Silent in an Evil Time, page 7
Philippe Baucq was a Brussels architect who served valiantly in the secret organization that aided escaping British, French, and Belgian soldiers. The Germans punished him for his brave defiance by sentencing him to the same fate as Edith. (The Royal London Hospital Archives)
Chapter Ten
THE GERMANS CLOSE IN
Philippe Baucq was probably the first member of the secret organization to warn Edith about the German threat to her and the clinic. Baucq was a latecomer to the organization, joining it in February 1915, but once in, he became an aggressive operator. By profession, he was an architect. He was in his midthirties and lived in the Brussels suburb of Schaerbeck with his wife and two daughters. As a young man, he swam for Belgium in international competitions, and as an adult, he still kept fit. He was a man who had lots of energy and, as he later revealed, a taste for drama.
Baucq began his anti-German work by distributing copies of La Libre Belgique, an underground newspaper that carried reports about the war in defiance of the German ban on a free Belgian press. The paper printed twenty-five thousand copies per issue and published five issues each month. For the entire war, La Libre Belgique kept to its schedule, which drove the Germans mad with frustration.
Even though Baucq had plenty to handle in his distribution work, he threw himself into every level of the secret organization's activity. First, he arranged for places where escaping soldiers could hide in Brussels. Then he connected with the guides. Finally, he became a guide himself, escorting the soldiers through occupied territory to the border. It was as if Baucq wanted to test his courage against the greatest possible dangers.
He developed contacts with politicians in Brussels. They were people who didn't necessarily support the German occupiers, but knew everything that the Germans were up to. From one source, Baucq learned in late April that the Germans had assigned a new agency to arrest everyone who aided Allied soldiers in escaping from Belgium. The agency, called Section B of the German political police, was under the direction of two fanatical officers – Lieutenant Ernest Bergan and Sergeant Henri Pinkhoff. Though the two were committed to bringing down the entire escape organization, they took particular aim at Edith. They suspected that she was at the core of the organization, and each day, Bergan and Pinkhoff repeated a mantra to one another: “The Cavell woman must go before a firing squad.”
Philippe Baucq reported what he learned to Edith. It was the first and only time that the two met privately, and at the meeting, Edith gave Baucq the impression that she wasn't surprised by his news. She told him that strange things were happening at the clinic. Men she described as “suspicious persons” called on her for help in leaving Belgium. They wanted money, rooms to hide in, and guides to take them to the border. Edith sensed that the men weren't genuine escapees, and she pretended not to know what they were talking about. Edith presented herself to them as just a nurse who looked after the sick and injured.
OPPOSITE: La Libre Belgique was an underground newspaper published by Belgian patriots throughout the war, bringing news to their fellow citizens in defiance of the German ban. The clandestine paper survived Governor-General von Bissing's “reward for the discovery of its office and made fun of him by faking a picture of him reading their condemned paper.” (The Royal London Hospital Archives)
Baucq cautioned Edith to take care. She assured him that she was keeping her wits about her. But the organization's work was essential, and she intended to carry on with it as long as could.
Within two weeks of the meeting with Baucq, Edith sent an urgent message to Jeanne de Belleville, the countess who lived near Bellignies. Like Louise Thuliez, the countess had become a guide escorting British and French soldiers from the Bellignies area to Brussels. Both women survived desperate adventures. On one trip, Thuliez was in charge of a British soldier who thought she might not be a real member of the escape network. He kept his pistol loaded and ready for firing; if Thuliez made a false step, he intended to shoot her. When Thuliez steered the soldier safely to his destination, he realized he had been mistaken. The soldier apologized. Thuliez shrugged, as if to say that the chance of being shot by someone on her own side was just one of the hazards of war.
Edith respected both Thuliez and de Belleville as her courageous colleagues, but, in mid-May in Edith's urgent message to de Belleville, she begged the countess and others at the Bellignies end of the network not to bring men to the clinic in the next week. “My situation,” Edith wrote, “is becoming more and more strained every day.”
