Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 2: The Icon And His Critics

The first problem which the Secret Elite and their agents faced in bringing Kitchener into the Cabinet in August 1914 was that he was a serving soldier, not a politician. He did not take orders; he gave them. His appointment lent credence to the view that with his presence inside the Cabinet, Kitchener guaranteed the Liberal government ‘an aura of professional military competence which earned [them] widespread public approval.’ [1] The people in the streets and factories were delighted at his appointment. However, if any insider assumed that he would embrace the collective responsibility of cabinet membership, they were to be sorely tested. [2]

The second problem stemmed from Kitchener’s comparative lack of association with the military hierarchy which had been groomed at Camberley. [3] His world had been centred on the Empire. He was more at home as proconsul in Egypt or Commander-in-Chief in South Africa during the later stages of the Boer War, and again in India, [4] than in the confines of the War Office and the Cabinet Office. While Kitchener was hailed throughout Britain as a decisive and iconic figure, he had a more limited impact on his own staff. [5] Despite all of the careful preplanning carried out by the Committee of Imperial Defence and so clearly explained to Churchill, Lloyd George, Grey, Haldane and Asquith in 1911 [6] by Henry Wilson (at that point a General), the newly formed War Council [7] began to reconsider options. To Wilson’s horror they started to quibble over the number of divisions from the British Expeditionary Force which should be sent to France. He had assumed that the whole force would be sent immediately on mobilisation. That was what had been secretly agreed with the French army. The implications of failing to do so appalled him and he complained bitterly to senior military commanders, and prominent individuals like Leo Amery and Lord Alfred Milner, [8] both of whom were inner circle members of the Secret Elite.

If Kitchener required a quick lesson on how difficult rule by committee can be when strong-minded individuals feel the need to express contrary or optional views, this was a baptism of fire. The War Council could not decide where the BEF should be headquartered or how many division should be sent to France. Sir John French favoured switching headquarters to Antwerp rather than Maubeuge, as had been planned and agreed with the French army. Kitchener preferred Amiens, but wanted to have further intelligence from the French before settling the question. The meeting should have been held in Bedlam. Some War Council members thought that Liege was in Holland, not Belgium. In Henry Wilson’s view, they discussed strategy like idiots. It was, he rasped, ‘an historic meeting of men mostly entirely ignorant of their subject’. [9] And he included Kitchener in that wild generalisation.

Every day of indecision was a day irrevocably lost to the advancing Germans. On 5 August a further War Council meeting took place at 10 Downing Street. [10] Kitchener had decided that two divisions from the BEF should be withheld to protect the east coast of Britain from German attack and Asquith approved the action. According to Henry Wilson, when the prime minister backed Kitchener in withholding two divisions, he was more concerned about internal disorder than invasion, fearing that ‘the domestic situation might be grave’. [11] He still had one eye on Ulster and knew that there was a sizeable opposition to war amongst some members of the Labour and Trades Union movement. Whatever the reason, Kitchener approved the sending of only four divisions [12], and eventually, after bitter argument on 12 August, agreed that the BEF Headquarters be established at Maubeuge. Later, historians claimed that Kitchener’s final decision was indeed fortunate. Had all six divisions been thrown at the German army in Belgium, losses would probably have been far worse and the whole British army destroyed. [13]

The personal relationship between Lord Kitchener and Brigadier-General Henry Wilson soured markedly when the Secretary of State for War discovered that Wilson had met with the French intermediary, General Huguet, informed him of current British thinking and allowed him to return to France without meeting Kitchener on 7 August. Wilson’s diary records a most acrimonious meeting at which he spoke his mind to Kitchener, insisting that he would not be bullied ‘especially when he [Kitchener] talks such nonsense as he did today.’ We have only his word on such insubordination. In Wilson’s eyes, Kitchener had ruined the carefully designed plans which had been agreed with the French army by diluting the BEF’s strength in France. [14] Consequently, relations between Wilson and Kitchener remained toxic for the first eight months of the war.

Wilson continually undermined Kitchener’s vulnerable position, isolated as he was in the War Office, criticising his ‘colossal ignorance and conceit.’ [15] The Imperial General Staff had decamped to France with Sir John French in overall command, Sir Archibald Murray as Chief of General Staff, Sir William Robertson as Quartermaster and Wilson himself, ‘reduced’, as he saw it, to Brigadier General of Operations. [16] After a personal protest, Wilson’s position was redefined as ‘Sub-Chief.’ [17] Such vainglorious emphasis on titles rather than substance revealed the near ubiquitous pettiness and conceit among the outdated, outmoded and, soon to be very evident, incompetent military hierarchy of the Roberts Academy. Kitchener was thus left isolated in London where a substantial power vacuum developed between the war planners (the General Staff in France) and the policy makers, essentially the Cabinet advised by Kitchener.

