The Case of Edith Cavell | Page 5

escape across the frontier to Holland. For this she suffered the penalty of death, and the validity of this sentence, even under Prussian military law, I will discuss later. It is enough to say that no instinct is so natural in every man and woman, and especially in woman with the maternal instinct characteristic of her sex, than to give a harbor of refuge to the helpless. All nations have respected this instinctive feeling as one of the redeeming traits of human nature and the history of war, at least in modern times, can be searched in vain for any instance in which anyone, especially a woman, has been condemned to death for yielding to the humanitarian impulse of giving temporary refuge to a fugitive soldier. Such an act is neither espionage nor treason, as those terms have been ordinarily understood in civilized countries.
It is true, as suggested by a few in America who sought to excuse the Cavell crime, that Mrs. Surratt was tried, condemned and executed because she had permitted the band of assassins, whose conspiracy resulted in the assassination of Lincoln and the attempted murder of Secretary Seward, to hold their meetings in her house; but the difference between this conscious participation in the assassination of the head of the State, in a period of civil war, and the humanitarian aid which Miss Cavell gave to fugitive soldiers to save them from capture is manifest. I am assuming that Miss Cavell did give such protection to her compatriots, for all accessible information supports this view, and if so, however commendable her motive and heroic her conduct, she certainly was guilty of an infraction of military law, which justified some punishment and possibly her forcible detention during the period of the war.
To regard her execution as an ordinary incident of war is an affront to civilization, and as it is symptomatic of the Prussian occupation of Belgium and not a sporadic incident, it acquires a significance which justifies a full recital of this black chapter of Prussianism. It illustrates the reign of terror which has existed in Belgium since the German occupation.
When the German Chancellor made his famous speech in the Reichstag on August 4th, 1914, and admitted at the bar of the world the crime which was then being initiated, he said:
"The wrong--I speak openly--that we are committing we will endeavor to make good as soon as our military goal has been reached."
Within a few weeks the military goal was reached by the seizure of practically all of Belgium and by the voluntary surrender of Brussels to the invader, and since then, for a period of fourteen months, the Belgian people have been subjected to a state of tyranny for which it would be difficult to find a parallel, unless we turned to the history of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth Century and recalled its occupation by the Duke of Alva. It must be said in candor that the Prussian occupation of Belgium has not yet caused as many victims as the "Bloody Council" of the Duke of Alva, for the estimated number of non-combatants, who have been shot in Belgium during the last fourteen months, is only 6,000 as against the 18,000 whom it is estimated the Duke of Alva mercilessly put to death.
It may also be the fact that the present oppression of Belgium is marked by some approach to the forms of law; but it may be doubted whether the difference is not more in appearance than in reality, for the administration of law in Belgium has been a mockery. Of this there can be no more striking or detailed proof than the protest which was presented to the German authorities on February 17th, 1915, by M. L��on Th��odor, the head of the Brussels bar. The truth of this formal accusation may be fairly measured by the strong probability that the brave leader of the Brussels bar would never have ventured to have made the statements hereinafter referred to to the German Military Governor unless he was reasonably sure of his facts. What he said on behalf of the bar of Brussels was said in the shadow of possible death, and if he had consciously or deliberately maligned the Prussian administration of justice in this open and specific manner, he assuredly took his life into his hands. This brave and noble document will forever remain one of the gravest indictments of German misrule, and as it states, on the authority of one who was in a position to know, the details of the savage tyranny which masqueraded under the forms of law, it is appended, with some condensation, to this article.
After stating the fact "that everything about the German judicial organisation in Belgium is contrary to the principles of law," and after showing that