CHAPTER VI
WEAVING THE NET.
The full story of the next few months of Edith Cavell’s life cannot be told until after the war is over. Brussels, as she had written, became cut off from the world. The hospitable old city became a nest of spies. “Newspapers were first stopped, then suppressed, and are now printed under German auspices. The few trains that run for passengers are in German hands, and wherever you go you must have, and pay for, a passport. No one speaks to his neighbour in the tram, for he may be a spy. Besides, what news is there to tell, and who has the heart to gossip, and what fashions are there to speak of, and who ever goes to a concert or a theatre nowadays, and who would care to tell of theirall-absorbing anxiety as to how to make ends meet and spin out the last of the savings, or to keep the little mouths at home filled, with the stranger close by?”
The frank, open nature of Edith Cavell was ill-fitted for such an atmosphere of fear and deception. Everyone was “suspect,” as in the days of the Paris Terror in 1793. It was enough, as then, to fall under “suspicion of being suspect.” Edith Cavell was suspected, and cunning men sought how they might weave a net of accusation around her.
Nurse Cavell was an Englishwoman. That, was the beginning of her offence. I am not here to say she did no wrong. The full significance of her own brave admissions cannot yet be revealed. Her crime was the crime of humanity. The beginning of her offence, to the suspicious German mind, was that she was English and was popular. Everyone spoke of her untiring kindness and unfailing courage. It was enough. She must be dangerous, or all the world wouldnot speak well of her. Nobody spoke well of the German governors of Brussels.
There is reason to believe that Miss Cavell came in contact, once at least, with the terrible Baron Von Bissing, the Governor-General. He formed a strong opinion of her capacity and dauntless courage. The same head that contrived her secret trial and execution, directed, there is little reason to doubt, the weaving of the web that ensnared her. The cleverest spies in Von Bissing’s service were set to watch her. They found out that she had given a greatcoat to a French soldier who afterwards escaped across the Dutch frontier. On another occasion she had given an exhausted Englishman a glass of water. Then the spies said, what was likely enough, that she had given money to Belgians, and that this had enabled them to escape.
In every part of the world these would be simple acts of humanity—for the suspicious Von Bissing they were crimes. “This must be stopped,” he ordered.