General Sir Henry Wilson had much deeper and more extensive roots within the Secret Elite than Kitchener could ever have appreciated and regularly sent private letters of complaint about the conduct of the war to his mentor and Secret Elite leader, Lord Alfred Milner. Within a week of crossing to France, Wilson condemned the ‘cowardly ignorance’ of his superiors in London – meaning Asquith and Kitchener. He blamed the retreat from Mons on the ‘initial blunder’ (that would be Kitchener’s blunder, approved by the prime minister) of depleting the BEF’s original strength by keeping two divisions in Britain. [18] Blaming others was a tactic repeatedly employed by Henry Wilson. Any military failure was always someone else’s fault.

Despite the criticism of disloyal colleagues, both in the military and the Cabinet, Kitchener had a far greater grasp of the prerequisites for warfare and the appropriate application of sound strategy than most around him. What did not help was his overbearing and dismissive manner. [19] He alone amongst the military hierarchy recognised that Britain had to be committed to a prolonged war.

Historians have glibly accepted the idea that Herbert Kitchener first began to consider the impact of war in Europe in the short days of August immediately before his appointment as Secretary of State for War. What nonsense. While in Japan on his world tour in 1909, Kitchener was joined by his old friend Henry Rawlinson who had served on his staff in Sudan and South Africa. He was informed of the secret arrangements for combined action between the British and French in the event of war with Germany. Kitchener did not like the arrangement because it meant being tacked-on to the French, which ‘might not suit’. [20] After a joint military and naval conference in Malta in 1912, he and Churchill ‘used to talk over Imperial Defence topics when from time to time we met.’ [21] Kitchener also discussed Germany’s likely strategy in Belgium with Winston Churchill on 28 July. [22] To suggest that he was ignorant of the imminence of war in August 1914 is completely at odds with the evidence.

While the German plans for defence, should they be attacked from east and west simultaneously, the Schleiffen Plan, was widely known throughout Europe, Schleiffen’s original designs had been refined over the previous decade. The advance of the whole first army through Belgium had not been envisaged by Wilson and his entourage. This concerned Kitchener. He correctly concluded that the German plan of attack was to sweep around Belgium north of the River Meuse – which was why he had deep reservations about placing the BEF headquarters at Maubeuge. For all the years of detailed preparations which Sir Henry Wilson had spent laboriously mapping and planning along the Belgian – French border, he had never considered that his small force would face the full might of Von Kluck’s 1st German army, nor spend the next three weeks in retreat, struggling to keep in touch with the disheartened French.

Indeed as a soldier experienced in several wars, Kitchener’s grasp of the immediate situation before him was far more circumspect than that of anyone at GHQ in France. [23] He was under no illusion that the Expeditionary Force was completely inadequate to the task of taking on the vast resources and overwhelming manpower of the German and Austrian forces. He saw that the small British force had little value as an independent unit and consequently it became an auxiliary wing of the retreating French army.

Kitchener’s fears proved justified. Sir John French, a commander whose enthusiasms plummeted between unbound optimism and deep despair, had to be commanded not to retire to Le Havre with the remnants of the BEF. Perturbed by his commander in the field’s intention to withdraw, Kitchener was immediately sent by a small coterie of the Cabinet, including Asquith, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George ‘to unravel the situation and if necessary, put the fear of God into them all.’ [24] With his mind already poisoned by the bitter Wilson, Sir John French took Kitchener’s presence as a personal insult. He was even more upset when Kitchener appeared in the uniform of Field Marshall. Jealous of Kitchener’s superior rank, political authority, linguistic skills (his fluency in French gave him an advantage in discussion with the French high command,) [25] Sir John French resented the Secretary of State for War with a vengeance.

All of which begs the question – why did the Secret Elite pursue his appointment as Secretary of State for War with such insistence? What did Kitchener possess which made him integral to the pursuit of a very long war?

