‘A Sweet Tribute to Her Memory’: War-time Edith Cavell Plays and Films

Abstract

In the Senate House of Brussels late on the afternoon of 8 October 1915, the English nurse Edith Cavell and four Belgian and French civilians were sentenced to death by firing squad by a military tribunal of the German General Government of occupied Belgium. Their charge was ‘treason in time of war’ under Paragraph 58 of the German Military Code, which prohibited ‘conducting soldiers to the enemy’. Under a decree of June 1915 issued by General Moritz Freiherr von Bissing, Governor General of Belgium, civilians were tried under military law for activities seen as acting against the German state or the German army. On 10 October, Traugott von Sauberzweig, the Military Governor of Brussels, confirmed Cavell’s sentence with ‘immediate effect’. Diplomatic personnel then spent frantic nocturnal hours seeking to stay the sentence, led by Brand Whitlock, head of the American legation in Belgium, and the Spanish Marquis de Villalobar. Baron Oscar von der Lancken, the German civilian Governor-General, appealed in vain to von Sauberzweig. In the early morning of the 11 October, Cavell and the clandestine Belgian journalist Philippe Baucq were shot and buried at the Tir National firing range in northeast Brussels. The good offices of Whitlock, plus representations from the Pope, King Alfonso of Spain and other European royalty, secured the commutation of the other sentences to life imprisonment. Most of these were released at the war’s end.1