Silent in an Evil Time, page 3
The job was as night superintendent at the St. Pancras Infirmary in the middle of London, and it called for enormous stamina. Apart from the physical demands that went with working through the night and trying to sleep in the daytime, Edith treated the most impoverished and desperate patients. St. Pancras was a Poor Law Institution, dedicated to serving the penniless people of the community. As ever, Edith was attentive and sympathetic to those in her care.
When she won a better paying job two years later, it was once again in a Poor Law Institution in London, this time at the Shoreditch Infirmary, where she was made Assistant Matron. Among her patients at Shoreditch, Edith became a favorite of the costermongers – traders who sold all sorts of goods from carts, which they pulled through London's streets. Costermongers wore clothes embroidered with pearl buttons, and they entertained their customers with jokes and funny patter. Despite the colorful costumes and outgoing personalities, costermongers lived difficult lives, working long days exposed to every illness. When they entered Shoreditch for medical treatment, they asked for Edith, the Assistant Matron who treated them with humor and compassion.
After four years at Shoreditch, Edith resigned to take a four-month trip through Europe with a nurse named Eveline Dickinson. It was the longest holiday of Edith's life, and when she returned refreshed, she got a temporary position as a nurse in one of the clinics known as Queen's District Homes in industrial Manchester, a city in the Midlands. Many of her patients were poorly paid miners who had been injured in accidents down in the mines. These men adopted Edith as their favorite, just as the costermongers had at Shoreditch. Someone who knew of Edith's work with both groups gave her a title that everyone in Manchester picked up. Edith was known as “the poor man's Nightingale.”
When the Matron at the Home fell ill, Edith was appointed to fill the job until she recovered. But Edith knew that whatever position she had at the Home was temporary. She could be out of work at any time. Since she was already forty-one years old, she worried about her future. Surely, she thought, she had shown enough talent as a nurse to win a steady position in a respected hospital. Over the years, she had applied for senior jobs at three or four hospitals, but she just missed out – the second choice on everyone's list. In Manchester, she was growing frustrated.
Then, unexpectedly, from a place she had never thought of, the perfect job was presented to her. It was to change Edith's life.
Dr. Antoine Depage of Brussels was often difficult and demanding, but he was a medical pioneer and visionary. Not only did he open the first institution in Belgium to train nurses, but he had the foresight to hire Edith as the first Matron. (The Royal London Hospital Archives)
Chapter Five
EDITH TAKES CHARGE
Dr. Antoine Depage of Brussels envied England's nursing system. A surgeon who ranked among the finest in Europe, Depage was brilliant and obstinate, and did not suffer fools gladly. Among the fools, in his opinion, were Belgium's nurses. Catholic nuns provided the care in the country's hospitals, and though the nuns had the best of intentions, their skills belonged in the dark ages of nursing, before Florence Nightingale brought enlightenment to the profession.
Dr. Depage was determined to raise Belgian nursing standards. He wanted his nurses to match the levels in care and knowledge of those in England. As a start, he decided to open Belgium's first training clinic. One thing that Depage insisted on for the new clinic was a Matron who had three qualifications: She must be English; she must speak fluent French; and she must have taken her training at one of England's great hospitals.
A young Brussels housewife named Marguerite Graux knew the very person who could meet each of Depage's requirements. Marguerite's maiden name was François. She was the oldest of the four François children in the household where Edith had served as governess from 1890 to 1895. The children never lost touch with their dear Edith Cavell, and Marguerite knew all about Edith's nursing career. She praised Edith to her mother-in-law, Madame Charles Graux, who happened to be president of the Ladies Committee that was helping Dr. Depage in launching his teaching clinic.
Among the upper classes, Brussels seemed a small town where everybody knew everybody else. The François, Graux, and Depage families moved in the same social circles, and through the connections, Dr. Depage soon learned all about Edith. He offered her the Matron's job. Edith was surprised and ecstatic, and in the middle of September 1907, she arrived in Brussels to take up her position at Dr. Depage's pioneering clinic.
Depage opened the clinic in four adjoining three-story houses on Rue de la Culture, in the Brussels suburb of Ixelles. It was only a short walk from the medical clinic where he carried on his practice. Edith and Dr. Depage assigned the houses to different uses. Number 143 became the living quarters for the nurses in training. Number 145 was divided into wards of five beds each, plus six single rooms for private patients. Number 147 underwent conversion into an operating theater and lecture rooms, in addition to providing beds for patients. Number 149 included wards on the upper stories and Edith's rooms on the ground floor. She had a small office and an even smaller reception room at the front; a kitchen, a sitting room, and a bedroom at the back.
Since Edith's responsibilities as Matron left her little free time, she hired a maid to look after the domestic chores at 149. The stocky middle-aged maid was named Marie – no record survives of her surname – and she was the kind of hard worker that Edith appreciated. Marie was German. Seven years later, once the First World War had broken out, Maries presence in the clinic would become a major problem for Edith. The question of Marie and her loyalties would cost her many sleepless nights.