[1] Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol 1, p. 203.
[2] Keith Jeffery, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, A Political Soldier, p. 132.
[3] Kitchener was an imperial soldier and proconsul. Several of his staff members during the Boer War served or commanded the Military Staff Training College at Camberley, but Herbert Kitchener was never one of Lord Robert’s entourage who dominated the upper echelons of the British army. He operated independently, and had his heart set on becoming the next Viceroy of India before war broke out. Thus he was an ‘outsider’ compared to the near masonic brotherhood which Roberts dominated inside his ‘Academy’. [ See Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the first World War, Chapter 15, p. 194 – 202.]
[4]  Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1, p. 203.
[5] Jeffrey, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, 132.
[6] Winston Churchill, World Crisis, pp. 38-9.
[7] For details see previous blog.
[8] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics p. 244.
[9] C E Callwell and Marshal Foch, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson VI: His Life And Diaries. p. 159.
[10] PRO CAB 22/1/1.
[11] Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock, H H Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 159.
[12] PRO CAB 22/1/2.
[13] John Terraine, Mons, p. 88.
[14]  Callwell and  Foch, Wilson Diaries:  p. 160.
[15] Jeffrey, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, p. 133.
[16] Callwell and Foch, Wilson Diaries, p. 157.
[17] Jeffrey, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, p. 132.
[18] Milner Papers held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, quoted in A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 242.
[19] George H Cassar, The Tragedy of Sir John French, p. 252.
[20] George H Cassar, Kitchener, Architect of Victory, p. 160.
[21] Churchill, World Crisis, pp. 125-6.
[22] Ibid., p. 101.
[23] Callwell and Foch, Wilson Diaries, p. 161.
[24] Brock and Brock, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 213.
[25] Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 310.

Commission For Relief In Belgium 13: As If It Had Never Happened

Herbert Hoover’s reputation could not have survived the war years without protection from his Secret Elite masters. Once he had been presented as the humanitarian face of the so-called relief programme, and his status transformed from unscrupulous and crooked mining-engineer to quasi-diplomat, he had access to the inner chambers of the American, British and German governments. Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) records show that  between 1914-1916 he had discussions with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey [1], Prime Minister Henry Asquith [2] and Chancellor Lloyd George, [3] yet interestingly they blank him entirely from their official memoirs. Why? US President Woodrow Wilson and various Secretaries of State discussed policy with Hoover, as did German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann [4] and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. [5] The Kings of Spain and Belgium and countless senior diplomats across Europe knew Hoover personally, yet their reticence on the subject of Belgian Relief speaks volumes

Critics were silenced, rebutted or otherwise dissuaded in order to protect his reputation as the ‘great humanitarian’. The greater Hoover’s success at the CRB in prolonging the war, the stronger the Secret Elite’s cordon of protection was drawn around him. Almost everyone who spoke out or questioned him was crushed or discredited, beaten into submission or forced to retract their claims in the face of violent threats and legal retribution. It was as if his past history had never happened. Officially.

Convinced that Belgian Relief was  damaging the British war effort as early as April 1915, the Admiralty in London, asked naval intelligence to investigate Hoover’s background. Allegations were made that he was ‘untrustworthy, had sinister business connections with German mining corporations’, and that ‘his foodstuffs had passed into German hands.’ [6] His activities were subjected to a formal investigation headed by Sir Sidney Rowlatt who duly whitewashed his findings and gave his formal stamp of approval to the Foreign Office. Loyal member of the British establishment, Rowlatt was later responsible for the repressive Rowlatt Act in India which led to serious unrest in the Punjab and the shocking Amritsar Massacre in 1919. [7]

Hoover steadfastly lied about his business connections. Initially, he claimed to have resigned from his mining company directorships because the relief programme left him no time for private business. [8] He is famously quoted as saying, ‘let the fortune go to hell’, [9] yet records from Skinner’s Mining Manual show that he served on thirteen boards of directors in 1914 and on sixteen in 1915. By 1916 he not only remained on thirteen boards but was chairman of one and joint manager of both the Burma Corporation and Zinc Corporation. [10] His companies returned immense dividends during the war largely through the unprecedented increase in demand for metals and munitions. When rumours of his impropriety in the dealings of the Zinc Corporation surfaced in 1916, law suits followed. He approached the Foreign Office to directly intervene on his behalf, on the grounds that his work with the CRB was too important to the war effort. At his behest, the Ambassadors from Belgium and France wrote to the Foreign Office to stress Hoover’s vital role in Belgian Relief. The Foreign Office advised Hoover’s solicitor that, if ‘The Court’ sought their opinion about the importance of his work, they would willingly reply. The British establishment knew how to protect its assets.

In legal proceedings taken against his Burma Corporation, he attempted to pervert the course of justice by claiming to have previously resigned from the company. His ‘resignation’ was a sham, a temporary convenience to avoid court proceedings. Back on the Board of the Burma Corporation, Hoover brokered a deal in December 1917 with the head of the CRB office in New York and Ernest Oppenheimer to develop gold mines in the Rand. He organised the finance chiefly through the CRB’s bankers, J P Morgan & Company and Morgan’s Guaranty Trust Company of New York. Thus the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa was born, a mining giant in its field from day one. [11]

Consider these connections. Hoover used the CRB banking agencies [12] to  broker a deal that rewarded him with a huge shareholding (plus options) which reaped him yet another fortune. Who was greasing whose palm?  Hoover’s access to ‘insider-knowledge’ brought him an enormous stroke of ‘good fortune’. Like Lord Rothschild some time before, he liquidated almost all of his direct Russian holdings in late 1916, just in time to avoid the consequent take-overs obligated by the Russian Revolution. Every one of his former Russian enterprises was confiscated. [13], and other unfortunates had to bear the consequent loss. Lies and evasion, deceit and malpractice were laced into Hoover’s mentality. Yet his illegal business practices were successfully covered up by his Secret Elite minders.

