal, he should himself have provided us with this appalling reply.'
Mr. Hall Caine attended the great Memorial Service in St. Paul's Cathedral; and below is a short extract from his impressions as recorded in the Daily Telegraph:
'What has brought this multitude together? A great victory? The close of a great campaign? The funeral (as at this time last year) of a grand old warrior who, after many glorious victories, has died, as is most fit, within sound of the guns in the War he foretold, and is being borne to his lasting place amid the acclamations of his countrymen and the homage of the world? No, but the memory of a poor woman, a hospital nurse, who has been foully done to death by a barbarous enemy, condemned for acts of mercy and humanity, tried in secret, shot in haste, and then buried in a traitor's grave!
'What a triumph for religion, for Christianity, for the Church! What an answer to Nietzsche! What a rebuke to Treitschke! What a smashing blow to the all-wise philosophers who have been telling us that Corsica has conquered Galilee! That in these dark and evil days the people of London should assemble in tens of thousands to thank God for the shadow of the scaffold and to find inspiration in thinking of the martyr's end is proof enough that not lust of empire, not "the will to power," not war for its own sake or for the triumphs it brings in its train, but religion, with its righteousness, is still the bread of our souls.'
XIII
THE LASH OF THE WORLD'S PRESS
Selections from British Journals
The Times.
'The ordinary German mind is doubtless incapable of understanding the "horror and disgust" which the military execution of Miss Cavell will arouse throughout the civilized world. We shall be surprised if within the next few days the press of all neutral lands does not re-echo these feelings with an intensity which will astonish the disciples of "Kultur." Here we have in its highest development that boasted product of the Teutonic intelligence and the Teutonic heart. The very spirit of Zabern, but of Zabern in war-time, broods over the whole brutal and stupid story. There is not in Europe, outside Germany and her Allies, a man who can read it without the deepest emotions of pity and of shame. The victim was a lady who had devoted her life to the noblest and the most womanly work woman can do. She was the head of a great nursing institute which has trained numbers of nurses for Germany as well as for Belgium. She herself nursed many wounded Germans at the beginning of the War. She has been sentenced to death by their officers, and shot by their comrades. So is it that the Germans requite the charity of strangers. She had been guilty of a military offence—the offence of harbouring her own wounded countrymen and Belgians amongst whom she had lived and worked, and of getting them across the Dutch frontier. That was enough for the uniformed pedants who tried her, and for their civilian subordinates. She was perfectly straightforward and truthful with the court. They sent her to her death upon her own admissions. They could not, even by their own harsh law, have convicted her without these admissions. Her frankness did not profit her any more than did her sex, her calling, or her services to the Kaiser's wounded troops. There was the fact: she acknowledged certain acts which could be twisted into "conveying soldiers to the enemy," and the legal penalty for this offence under the German military code is death. That was enough for her judges. They sentenced her on a Monday afternoon, and had her shot in the dark at two o'clock next morning. Napoleon ordered a similar "execution" in the ditch of Vincennes. It cost him and his Empire dear.
'There is not much more to tell. The Councillor to the American Legation was refused permission to visit the prisoner after sentence, and a like refusal was at first given to the English clergyman, Mr. Gahan. This last refusal, worthy of the Jacobins who refused a confessor to Marie Antoinette, was, however, not persisted in, and the doomed Englishwoman had the consolations of her own Church, and received the Holy Communion from Mr. Gahan's hands. He found her "admirably strong and calm." She admitted again her guilt according to German military law, but assured him that "she was happy to die for her country." Her country with one voice acknowledges the claim. She did in very truth die for England, and England will not lightly forget her death. That she had committed a technical offence is undeniable; but so did Andreas Hofer and other victims of Napoleonic tyranny whose doom patriotic Germans never cease to execrate. We do not know whether the hide-bound brutality of the military authorities or the lying trickery of the civilians is the more repulsive. Both were determined that Miss Cavell should die, and they conspired together to shoot her before an appeal could be lodged. They have killed the English nurse, as Napoleon killed the Duc D'Enghien, and by killing her they have immeasurably deepened the stain of infamy that degrades them in the eyes of the whole world. They could have done no deed better calculated to serve the British cause.'