British soldiers had been coming to the clinic in steady numbers, and even though they were now staying only a day or two before Edith moved them on their way to the border, the increased chance of drawing German surveillance alarmed her. Edith had taken Philippe Baucq's warning to heart, and, for a short time, she scaled back the clinic's escape operations.
But soon enough, by late May, the arrival of soldiers in the usual numbers started up again. Edith couldn't bear the thought of turning away her fellow countrymen. She was delighted when a lance corporal named Horace Sheldrake reached the clinic. At thirty-seven, Sheldrake was older than the other soldiers. Edith appreciated his maturity, but best of all, he was another Norfolk native. Though their meeting was brief, the two felt much warmth for one another, two people from the same rural English county caught in the horror of war. Edith gave Sheldrake money, a pipe, tobacco, and a comfortable hospital shirt. The gifts were intended to cheer him on his trip to the border.
To Sheldrake's dismay, the Germans caught him as he left Brussels. He spent the next years as a prisoner of war. When Sheldrake arrived home at the war's end, he still had the hospital shirt. He told his family how much he admired Edith, and he insisted that, on his death, he be buried in the shirt she gave him. When Sheldrake died in 1946, his family carried out the wish.
A few days after Sheldrake passed through the clinic, Edith had a warm encounter with yet another Norfolk soldier. He was Robert William Mapes of the 1st Norfolk Regiment, a private who had been wounded at Mons by a German bullet that drilled through his ankle. He recuperated while he hid for several months with a family in the nearby village of Quiévrain. When Jeanne de Belleville heard about Mapes, she organized the fake passport and the system of guides that led him to a large house in Brussels. Many English soldiers were staying at the house, and while Mapes was there, waiting to move on to Holland, he met Edith.
Mapes never knew who owned the house where he was sheltered, but the owner was part of the secret organization and a colleague of Edith's. She visited the house one day and immediately recognized, from Mapes' accent, that he was a Norfolk native. The two began a conversation, and Edith soon learned that Mapes came from Hethersett, a village not far from Swardeston. Nostalgia overcame her.
“Dear old Norfolk,” she said to Mapes. “I would do anything to help a Norfolkman.”
Edith put her arms around Mapes and gave him a kiss, something that she did not do often. But, at that moment, with the Germans closing in on her, she must have felt homesick for the part of England she shared with the soldier she held in her arms. He was on his way back home. Edith may have sensed that it could be a long time before she saw Norfolk again.
Raoul de Roy was a young Belgian who lived south of Brussels. He wanted more than anything to get to England, where he could join the army and fight against the Germans. Jeanne de Belleville had known de Roy since he was a little boy and she promised to make his wish come true. Early in May 1915, she gave de Roy a fake passport and took him by train to Brussels.
As a precaution, since the countess had been active in the secret organization for so long and was aware that the Germans might have taken note of her activities, she and de Roy sat in different sections of the train. When they reached the station in Brussels, she wrote the address of Edith's clinic on notepaper and slipped it to de Roy whispering to him that he must memorize the address, then rip up the notepaper. De Roy not only ripped the paper into pieces, he also swallowed them.
He made his way to the clinic and explained his mission to Edith. She nodded and gave de Roy a form to sign. The form was for an operation. De Roy was puzzled.
“But, Madame,” he said to Edith, “I don't need an operation. I want you to get me across the border.”
Edith gave de Roy a smile. “That, young man,” she said, “is the operation!”
Edith was only partly joking. While it was true that the clinic had no intention of performing an operation on de Roy with many of the escaping men, Edith put their names into the book where she kept her official list of real medical operations. Then, opposite the names, she wrote imaginary treatments that the men received for fictitious ailments and illnesses. If the Germans happened to ask Edith why certain men had stayed at the clinic, she could produce the book as explanation. No record exists today that reveals whether Edith ever used the operations book to get herself out of tight spots, but it was typical of her careful and methodical planning that she prepared herself for every possible trouble.