At the end of the war Herbert Hoover was given one final task in Europe by the Secret Elite. Their role in causing the war and supplying the German army during the conflict had to be kept buried. Any evidence of CRB impropriety, of its complicity with the German government of occupation in Belgium and of its role in prolonging the war would have been ruinous. Hoover faced a massive undertaking. With registered offices in New York, London, Brussels, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Paris, Lille and Buenos Aires, [14] official documentation for purchasing agents, shipping agents, insurance brokers, bankers and auditors, statisticians and clothing buyers, the CRB had left in its wake a multiple tonnage of bank transactions, ledger entries, accounts, deposits and records of international exchange. The list was potentially endless, at least, theoretically, because no independent records ever saw the light of day. They were systematically taken after the war by Hoover’s agents and shipped to the west coat of America. Ponder long and hard on this fact; the evidence was physically removed from its point of origin. It was to be as if the illegal importations to Germany and the malpractices of Belgian bankers and speculators had never happened.

We do not know what has since been destroyed or what languishes in the darker recesses of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, but a very determined and successful attempt was made to rewrite history while presenting Hoover as a great saviour of humanity. Our research proves that, in reality, he was a ruthless opportunist – a liar and cheat who browbeat, bad-mouthed and took advantage of the weak while greatly increasing his personal fortune throughout the war. And, had there been no CRB to supply Germany, the war would have ended as early as the Spring of 1915. Millions died while he and other millionaires thrived.

Bad as Hoover’s manipulation and removal of the CRB’s records was, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the outrageous theft of the historical record from all across Europe. In 1919 he was given this important task as the Secret Elite set about removing documentary evidence pertaining to the origins of the war. Once more he had to be re-invented. The ‘great humanitarian’ became a ‘lover of books and of history’ who wished to collect manuscripts and reports relating to the causes of the war because they would otherwise ‘easily deteriorate and disappear’. [15] Hoover certainly made sure that anything incriminating ‘disappeared’.

On the basis that his involvement was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University, a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, went to Paris in April 1919 to coordinate a great heist of documentary evidence, official and unofficial, and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability. Adams resolved to keep a diary, but stopped after a week on the spurious excuse that he was making too many contacts and the work was a too interesting ‘to suffer interruption by recording them.’ [16] The task had to be undertaken immediately. Speed was of the essence. Adams was in Paris by 11 June with no plan of action, other than follow Hoover’s instructions that all the documentation was sent to Stanford University in California. It was about as distant a destination from the European theatre as could be imagined.

Nothing was too unimportant. Decisions about relevance would be left to a later date. Two years later Adams still hadn’t even begun the process of creating a catalogue on the rather spurious basis that doing so too early led to ‘disappointment and vexation’. [17] In Belgium, for example, access to government records was facilitated by ‘M. Emile Francqui, mining engineer and a banker of world reputation’. [18] Of course it was. Who else knew where all the important evidence was buried? Francqui, whose all-powerful Belgian bank, the Societe Generale ended the war cash rich and thriving beyond its dreams, [19] was the one man who knew exactly what had to be buried deep for all time.

Why have historians and investigative journalists failed to unmask this charade? Hoover and Francqui orchestrated the removal of documents that enabled the myth of Belgian Relief to flourish while masking its sinister role.

Hoover had many powerful friends. He persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe and sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, these agents faced little resistance in their quest.  They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origins and the workings of the Commission for Relief of Belgium. They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [20] He recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. [21] Hoover allegedly donated a $50,000 ‘gift’ for the task. It would only have paid for around seventy of these agents for a year. It has not been possible for us to discover from what source the remaining nine-hundred men were paid.

Hoover’s backers claimed that there would only be ten years within which the most valuable material could be ‘acquired’. According to Ephraim Adams, Hoover himself estimated that the process of ‘collecting’ would go on for twenty-five years [22] but it could take ‘a thousand years’ to catalogue the material. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace’. [23] How convenient. The official propaganda insisted that the work was urgent, but it would take a millennium to catalogue. They were stealing history.

