A Noble Woman: The Life-Story of Edith CavellProtheroe, Ernest
History
A Noble Woman: The Life-Story of Edith Cavell
Protheroe, Ernest
Cavell, Edith, 1865-1915
'Miss Cavell neither grieved nor faltered when she knew her fate.
She was happy, she said, to die for her country; and a life which
had been generously devoted to a noble work was crowned by an
heroic death. It is difficult to say what inspiration a nation does
not draw from such an example as hers, which lifts up even the
meanest and most selfish heart to new heights of unselfish love and
devotion. "To weep would do her wrong." Her life and death are
beautiful as those of the saints of old, and will move mankind like
immortal music or song. In the truest sense she may be said to have
died happy. Her country will never forget her. Her memory will
brace our troops in the hour of battle, and when the grey forms
close in the North Sea it will be there. Those who die thus have
won immortality.'
_The Daily Chronicle._
'In a War which numbers its casualties by millions, and which has
witnessed holocausts of atrocity like the sinking of the
_Lusitania_ and the sack of Louvain, the murder of a single lady
may seem a small episode. But the enormity of a crime is not always
measured by the number of its victims. Here was a lady of education
who had devoted her life to the relief of human suffering. The head
of a great nursing institute, she had helped to train hundreds of
nurses, including Germans. When the War broke out she devoted her
whole strength to the care of the wounded, and had lavished her
personal attention on wounded German soldiers. Latterly she had
assisted certain British, French, and Belgian soldiers to escape to
England across the Dutch frontier. Charged with this military
offence, she admitted it with complete candour; indeed, she seems
to have been the principal witness against herself. One may safely
affirm that, having regard to her transparently humanitarian
motives and all the circumstances of the case, no Government in the
world but the German would have inflicted the death penalty on such
a culprit. They not merely inflicted it, but compassed its
infliction with a mixture of duplicity and brutality that must make
every decent human being's gorge rise. Of Miss Cavell herself no
one will dispute that if any death in this War has been heroic,
hers was; one cannot say less, and no one could say more. The sense
of the whole civilized world can be left to judge between this
helpless woman and her murderers.'
_The Scotsman._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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