Young Raoul de Roy stayed at the clinic for three days before leaving with a party of three or four other men for the trip into Holland. At the border, they ran into a problem. Strands of barbed wire guarded that section of the frontier, and beneath the barbed wire, hand grenades were buried in the sand. De Roy and the others solved the difficulty by stepping on the least thick barbed wire and performing a balancing act to keep from falling on the grenades. De Roy reached England, where he joined the 7th Artillery Regiment. Just as he had dreamed, he fought the Germans for the rest of the war.
Like all of the soldiers who passed through the clinic, de Roy never forgot his debt to Edith. During his three days on Rue de la Culture, he talked with her several times and formed a lasting impression of Edith. To de Roy she was an easy person to get on with. But she was more than that; she had “spontaneity.” Even in the period of her growing worry, Edith was generous to the men who were under her care.
On June 14, a man named Otto Mayer came to Edith's office at number 149. His appearance in the clinic represented the worst nightmare Edith could have imagined. Mayer worked for Bergan and Pinkhoff of the German political police. Although he was a German civilian, not an army man, Mayer had assets that made him valuable to Bergan and Pinkhoff. Unlike them, he spoke English as well as German and French. Like them, he was expert at double-dealing, a skilled sneak who would be effective on the Cavell case.
On the June day when Mayer showed up at Edith's office, she was over on Rue Brussels, checking on the construction of the new clinic. It's possible that Mayer chose this time when Edith was absent for his surprise visit, hoping that the less experienced nurses would crumble under his questioning. Elisabeth Wilkins, an Englishwoman in her late twenties, was sitting at Edith's desk the moment Mayer walked in. It was lucky for Edith that, of all the nurses, Wilkins was the one on duty. She had senior status, and she was more assured under pressure than the others.
“May I do something for you?” she asked Mayer.
He answered with a brusque question. “Have you got any more?”
Wilkins thought the man must be referring to nurses. The clinic had received several requests for nursing staff, and Mayer, who was dressed in civilian clothes, seemed to be on the same errand.
“I'm sorry,” she said, “we have no nurses available.”
“I'm not talking about nurses,” Mayer snapped, turning around the lapel on his jacket to reveal the badge of the German political police. “Have you any more British soldiers in the clinic?”
Wilkins kept her composure. She knew that two British soldiers had left the clinic just the day before, and that no more British were there at the moment. But on the floor above her, two French and two Belgian soldiers were waiting in a ward to leave for Holland. In the desk where Wilkins was sitting, her Matron's desk, Edith kept names and records of the soldiers who had passed through the clinic. These weren't just lists of operations performed, but detailed accounts of British escapees. At all costs, Wilkins had to get Mayer out of number 149.
“We have no British soldiers here,” she said. “If you don't believe me, come over to my room. You can go through my desk and look anywhere else in the house you want.”
Mayer followed Wilkins to number 145, where he made a search of her desk. Then he questioned the patients in the ward. Wilkins knew Mayer would find nothing; her desk held no incriminating records, and the men in the beds were Belgian civilians. While Mayer searched and interrogated, Wilkins slipped back to 149. She sent the two French and two Belgian soldiers to safe houses in the neighborhood, then she hid Edith's records in a toilet tank.
After Mayer finished with Wilkins' building, he demanded to look through everything in Edith's office and in the ward above. Wilkins told him to go ahead. Mayer wouldn't come across anything damaging – unless he was such a meticulous detective that he examined the toilet tank. Wilkins took a deep breath and watched in relief as Mayer walked past the toilet. He was a disappointed man when he left the clinic. And he warned Wilkins that he would be back.
That night in her office, Edith wrote the last letter to her mother that ever reached Mrs. Cavell. Edith chose her words carefully. She wrote about everyday events, about the little garden at the new clinic, about the hot weather and severe thunderstorms in Brussels. But, in the course of the letter, she included remarks that tried to warn her mother of Edith's fears for the future. She wrote of “very serious” things happening, the “very” underlined, and she emphasized that “I am not sure of having another occasion of sending [letters].”