Hoover was the US Secretary of State for Commerce from 1921 and as a fitting reward for all of his sterling efforts on behalf of the Secret Elite, he became their chosen candidate in the US presidential election of 1928. His critics in America were systematically harassed or squashed. Books that exposed his malpractices were removed from shelves and whole editions pulped. Hoover had long employed sophisticated public relations to curry favour with the media. Pliant biographers and party hacks were supplemented by use of the FBI to perform background checks on would-be unsolicited authors. [24]

A campaign of determined denigration was launched against the crusading journalist Walter Liggett, whose well researched book, The Rise of Herbert Hoover stands testament to Hoover as a criminal businessman and opportunist, who strove to manipulate and remove the records of his past wrong-doing. [25] Liggett, a fearless reporter and newspaper editor who represented the best of American investigative journalism, was later gunned down for exposing syndicated crime. [26]

Tracy Kittredge, a loyal insider who worked with the CRB in Belgium, wrote a very comprehensive  history of the Commission for Relief in Belgium – now entitled the Primary Source Edition – in 1919. [27] Hoover didn’t like its content, so it remained unpublished. In 1942 he claimed that Kittredge’s work  was deemed ‘inaccurate and unreliable’ and was not be shown to anyone without clarification. [28] Hoover did not explain what the inaccuracies were, but we suspect that Kittredge’s criticism of Francqui and the bad blood between both the CRB and the CNSA was the cause. He ordered an associate to collect and destroy all copies of the unpublished work which had progressed as far as a bound proof. Fortunately for researchers, a few survived the cull. [29] Even when faced with official records from those who were there, the Secret Elite endorsed the party line; nothing irregular had ever happened. Any view to the contrary had to be suppressed.

The biography which most disturbed Hoover was John Hamill’s The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two Flags. [30] It was a hugely controversial expose which resulted in an outpouring of indignation from the Hoover lobby who damned the book as a complete fabrication. Shortly after its launch, Hoover’s legal team reported that Hamill had signed a one hundred and eighty-four page repudiation, admitting ‘false conclusions’. Interestingly Hamill refused in court to admit that his work was entirely false and only went as far as to say that ‘my interpretations were in error in some instances.’ [31] It has since been suggested that Hoover’s own agent, George Barr Baker, wrote the repudiation using strong-arm tactics and thuggery. That is the same George Barr Baker who penned articles published in the New York Times about starving Belgian children, and visited the Pope as the CRB envoy. [32]

Hamill’s conclusion chimes absolutely with ours: ‘The whole scheme of Belgian Relief was planned for the purpose of securing the enormous food supplies of Belgium for Germany. The Belgian Relief …. was the cause of the prolongation of the dreadful war, with all its horrors and miseries, and the loss of millions of lives, including our more than 126,000 brave American boys (not to mention the wounded and crippled).’ [33] It was, and the extent to which the Anglo-American establishment went to cover all traces of its complicity, remains awesome.

And who today has heard of the Commission for Relief in Belgium? Where does it sit in the role of honour for World War 1? No-where. It has been systematically buried; as if it never happened at all. But there was one major political consequence.

On 4 March 1929 the great Belgian Relief ‘humanitarian’ was sworn is as President of the United States of America.

[1] George I. Gay and H H Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 18, p. 19.
[2] George H. Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, pp. 69-70.
[3] George I. Gay and H H Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 147 , p. 266.
[4] Ibid., Document 134, pp. 241-2.
[5] Ibid., Document 140, pp. 252-255.
[6] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 176.
[7] For further information on the Massacre at Amritsar in 1919, known also as the Jallianvala Bagh Massacre, see; http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/jbagh.html
[8] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 270.
[9] Walter Liggett, The Rise of Herbert Hoover, p. 209.
[10] Ibid., pp. 210-211.
[11] http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Anglo_American_Corp._of_South_Africa_Limited.aspx
[12] The Commission for the Relief in Belgium, Balance Sheet and Accounts, published 1921 p. 86
http://libcudl.colorado.edu/wwi/pdf/i71185215.pdf
[13] Nash, Herbert Hoover, p. 274.
[14] The Commission for the Relief in Belgium, Balance Sheet and Accounts, published 1921.
[15] Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
[16] Ephraim Adams, The Hoover War Collection at Stanford University, California; a report and an analysis, (1921), p. 7. https://archive.org/details/cu31924031034360
[17] Ibid.
[18] Adams, The Hoover War Collection , (1921), p. 36.
[19] After 1918, the Societe Generale continued its expansion, founding Banque Générale du Luxembourg. Banque Belge pour L’Etranger also grew, opening new branches in New York, Istanbul, and Hong Kong, among other cities. In addition, SG had banking interests in Portugal, Spain, and much of Eastern Europe. The year before its 100th anniversary, in 1922, the bank’s books showed credits amounting to BFr 4.1 billion and debits of BFr 2.1 billion. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/generale-bank-générale-de-banque-history/
[20] WhittakerChambers, Hoover Library http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/%5D
[21] New York Times, 5 February 1921.
[22] Adams, The Hoover War Collection, p. 5.
[23] Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/ publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
[24] Roseanne Sizer, Herbert Hoover and the Smear Books, 1930-32, State Historical Society of Iowa, Vol. 47, (Speing 1984) no. 4, p. 347.
[25] Walter Liggett’s The Rise of Herbert Hoover was published in 1932 by the H W Fly company. it can be read on; https://archive.org/details/riseofherberthoo011467mbp
[26] Stopping The Presses, the Murder of Walter Liggett by Martha Liggett Woodbury, his daughter, is an excellent expose of the corruption and sleeze in the USA in the 1920s and 30s and details the victimisation and persecution of a respected journalist who unmasked, amongst other crooks, Herbert Clark Hoover.
[27] Tracy Barrett Kittredge was a member of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from 1914-1917. The Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives includes his correspondence, reports, writing and newspaper clippings, but makes no mention of the book which Hoover ordered to be pulped. See Charles G Palm and Dale Reed, Guide to the Hoover Institution, p. 126.
[28] G Nash, Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, pp. 449-50.
[29] A copy held in the Library of the Free University of Brussels contains a note to the reader in French. It states that ‘the work is both a rare book and a document of real historical interest’. First printed in London in 1920 under the auspices of the Belgian-American Educational Foundation, the note states that Mr Kittrege’s writings included some criticism of ‘certain Belgian persons’ so it was decided, in the interest of good Belgian-American, ‘metre au pilon’ literally, to pound it to dust. The note is dated July, 1964.
[30] John Hamill’s The Strange Career of Mr Hoover under Two Flags, was published by W. Faro in 1931.
[31] New York Times, 5 January, 1933.
[32] New York Times, 21 December, 1916.
[33] Hamill, The Strange Career, p. 306.

