Edith Cavell: “Patriotism Is Not Enough”
Not all the heroes of the First World War fought in the trenches.
Forty-nine year old British nurse Edith Cavell was the director of the first nurses' training school in Belgium. When Germany occupied Brussels in the first month of the war, Cavell refused to leave. She turned her clinic into a Red Cross hospital and cared for wounded soldiers from both armies.
On November 1, 1914, Cavell took her heroism to a new level when a Belgian resistance worker brought two British soldiers to her door. Hiding Allied soldiers was punishable by death, but Cavell took the soldiers in without question. She hid them for two weeks while plans were made to take them across the border into the Netherlands, which remained neutral throughout the war.
These two soldiers were the first of more than 200 Allied soldiers whom Cavell helped escape from German-occupied Belgium during the first year of the war. Working with a resistance network, she provided medical care for wounded soldiers, hid the healthy until a guide could escort them over the border, and made sure they had money in their pockets for the journey.
Catching Cavell in the act became a priority for the German political police, who assigned an officer to the task full-time. Searches of the clinic became more frequent. (On one occasion she hid a wounded soldier in an apple barrel, covered with apples.)
On August 5,1915, the Germans arrested Cavell. Told that the other prisoners had confessed, she admitted during interrogation that she had used the clinic to hide Allied soldiers. Ten weeks later, Cavell and 34 other resisters were tried for assisting the enemy. Five, including Cavell, received the death penalty.
American and Spanish diplomats tried to get her sentence commuted without success; her execution was scheduled to be carried out the next day at dawn. When an English chaplain visited her that night to offer her comfort, he was surprised to find her calm and collected. Cavell told him, "I realize that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone." As he left, Rev. Gahan told her,"We will always remember you as a heroine and a martyr." Cavell answered, "Don't think of me like that. Think of me only as a nurse who tried to do her duty."
Cavell's hope to be remembered "only as a nurse" was idealistic--and unrealistic. The British propaganda office at Wellington House used her story both to increase enlistment in Britain (the number of volunteers doubled in the weeks after her death) and to increase anti-German sentiment in the United States.
Two Stories In One?
Dear Readers,
I'm hoping you can help.
I'm in the initial stages of writing a new book proposal. Or more accurately, I'm in the initial stages of writing three book proposals springing from the same big topic in an effort to decide which one works best.* The structure of two of the proposals is straightforward, but the third is problematic: parallel events that occurred in very different times and places.
I'm looking for models of historical works that have successfully used two stories, either combining them in a single narrative or linking two separate narratives.
The first example I looked at is Simon Schama's Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations). The book is beautifully written, but I found it perplexing until the end--not necessarily a condition I want to inflict on readers. The first section, "The Many Deaths of General Wolfe" looks at the death of General Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 from several different vantage points, including that of nineteenth century historian Francis Parkman. The second section, "Death of a Harvard Man" tells the story of the murder of Dr. George Parkman in Boston in 1849. For most of the book, the two are linked by a single reference in the first section to "Uncle George Parkman" and the general theme of death. Schama finally shares the element that joins the two stories together on page 320 of the 327 page book: "Both the stories offered here play with the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration…These are stories, then, of broken bodies, uncertain ends, indeterminate consequences." It's all very clever,** but the connection comes so late in the book that it's not very satisfying as narrative. Kind of like a murder mystery where the author holds back a vital clue so the reader has no hope of solving the puzzle.
Eric Larsen's Devil In The White City is the obvious next choice, but it seems to be in one of the boxes we have not yet unpacked.
Any suggestions of other possible models I could read while I dig through the boxes?
Many thanks.
*Not very efficient, but sometimes the only way I can find out what I think/know/believe is to write my way through.
**Just for the record, I'm not being sarcastic. It's a lovely and illuminating piece of deconstruction.
Victorian City
In The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London,* social historian Judith Flanders (The Invention of Murder) reminds us Charles Dickens was a journalist before he was a novelist. The London that stands at the hearts of his novels--so vibrant that it's almost a character in its own right--is not only a work of the imagination but the reportage of a great observer. From his first works to his last, Dickens recorded and reinvented the people of London's streets and the world they inhabited. His earliest readers recognized the jokes behind his often-sly accuracy; today, the lines between imagination and observation are less clear.
Using both Dickens's novels and a wide range of other contemporary accounts, Flanders attempts to look at the streets of London as they existed from 1812 to 1870, a period of tremendous transformation and growth. (The title The Victorian City is a conscious misnomer. As Flanders points out, the great recorder of Victorian London spent almost half his life under the rule of Victoria's uncles.) Beginning with workers making their way through the city in the early morning and ending with the seedy side of Victorian nightlife, Flanders provides a detailed picture of both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of life in 19th-century London: markets, prisons, gin palaces, brothels, slums (known as "rookeries"), the mail stage and hackney cabs, and the health problems caused by overflowing cemeteries and overflowing cesspools. The Victorian City, filled with squalor, social injustice, larger-than-life characters and expansive prose, is Dickensian in every sense of the word.
The Victorian City is an engaging exploration of the city and social conditions that inspired Dickens's novels.
* Not to be confused with Asa Brigg's classic Victorian Cities. also well worth a read.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.