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In speaking of the heroic death of Edith Cavell in Belgium in October, 1915, he said: "She has taught the bravest men among us a supreme lesson of courage; yes ... and there are thousands of such women and a year ago we did not know it." Almost the whole of the press was on our side.
Her words resembled those of Florence Nightingale that have been quoted elsewhere in this book. Death, she said, was well known to her, and she had seen it so often that it was not strange or fearful to her. Early in the morning with her eyes bandaged Miss Cavell was led out to face the rifles of the Huns. She wore an English flag over her bosom.
Instead, for our children's children, would not a tablet to Edith Cavell be better, or one to the French priest, Abbé Thinot, who carried the wounded Germans from the burning cathedral, and who later, while carrying French wounded from the field of battle, was himself hit three times, and of his wounds died?
Many a night, after he had read a flaming page of Belgium's and Armenia's fearful history, he sat, sleepless, by the dying kitchen fire until dawn, and the day that the name of Edith Cavell was written in letters of fire across the sides of civilisation, Gavin went off into the woods alone with his axe, and tried to put some of the fury that was burning him up into savage blows against the unoffending timber.
By a sudden movement of lawlessness the Turkish military authorities sent to him, demanding the English documents left in his custody. He refused to give them up; and he knew what he was doing. In standing firm he was not even standing like Nurse Cavell against organised Prussia under the full criticism of organised Europe.
Every now and then he has half let the nation see what was in his mind. For example, he has taken those illuminating, those surely inspired, words of Edith Cavell as the text for more than one address Patriotism is not enough. But beautiful and convincing as these addresses have been, their spirit has always had the wistful and piano tones of philosophy, never the consuming fervour of fanaticism.
In common with Edith Cavell, Gabrielle Petit, Philippe Bauck, and the other forty or fifty victims of von Bissing's "Terror," he had been buried in the grassy slopes of the amphitheatre of the Rifle range, near where he had been executed. Every Sunday, wet or fine, Vivien went there with fresh flowers.
Johnnie drew those yellow brows together. "I wonder what Mrs. Kukor would think I ought t' do," he continued. "And and what would Mister Roosevelt do if he was me? And that boss of all the Boy Scouts " "General Sir Baden-Powell." "Yes, him. What would he think about it, I wonder? And then Edith Cavell, what would she say?" Mr. Perkins went on with his polishing.
But the main reason that the Germans hated her was because she was held in great affection by the people of Brussels. On the night of August fifth, 1915, we are told, Miss Cavell was tying up the wounds of a wounded German soldier, when a group of armed men entered the room and their leader told her roughly that she was under arrest. A blow was the only response when she tried to expostulate.
Yet the entire world stood horrified when the Government of Germany, with due legal form, committed a crime against womanhood and against humanity, which for centuries will make Germans blush for shame when the name of Miss Cavell is mentioned. Englishmen blush at the memory of Jeffreys, but no Englishman ever defends that fiendish butcher of women. Americans blush at the memory of Mrs.
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