Commission For Relief In Belgium 12: Hoover, Servant Not Master

One of the essential skills that the shrewd investor requires is the ability to recognise the moment to sell and move on. The really successful investor has an additional edge; insider information. Herbert Hoover was blessed with well concealed contacts who advised and directed his career paths so that he was guided into safe waters from the storm that would surely follow the closure of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Towards the end of 1916 Hoover wanted out. For nearly two and a half years he had fronted the international funding for the relief programme and had accrued good impressions upon which he intended to build.

Herbert Hoover could rightly claim to number among his friends, Sir Edward Grey and his acolytes in the British Foreign Office [1] and President Wilson’s special advisor, Colonel Edward Mandel House and Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The Secret Elite on both sides of the Atlantic knew that Hoover had doggedly mastered the successful implementation of Belgian Relief to the advantage of all. His New York office manager, William Honnold told him confidentially that President Wilson intended to create a Relief organisation in America to co-ordinate and collect funds. Hoover instantly saw this as an opportunity for a position within the Wilson government. He confided to an associate in November 1916, ‘I would like to get out of Europe and I would like to get out with dignity’. [2]

In the post-Somme aftermath the war took a desperate turn for Germany. Britain began to apply its naval blockade seriously and Germany struggled through a damagingly poor harvest thanks to their access to Belgian foodstuffs and Romanian grain. In a global context, grain prices continued to rise alarmingly and the Allies found it increasingly onerous to fund relief for Belgium.

Hoover tried to set up a new mode of finance for the CRB which would remove the burden from Britain and France who were financing the Commission with loans from America. The solution was to raise an American loan rather than continuing to channel funds firstly to Britain and France which they then fed into the CRB. J.P. Morgan and his banking associates knew well that the Allies could not continue to support Belgium indefinitely and they advised Hoover to suggest a more direct approach. [3] In December 1916, he confidently reported that: ‘The bankers include Morgans, Guaranty Trust, and all other important groups, who are acting entirely out of good feeling’ were prepared to support the loan. Bankers acting entirely out of good feeling … an oxymoron surely? Hoover then proceeded to advise his men in Europe that the French and Belgian governments should settle the details with Morgan’s bank in London. [4] Clearly it was impossible for J.P. Morgan to advocate a relief loan which his banks could fund through the Federal Reserve System, from which they would make considerable profit, but if the suggestion came from the head of the CRB, it had much more chance of being approved by Congress.

