The trial began Thursday, Oct. 7. Some opinion of the value of Mr. Kirschen’s assurance made “over and over again that the military court of Brussels was always perfectly fair,” etc., may be formed from the facts that Miss Cavell was not allowed to have a defender of her friends’ choosing, that she had no record of the evidence, oral or documentary, to study in preparation for her defense, that she was kept in solitary confinement for over nine weeks without opportunity to consult even with her legal advisers, during which time she was subjected to repeated cross examinations, and statements said to have been made by her confessing guilt were transmitted by the German authorities to the lawyer who subsequently was to defend her. The trial was conducted in German, a language she did not understand and which had to be interpreted to her. As a commentator said, “It obviously was impossible to place any adequate scheme of defense with a lawyer whom she saw for the first time when the trial began, a lawyer who had had no opportunity of studying the documents of the prosecution. That Mr. Kirschen did the best he could under the conditions is possible, though his subsequent conduct did not give assurance of the devotion and profound interest to be expected of a conscientious lawyer charged with an obligation that appealed at once to his humanity and his chivalry.” SENTENCED TO DEATH The fullest account of the trial was that given in M. de Leval’s report to Mr. Whitlock. It was as follows: “Miss Cavell was prosecuted for having helped English and French soldiers, as well as Belgian young men, to cross the frontier and to go over to England. She had admitted by signing a statement before the day of the trial, and by public acknowledgment in Court, in the presence of all the other prisoners and the lawyers, that she was guilty of the charges brought against her, and she had acknowledged not only that she had helped these soldiers to cross the frontier, but also that some of them had thanked her in writing when arriving in England. This last admission made her case so much the more serious, because if it only had been proved against her that she had helped the soldiers to traverse the Dutch frontier, and no proof was produced that these soldiers had reached a country at war with Germany, she could only have been sentenced for an attempt to commit the ‘crime’ and not for the ‘crime’ being duly accomplished. As the case stood the sentence fixed by the German military law was a sentence of death. “Paragraph 58 of the German Military Code says: “‘Will be sentenced to death for treason any person who, with the intention of helping the hostile Power, or of causing harm to the German or allied troops, is guilty of one of the crimes of paragraph 90 of the German Penal Code.’ “The case referred to in above said paragraph 90 consists in— “... conducting soldiers to the enemy....’