The clinic in Brussels, where Edith served as Matron for eight years, occupied four adjoining houses on Rue de la Culture. Her office and living quarters were on the ground floor of number 149. (The Royal London Hospital Archives)
In October 1907, while Edith was still figuring out how to run the clinic, five young women enrolled, becoming the clinics first trainees. Edith felt great pride in welcoming them to the new facility. These five, and all the other women who soon followed, signed up for five years of training. The first three years were to be spent attending lectures and nursing patients who came to the clinic, and in the final two years, the nurses were to be sent out as working student nurses in Belgian hospitals and private homes. At the end of the five years, the clinic would present the graduating nurses with diplomas, which qualified them for nursing positions in medical institutions throughout the country.
The clinic thrived from the start. Each year brought more young women keen to learn about nursing under Matron Cavell. By 1912, sixty nurses were at different stages of training. Besides Belgium, they came from France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and even England.
“The Belgian school of nursing has been an entire success,” Dr. Depage reported in a speech to the International Congress of Nurses in Cologne, Germany, in 1912. Then he listed all the places in Belgium where Cavell-trained nurses provided services: three hospitals, three private nursing homes, twenty-four communal schools, and thirteen kindergartens. Depage's speech drew a rousing ovation.
Edith ran a happy clinic. She set high standards, and at times, she could be severe in enforcing them. Like Eva Luckes at the London, Edith cracked down on nurses when they flirted with the doctors who treated the clinic's patients. This was a rule that puzzled the European nurses, who thought of themselves as more sophisticated than the English in matters of the heart. But the nurses found little else to complain about in the generous atmosphere that Edith created around the clinic.
The smart uniforms, which Edith helped to design, set the tone. The nurses wore blue cotton dresses, with long skirts and long sleeves. White aprons went over the dresses, and the caps were white and perky in a style called Sister Dora. These uniforms were a big leap forward from the dark and heavy robes that the nursing sisters wore in Belgium's hospitals. Edith said in a speech that the difference in clothing was “a contrast of the unhygienic past with the enlightened present.”
Edith and her staff of senior nurses at the Brussels clinic wore plain but appealing uniforms. Such smart outfits were previously unknown in Belgium's hospitals. (The Royal London Hospital Archives)
Edith never missed a chance to pass along a piece of her personal philosophy to the nurses. Once, during a lecture – Edith was a clear and enthusiastic teacher – a spider crawled across the floor. A student nurse raised a foot to crush it. Edith stopped her. “A woman does not take life,” Edith said. “She gives it.”
The tea parties were another custom that Edith adopted from Eva Luckes. Luckes gave them every week for her nurses at the London, and so did Edith in Brussels. Luckes invited the young women into her sitting room, where she poured cups of tea and kept the conversation lively. Edith went a step further. She joined the nurses in their rooms, in the house at 143, for musical evenings. A piano was installed in the nurses' quarters, and when enough of the young woman were off duty, they gathered at the piano to sing and play Edith joined in, and none of the nurses felt awkward in their Matron's company Clara Bohme, one of the first five nurses to join the clinic, said, “We were more like a family than anything else.”
Edith kept two dogs as pets – one a Belgian sheepdog named Jackie and the other a mutt named Don, both born in 1909. Don died about six years later, while Jackie lived much longer. Edith had taken Jackie in as a stray, and he became his mistress' devoted companion. Later, in the time of Edith's work with the escape organization, Jackie accompanied her whenever she left the clinic on risky errands. Edith thought the Germans would never imagine that a middle-aged woman walking her dog could be up to anything suspicious.
A stray of an entirely different sort that Edith took in in 1912 was a tall attractive Englishwoman in her twenties, named Grace Jemmett. Jemmett came from a well-to-do family, but she had grown addicted to morphine as the result of treatment that went wrong for a nervous disorder. She couldn't stay away from the drug, and one of the many doctors who had no success in treating her was the man who married Edith's sister Lillian. He was Longworth Wainwright of St. Thomas' Hospital in London, and he had the idea that Edith's clinic might be the right place for Jemmett to get off morphine. She moved to Brussels, where Edith's best efforts couldn't help the young woman shake her addiction. Nevertheless, Edith kept Jemmett at the clinic for years, giving her a bedroom and Edith's own personal care.
Jemmett could be a handful. She stayed in bed for long periods, and, at other times, she wandered around the clinic smoking cigarettes. Edith showed patience that was so saintly, it was almost beyond imagining. She hid the clinic's supply of morphine and personally regulated the young woman's drug taking. Under Edith's guidance, Jemmett often made a charming companion, but when something upset Jemmett, she took to her bed and to her morphine.
In her years as Matron, Edith went on holiday each July to visit her family and friends in Norfolk. On most trips, she took Grace Jemmett. Edith's mother didn't like Jemmett. She considered her morphine addiction sinful, but more than that, Mrs. Cavell was jealous of the hours that Edith spent on Jemmett. It was time that the possessive Mrs. Cavell thought Edith should be devoting to her mother, rather than to an erratic drug addict.