Otto Mayer's search of the clinic had shaken Edith more than anything the Germans had so far done, and she was trying to let Mrs. Cavell know that Edith believed she could be arrested at any moment. She had endured searches in the past by regular German army officers, but Mayer represented a threat on a far more serious level. Mayer and the others in the German political police were certain to be more purposeful: It was their job to keep after the secret network until they caught all of its members. Edith was pessimistic about what lay ahead, and she needed to prepare her mother for the bad news that was sure to come.
In the next few days, Edith was distracted – something that was out of the ordinary for such a self-contained person. A Belgian surgeon whom she assisted in an operation told Edith that she was “jumpy.” She developed the habit of peeking around the curtains in the front windows of the clinic, examining the street for signs of German activity. Edith was on edge.
And then another search team from the German political police arrived at the clinic. Edith was in a second-floor ward. Once again she heard the sound of German boots pounding up the stairs. In an instant, she threw the documents she was holding into a fireplace and put a match to them. Earlier that month, right after Mayer's visit, Edith had burned several of her papers listing the names and details of British soldiers. But she still kept many more documents in different places around the clinic. It may seem puzzling that Edith saved records that were guaranteed to get her in trouble with the Germans. But to her, it made sense to keep the paperwork. When the war was over, she would be required to account for every part of the clinic's operation to her boss, Antoine Depage. The material about the British soldiers was part of the record, and to destroy the documents offended her sense of responsibility. She would almost rather be imprisoned than fail in her duty to Dr. Depage.
Soon Princess Marie de Croy traveled from Bellignies to the clinic for a discussion about the secret organization's work. The visit took place just one day after the latest German raid, and Edith, who wasn't expecting the princess, was shocked to find her waiting in the office.
“I wish you hadn't come,” she said. “I am evidently suspect.”
She led Princess Marie to the office window overlooking the street in front of the clinic. Edith pointed to a group of men who were standing around a spot in the pavement that apparently needed repairs.
“Those men have been outside for days,” she said. “They hardly work at all. I'm certain they've been sent to watch me.”
The princess told Edith that the reason for her visit was to call an end to the network's activities. She said the Germans appeared to have almost everyone under surveillance. Bellignies had been raided several times. Now was the time to stop.
Edith agreed, but she had a question. “Are there any more hidden men?”
“About thirty,” the princess answered. Louise Thuliez had found the thirty soldiers hiding near a village named Cambrai.
“Then we can't stop just yet,” Edith said. “If one of those men were taken and shot, it would be our fault.”
The two women came to an understanding. They would carry on until the last thirty soldiers were out of Belgium. But they wouldn't take the thirty by way of Bellignies or the clinic. With the Germans watching both places, that would be foolish. By the time the princess left Edith's office, both knew that the secret network was still in business, at least for another month.
Edith changed her mind about not taking more British soldiers into the clinic. In July, she accepted six or seven of them. In her opinion, this was unavoidable because the soldiers had nowhere else to go. She hid them in the cellar, gave them whatever they needed to get to the Dutch border, and provided money and guides.
Two of the soldiers, Matty Shiells and Pat Revelly, were from the Royal Irish Rifles, and for them, Edith thought up a clever disguise. She dressed them as monks from a religious order whose members wore white robes and observed a vow of silence. Edith and the soldiers found the outfits amusing, but the laughs ended when the three sat down in the streetcar that was taking them to the outskirts of Brussels. Edith noticed that a German officer across the aisle was staring at Revelly's feet. What was so fascinating? Then Edith caught on. When Revelly's white robe was hiked up, the German could see that Revelly was wearing British army boots. She hurried the two soldiers off the streetcar and pointed them on their route north to Holland. Within a few weeks, Shiells and Revelly rejoined the Royal Irish Rifles.
