THE TRAGEDY OF EDITH
CAVELL
BRAND WHITLOCK
The first letter of inquiry not answered.
Reasons given for Miss Cavell's arrest.
One day in August it was learned at the Legation that an English nurse, named Edith Cavell, had been arrested by the Germans. I wrote a letter to the Baron von der Lancken to ask if it was true that Miss Cavell had been arrested, and saying that if it were I should request that Maître de Leval, the legal counselor of the Legation, be permitted to see her and to prepare for her defense. There was no reply to this letter, and on September tenth I wrote a second letter, repeating the questions and the requests made in the first. On the twelfth of September I had a reply from the Baron stating that Miss Cavell had been arrested on the fifth of August, that she was confined in the prison of St. Gilles, that she had admitted having hidden English and French soldiers in her home, as well as Belgians, of an age to bear arms, all anxious to get to the front, that she had admitted also having furnished these soldiers with money to get to France, and had provided guides to enable them to cross the Dutch frontier; that the defense of Miss Cavell was in the hands of Maître Thomas Braun, and that inasmuch as the German Government, on principle, would not permit accused persons to have any interviews whatever, he could not obtain permission for Maître de Leval to visit Miss Cavell as long as she was in solitary confinement.
The German mentality.
The principle that power makes right.
The accused without rights.
For one of our Anglo-Saxon race and legal traditions to understand conditions in Belgium during the German occupation, it is necessary to banish resolutely from the mind every conception of right we have inherited from our ancestors—conceptions long since crystallized into inimitable principles of law and confirmed in our charters of liberty. In the German mentality these conceptions do not exist; they think in other sequences; they act according to another principle, if it is a principle, the conviction that there is only one right, one privilege, and that it belongs exclusively to Germany, the right, namely, to do whatever they have the physical force to do. These so-called courts, of whose arbitrary and irresponsible and brutal nature I have tried to convey some notion, were mere inquisitorial bodies, guided by no principle save that of interest in their own bloody nature; they did as they pleased, and would have scorned a Jeffreys as too lenient, a Lynch as too formal, a Spanish auto da fé as too technical, and a tribunal of the French Revolution as soft and sentimental. Before them the accused had literally no rights, not even to present a defense, and if he was permitted to speak in his own behalf, it was only as a generous and liberal favor.
It was before such a court that Edith Cavell was to be arraigned. I had asked Maître de Leval to provide for her defense, and on his advice, inasmuch as Maître Braun was already of counsel in the case, chosen by certain friends of Miss Cavell, I invited him into consultation.