In June 1910, the Reverend Frederick Cavell died at age eighty-five. He was buried in the cemetery beside his church in Swardeston. After his death, Mrs. Cavell moved to a little house in Norwich, where she had the help of a maid. Edith tried to persuade her mother to make a home at the clinic in Brussels. Mrs. Cavell resisted until early 1914, when she visited Brussels for several weeks. She discovered that she couldn't stand the place. The French language confused her, and Grace Jemmett got on her nerves. Before the end of the winter, Mrs. Cavell was gone from Brussels, back to her little house in Norwich.
When Edith took her annual holiday in July that year, a trip which, to Mrs. Cavell's relief, did not include Grace Jemmett, Edith had mixed feelings. Since 1912, a plan to build a clinic that would replace the four overcrowded houses had been in the works, and now construction was going ahead at a promising rate. The new clinic on Rue Brussels, about a kilometer from Rue de la Culture, would combine everything that was up to date in medical care. Edith consulted Dr. Depage and an architect in planning the building, and she knew that it would attract more student nurses, who would receive more complete training. The prospect thrilled her.
At the same time, Edith was uneasy. There was speculation about a war involving almost all of Europe, which left her concerned about the year ahead. Every other citizen in Brussels who was paying attention to events felt the same way. Relations among European countries were disintegrating, and war was an increasing possibility. When Edith went on vacation in early July – she always liked to be in Norwich for her mother's birthday on July 6 – she left instructions with a senior nurse, Millicent White. If the news in Brussels suggested war, then White must send a telegram of warning to Edith.
The decisive battles of the First World War were fought in the trenches of northeastern France and in parts of Belgium. Millions of soldiers on both sides, Allied and German, died of gunfire and gas attacks before Germany surrendered on November 11, 1918. (The Toronto Reference Library)
Chapter Six
THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
In the early years of the twentieth century Europe's five most powerful nations were Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While all were rich in resources and industry, each nation had doubts and complaints about the others. Germany was jealous of Britain's mighty navy. France wished it had an army as large and disciplined as Germany's. Russia spent its wealth in building a military with bigger guns and stronger fortifications, all in the interests of not looking second-rate in comparison with the others. Germany objected that it had far fewer colonies in Asia and Africa than either Britain or France had. The British and French were growing more prosperous from their colonization of both continents, and the Germans considered their monopoly to be unfair.
Austria-Hungary, the least of the five powers, felt it received no respect from any of the others except Germany The population of the Austro-Hungarian Empire included groups of citizens divided by a dozen languages and five religions. The German Austrians, led by the prolific Habsburg family, dominated the empire for centuries, even though they were outnumbered by the Serbians and the other Slavic peoples who made up a large and unhappy subgroup within the empire.
Europe was officially at peace, but it was a nervous peace. None of the countries said they wanted war. All tried to manage workable diplomatic relations with the rest, and France and Russia maintained an alliance that had lasted for decades. Still, the five powers kept themselves armed just in case someone started a war. By “someone,” France, Russia, and Britain had Germany in mind, the country that was involved in more differences of opinion than anybody else. To the others, Germany seemed to bargain with a chip on its shoulder, and by 1914, German leaders were signaling that they might challenge the rest of the powers at any moment.
In June 1914, Austria-Hungary held its army's annual practice battle in the empire's province of Bosnia. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Habsburg family arrived in Bosnia on June 25 as the senior official in charge of supervising the battle. The archduke had the best of credentials; he was inspector general of the army and nephew of Austria-Hungary's Emperor Franz Josef.
When the army finished its practice battle three days later, the archduke and his wife were driven many miles in a procession of cars for a ceremonial visit to Bosnia's governor. The governor's residence was in the city of Sarajevo. Lying in wait for the archduke in the city's streets were five young Austrian citizens of Serbian background who had armed themselves with bombs and pistols. The five belonged to an extremist group of Nationalist Serbs who resented the rule of the Habsburgs. They intended to assassinate the archduke.
In June 1914, when Serbian nationalists assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (above right), the stage was set for the outbreak of the First World War The man in the lavish sideburns striding in front of the archduke is Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian emperor (The Toronto Reference Library)
As the royal motorcade entered Sarajevo, an assassin threw a bomb at the archdukes car. The bomb bounced off its target and exploded under the next car in the line, wounding an officer. The motorcade proceeded on its way, giving no sign of panic. Forty-five minutes later, still on the way to the governors house, the chauffeur driving the archduke made a wrong turn. He realized his mistake right away, but while he was backing up and turning around, he came to a stop in front of a man who was standing on the sidewalk. By a horrible coincidence, the man was another of the five Serbian assassins. He pulled out his pistol and shot the archduke and his wife. They died on the spot. The Serb killer was arrested.
The archduke's shocking assassination set off a chain of reactions among Europe's five powers. Austria-Hungary's Habsburgs were eager to declare war on the tiny kingdom of Serbia, which supported the Serb radicals within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the Habsburgs wanted assurance that Germany would help them in their fight. The Germans encouraged the Habsburgs to go ahead with an invasion of Serbia, whenever they were ready. Russia, long devoted to the Serbs, announced its support of Serbia in any war that was brought against the little kingdom. France already had a treaty with Russia that required each country to come to the aid of the other if Germany invaded one of the two. And both France and England were joined under an ancient treaty, in which they promised to protect Belgium if the Germans violated the country's neutrality.
