World's War Events, Vol. I

by Unknown

"Come at once; some one is about to die."

A delay of execution expected.

He went away to the prison; his frail, delicate little wife remained at the Legation, and there, with my wife and Miss Larner, sat with those women all that long evening, trying to comfort them, to reassure them. Outside a cold rain was falling. Up in my chamber I waited; a stay of execution would be granted, of course; they always were; there was not, in our time, anywhere, a court, even a court martial, that would condemn a woman to death at half-past four in the afternoon and hurry her out and shoot her before dawn—not even a German court martial.

Miss Cavell calm and courageous.

When Mr. Gahan arrived at the prison that night Miss Cavell was lying on the narrow cot in her cell; she arose, drew on a dressing gown, folded it about her thin form, and received him calmly. She had never expected such an end to the trial, but she was brave and was not afraid to die. The judgment had been read to her that afternoon, there in her cell. She had written letters to her mother in England and to certain of her friends, and entrusted them to the German authorities.

She did not complain of her trial; she had avowed all, she said; and it is one of the saddest, bitterest ironies of the whole tragedy that she seems not to have known that all she had avowed was not sufficient, even under German law, to justify the judgment passed upon her. The German chaplain had been kind, and she was willing for him to be with her at the last, if Mr. Gahan could not be. Life had not been all happy for her, she said, and she was glad to die for her country. Life had been hurried, and she was grateful for these weeks of rest in prison.

"Patriotism is not enough," she said, "I must have no hatred and no bitterness toward any one."

Notes made in Bible and prayer-book.

She received the sacrament, she had no hatred for any one, and she had no regrets. In the touching report that Mr. Gahan made there is a statement, one of the last that Edith Cavell ever made, which, in its exquisite pathos, illuminates the whole of that life of stern duty, of human service and martyrdom. She said that she was grateful for the six weeks of rest she had just before the end. During those weeks she had read and reflected; her companions and her solace were her Bible, her prayer-book and the "Imitation of Christ." The notes she made in these books reveal her thoughts in that time, and will touch the uttermost depths of any nature nourished in that beautiful faith which is at once so tender and so austere. The prayer-book with those laconic entries on its fly-leaf, in which she set down the sad and eloquent chronology of her fate, the copy of the "Imitation" which she had read and marked during those weeks in prison—weeks, which, as she so pathetically said, had given her rest and quiet and time to think in a life that had been "so hurried"—and the passages noted in her firm hand have a deep and appealing pathos.

Just before the end, too, as I have said, she wrote a number of letters. She forgot no one. Among the letters that she left one was addressed to the nurses of her school; and there was a message for a girl who was trying to break herself of the morphine habit—Miss Cavell had been trying to help her, and she sent her word to be brave, and that if God would permit she would continue to try to help her.