The founder of the Belgian Red Cross, Belgian royal surgeon Dr. Antoine Depage, asked Edith to be matron of a nursing school in Belgium in 1907. She trained nurses for three hospitals, 24 schools and 13 kindergartens in Belgium. When WWI broke out she was visiting her widowed mother in England but returned to Belgium and her work there.
It was during this time of war, in German-occupied Brussels that she helped many allied soldiers and fighting-age men to escape to the neutral Netherlands. Many of these were wounded soldiers she had also helped nurse. She was arrested by the Germans in 1915, put in prison and, in the end, executed for working with the enemies of Germany.
Although she was a nurse and could not be prosecuted under the Geneva Convention, since she had helped further than medical needs, she was seen as complicit in the war. She was not arrested for espionage, but for war treason. She was executed by firing squad on October 12, 1915. Her last thoughts and words, which are inscribed on a memorial to her near Trafalgar Square, are: “Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”
Cavell was 49 at the time of her execution and was a pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium. Among the many memorials around the world to Edith Cavell, her name is among the 35 names on a memorial in Schaerbeek in Brussels. The name Edith was not common in 1915 until this event. French singer Edith Piaf who was born two months after the execution was named after Edith Cavell. In 2005 the French-speaking Belgians voted her 48th greatest Belgian. On October 12 it will have been 110 years since her execution.