When Hoover set off for America on 13 January 1917 with the clear objective of refocusing his career, the omens for the CRB were not auspicious. The Miners’ Battalion from New South Wales formally requested that their State Relief Fund Committee stop sending money to support Belgian Relief because they could see that the Germans were seizing the food supplies. [5] Apart from New Zealand, the people of New South Wales had contributed more per head of the population than any other state in the world and this was publicly recognised by King Albert of the Belgians. [6] According to one report, Australian soldiers had seen so many instances of relief food going to the German troops that the CRB was asked to return $220,000 of as yet unspent money. [7] Several continents away, Hoover’s men ignored the Australians’ serious and well-founded allegations and produced a ‘barrage’ of positive, fawning articles in the New York Times in recognition of their leader’s achievements. [8]

Herbert Hoover always appeared to be in the right place at the right time. He had been in London at the outbreak of war in 1914, in Berlin with Arthur Zimmermann and the banker Max Warburg in 1915, [9] and in Brussels during Edith Cavell’s trial. [10] Back in Washington on 31 January 1917, he met with President Wilson on the same evening that Germany announced the commencement of its unrestricted submarine warfare. [11] Within three days two CRB ships, the Euphrates and the Lars Cruse carrying 2,300 tons of Maize had been sunk. [12] All Relief shipping was suspended. In the ensuing rush to safe harbour two CRB ships made it to Rotterdam, a further two were torpedoed, and the remainder sought refuge in British ports

The British government declared that it would be ‘a crime on their part’ to allow cargoes of foodstuffs, which were needed immediately in Britain, to be put at risk from German torpedoes and duly ordered that the food be unloaded. [13] Twenty-five thousand tons of merchandise purchased in Britain was instantly held back. Forty-five thousand tons of foodstuffs was ‘unavoidably’ detained and a further forty thousand tons already on the high seas destined for Belgium was ordered into British ports. [14] Allegedly the food was to be held in storage, though not indefinitely, until the Germans gave cast-iron guarantees of their safe transportation. [15] At a stroke, one hundred thousand tons of food was lost to Belgium and sold to, or requisitioned by Britain. [16]

Hoover was faced with an immediate personal dilemma. What would the consequences be for him if he disbanded the CRB? His distrust of Francqui and the CNSA was profound. He sent an urgent cable to London: ‘I wish to make it absolutely clear: the CRB must be liquidated and disappear’, except as a purely benevolent soliciting agency in the USA. ‘The whole of the files must be transferred to New York’. [17] He insisted that a definitive break had to be made if relief was to continue, that the separation had to involve the complete ‘dissolution’ of the original CRB, and that he would ‘positively refuse’ to surrender its money, its organisation or its ships, on any other terms. [18] Who did he think he was? On his instruction alone, the international relief programme was to be liquidated. All the files had to be gathered together and sent to New York. What motivated Herbert Hoover was self-preservation. To hell with Belgian Relief; so much for the starving poor. This was the action of an endangered dictator whose first thought was to close down the operation and remove all evidence of wrong-doing. What caused this panic? Did he suddenly realise that if someone else took charge, the CRB’s true purpose would be unmasked?

That same evening he attended a special dinner in the Astor Hotel in New York as chief guest of five hundred of the State’s most prominent citizens. Though not an official Pilgrims Society meeting, it boasted all the trappings of the elite. In the full knowledge of his absolute instructions to London, the speech he apparently improvised was cynically disingenuous: ‘If we must retire … then other neutrals must take up this work. The world cannot stand by and witness the starvation of the Belgian people and the Belgian children … the obligation of the American people towards Belgium continues.’ He stood on the platform of the Astor Hotel and delivered these words, having just ordered that the whole programme be liquidated. His gall knew no bounds. In justifying what had taken place he declared that ‘the German army has never eaten one tenth of one per cent of the food provided. The Allied governments would never have supplied us with $200,000,000 if we were supplying the German army’. [19] The assembled elite audience swallowed every syllable of the lie.

We do not know what pressure was brought to bear on him, but next morning Hoover sent a second urgent cable to London to stop the liquidation. Everyone was instructed to stay at their posts. Hoover had erred. The ‘great humanitarian’ had over-recached himself. He was answerable to a higher authority. The Secret Elite would decide if and when the CRB and the feeding of Germany would come to an end.

Herbert Hoover found it difficult to stomach the fact that the CRB was not his to dissolve. In Brussels, Brand Whitlock, the head of the American Legation, wanted to leave the relief programme intact under the control of the Spanish and Belgian agencies. Hoover, who passionately disliked and distrusted Francqui and the CNSA, advocated a Dutch takeover. The confusion continued with a flurry of instructions to Brand Whitlock and the CRB office in Brussels, but on 5 March 1917 Hoover wrote a long and confidential letter to Vernon Kellogg in Belgium which betrayed his real objective. A full month before America declared war on Germany, Hoover primed his key men in Belgium for the eventuality. They were instructed to ‘do nothing to create the impression that he [Hoover] was running away from the Relief.’ He had clearly been briefed by the Secret Elite to adopt their basic tactic of making sure that the blame would be pinned on Germany, or the State Department if it ordered the Americans to leave. If the CRB was ‘compelled to abandon its mission’, Hoover instructed that it was to be ‘absolutely’ liquidated as a business and released from all financial obligations. [20]

