Edith Cavell had anticipated that there would be work for her in Brussels. She found it in abundance, first in nursing wounded Belgians, succeeded by an influx of suffering Germans, for the new authorities allowed her to continue her work; and in due course numbers of English and French soldiers came under her ministering care. And be it noted that to be wounded was a sure passport to the great heart of the English nurse. Even the injured invaders were tended with impartial care, in accordance with the great tenet of the Red Cross nursing creed, that suffering humanity shall know no distinctions, whether friend or foe, their necessities calling for the same single-minded devotion. Miss Bertha Bennet Burleigh relates that she spent a pleasant half-hour with Miss Cavell, whom she met by chance shortly after the German occupation. In conversation the lady journalist learned that the nurses in the various nursing institutions had been requested to give an undertaking that they would also act as guards of the wounded. Miss Cavell said, 'We are prepared to do all we can to help them to recover from their wounds, but to be their jailers, never!' A German general smote the table with his clenched fist when the nurse gave her emphatic reply, but he could not cow her indomitable will. 'He looked,' Sister Edith afterwards told one of her colleagues, 'as if he would like to shoot me dead.' From that day onwards the German authorities commenced to deal harshly with the British Red Cross nurses who were in their power. There is evidence available to prove that many Germans had occasion to bless the good offices of Nurse Cavell; and from all who passed through her hands she won the most profound esteem, which in itself was a cause of offence to the German authorities, who knew that they themselves were just as cordially detested. But Edith Cavell's greatest offence lay in the fact that she was an Englishwoman, heroic daughter of the race that no specious promise or bribe could tempt from the path of honour; that could not view its treaty signature as a 'scrap of paper,' whose 'contemptible little army' had played a dramatic part in hurling back the Germans when Paris was literally in their mailed grasp; and that had succeeded in locking the once weak line of the Allies, which now forbade approach to the Channel ports of France from which a royal bully had proposed to attack the shores of England. Baron von Bissing had been appointed Governor-General of Belgium, and forthwith he had commenced to terrorize the inhabitants. Brussels was plastered with proclamations calculated to make life scarcely worth living. One of them in particular forbade any person to assist subjects of countries at war with Germany to leave Belgium.