The execution of Edith Cavell: 12 October 2015 Posted: 12 October 2015
Edith Cavell (National Portrait Gallery)
In the early hours of Tuesday, 12 October 1915, Edith Cavell, a British nurse who had been working in Belgium, was executed by the Germans after being found guilty of helping over 200 Allied servicemen escape to England. At her trial she confessed freely to doing this. Many others, mostly Belgian, had been arrested with her, of whom 26 were found guilty and 5 condemned to death, though in only two cases was the sentence carried out. Cavell’s hasty execution, before anyone had time to appeal on her behalf, caused international outrage. She became, literally, a poster girl for both sides in the First World War.
The Germans publicised her fate to discourage resistance and espionage; the Allies publicised it to encourage recruitment and stiffen public resolve against German barbarity. A Foreign Office official, however, suggested that her death, while ‘part and parcel’ of a German ‘policy of frightfulness’, might also be a sign of weakness.1 Cavell’s execution needs to be set in its wartime context to understand its particular resonance. 1915: a year of transition By the autumn of 1915 it was clear to all warring parties that the war initially expected to last six months was going to go on for a long time. It had become, as historian Sir Michael Howard has written, less a traditional struggle for power than a conflict of ideologies.2 Overall, the advantage in 1915 seemed to lie with the Central Powers, principally Germany and Austria, though a divided approach to the campaign against Russia weakened their initiative and Austria was close to collapse. For Britain, the disastrous Dardanelles campaign in the spring had served to emphasise the fact that the Balkans were lost to the Allies, despite Italy’s joining the Allied cause in April. By the autumn, both sides were committed to renewed campaigns on the Western Front: the Allies, led by Britain and France, to help their Russian ally, the Central Powers to encourage Russian weakness and strengthen the call for a separate peace. During 1915 the Allies had discovered they did not have enough of the right kind of guns, ammunition or men to fight the war they were faced with, and their communications were poor. The Central Powers discovered that success would require new defensive tactics, while on the Eastern Front infantry attacks behind a curtain of prolonged artillery fire worked better.
32
