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My reasons for this belief in the atrocity charge are the following: First, undisputed crimes, such as the Lusitania and Cavell cases. A government that would sanction these murders would sanction all other atrocities.
"Why don't you answer?" demanded the third occupant of the room, a heavily bearded man, and shook his fist threateningly in her face. "I'll answer only what I choose to answer," returned Antoinette quietly. "Neither you nor the whole German army can make me talk." "Is that so?" sneered the first man. "I suppose you've heard of the fate that came to an English nurse called Edith Cavell, eh?"
I won't never be at home in this dirty butchery." The nurse was walking by their cots. "How can you say such dreadful things?" she said. "But lights are out. You boys have got to keep quiet.... And you," she plucked at the undertaker's bedclothes, "just remember what the Huns did in Belgium.... Poor Miss Cavell, a nurse just like I am." Andrews closed his eyes.
Oct. 12 Edith Cavell executed by Germans. Oct. 13 Bulgaria declares war on Serbia. Oct. 15 Great Britain declares war on Bulgaria. Oct. 16 France declares war on Bulgaria. Oct. 19 Russia and Italy declare war on Bulgaria. Oct. 27 Germans join Bulgarians in northeastern Serbia and open way to Constantinople. Oct. 30 Germans defeated at Mitau. November 9 Italian liner Ancona torpedoed.
One who has stood with Socrates in the common criminal prison in Athens and watched him drink the hemlock poison, saying "No evil can happen to a good man in life or after death," who has heard the oration of Paul on Mars Hill or that of Pericles over the Athenian dead, who has thrilled to the heroism of Joan of Arc and Edith Cavell, the noble service of Elizabeth Fry and Florence Nightingale, the high appeal of Helen Hunt Jackson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who has heard Giordano Bruno exclaim as the flames crept up about him, "I die a martyr, and willingly," who has responded to the calm elevation of Marcus Aurelius, the cosmopolitan wisdom of Goethe, the sweet gentleness of Maeterlinck's spirit and the titan dreams of Ibsen, can scarcely fail to appreciate the brotherhood of all men and to learn that reverence for the true moral leader, that dignifies alike giver and recipient.
When she was near her death, Edith Cavell, patriot and martyr, said that patriotism is not enough. Every one who thinks on international affairs knows this; almost every one forgets it in time of war. What can be done to prevent nations from appealing to the wild justice of revenge?
The violation of Belgian neutrality? Malines, Termonde, Louvain? The official raping in the market-place at Liége? The Lusitania? Edith Cavell? The Zeppelin murders? Chlorine gas? The deportations from Belgium and Lille? Wittenburg typhus camp, where men were left to rot, without doctors, or medicine, or bedding? How can one talk of "honourable peace" with such a gang of criminal lunatics?
We got the real story of Miss Cavell, cruelly done to death by "field-gray" officers. We got full descriptions of the system of deporting the civil population a system which amounted to enslavement, with a taint of "white slavery" thrown in.
Great powers have surely great responsibilities. I remember speaking to Lord Robert on one occasion of the shooting of Miss Cavell a brutal act which distressed him very deeply. I said I thought we weakened our case against Germany by speaking of that atrocious act as a "murder," since by the rules of war, as she herself confessed, Miss Cavell incurred the penalty of death.
Also I am certain that Michael and Vivie made a pilgrimage to the prison of Saint-Gilles, and stood silently in the cell where Bertie Adams and Vivie had spent those terrible days of suspense and despair between April 6 and April 8, 1917; and that when they entered that other compartment of the prison where Edith Cavell had passed her last days before her execution, they listened with sympathetic reverence to the recital by the Directeur of verses from "l'Hymne d'Édith Cavell" as it is now called no other than the sad old poem of human sorrow, Abide with me; and that they appreciated to the full the warmth of Belgian feeling which has turned the cell of Edith Cavell into a Chapelle Ardente in perpetuity.
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