When this instruction reached Brussels, Whitlock believed that ‘Hoover must be losing his head’. [21] He raged that though Hoover was three thousand miles away, he thought that he knew better than the men on the ground in Belgium, and ‘was able to impose his brutal will on the [State] Department.’ [22] To an extent he was. Hoover had cultivated his friendship with the President’s Advisor, Edward Mandel House, another Secret Elite agent close to the Morgan banking influence. Furthermore, Hugh Gibson, his strongest ally in every way, had been dispatched from the American Embassy in London to the State Department in Washington. Once again his trusted right hand man was employed where Hoover wanted him; at the heart of American foreign policy.

And so it came to pass as they ordained. On 23 March, three CRB ships were sunk, and the US State Department ordered Brand Whitlock and all American members of the CRB to withdraw from Belgium. [23] When the diplomatic staff departed on 2 April, Prentiss Grey and three CRB accountants were left behind ‘to close the books’ and train up their successors. [24] Hoover himself dealt with the business end of his London office. Euphemistically, his purpose was to wrap up the loose ends. The wrap-up became a full-blown disposal of incriminating evidence.

On 6 April, 1917, America declared war on Germany.

A solution was found for the CRB, one which Hoover could still control yet took him out of the direct firing line. He (more probably his Anglo-American patrons) proposed the establishment of a ‘Comite Neutre de Protection et Secours’ under the high patronage of the King of Spain and the Queen of Holland, and the immediate patronage of the Ambassadors and ministers of Spain and Holland. They were to provide the guarantees formerly undertaken by the Americans. The Commission for Relief in Belgium proposed to continue its financial control over the purchasing and shipping of food and the supplies would be turned over to the CNSA in Belgium and Comite Francais in the north of France. [25] Hoover, again reversing all that he had originally proposed, decided to remain as overall chairman of the Commission.

Make no mistake, the provisioning of Germany continued. In his half yearly report to Berlin from February to July, 1917, Baron von der Lancken wrote: ‘we have continued successfully to export to Germany, or distribute to our troops, appreciable quantities of food. Certain parts of the agreement have been voluntarily exploited [by the Belgians]. The advantages which Germany accrues through the relief work continues to grow.’ [26]

In May 1917, America agreed to appropriate $75,000,000 to support the revised Commission. Although credited to the British and French governments, the funds were to be spent, as before, by the CRB. The only matter to which Congress would not give its approval was a $2,000,000 gift which Hoover requested to cover his administrative expenses. [27] He knew no shame. In formally withdrawing his request, Hoover cited the alternative solution to cover his costs. ‘As we have been compelled to resell a large quantity of foodstuffs bought but which we were unable to ship due to the suspension of our operations for a period at the outset of the submarine war, we have made a considerable profit on these goods against which we can debit the Commission’s overhead costs …’ [28] In other words, when Congress refused to pay for his administrative costs, he used the money from the sale of foodstuffs earmarked for the ‘starving poor’ of Belgium. So much for charitable giving.

Does anyone still think that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was anything other than a convenient front to prolong the agony of war while the racketeers made their fortunes?

Herbert Hoover was appointed Food Commissioner for the United States by President Wilson in May 1917, [29] ‘fresh from his triumph on the Belgian Relief Committee’. [30] It was but another step in his corrupt ascent to the 31st Presidency of the United States of America.

[1] George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, p. 298.
[2] Ibid., p. 300.
[3] George I. Gay and H.H. Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 158, p. 278.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Hawara and Normanby Star, Vol. LXXII, 6 January, 1917, p. 4.
[6] Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February, 1934 in the obituary for William A Holman, President of the New South Wales Belgian Relief Fund.
[7] John Hamill, The Strange Career of Mr Hoover Under Two Flags, p. 348.
[8] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 311.
[9] Gay and Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Documents 134 -137, pp. 241-248.
[10] Brand Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 9 October 1915. http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bwTC.html
[11] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 312.
[12] Gay and Fisher, Public Relations for the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 240, p. 361.
[13] Ibid., p. 354.
[14] The Times, 17 March, 1917, p. 8.
[15] Sir Maurice de Bunsen statement to the Associated Press, New York Times, 6 March 1917.
[16] Hamill, The Strange Career, p. 348.
[17] Hoover cable 93 to CRB-London office, 13 February 1917.
[18] Nash,The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 320.
[19] New York Times, 14, February, 1917.
[20] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 326.
[21] Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 4 March, 1917.
[22] Ibid., 13 March, 1917.
[23] Tracy Barrett Kittredge, The History of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, 1914-1917, primary source edition, p. 418.
[24] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 339.
[25] Kittredge, The History of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, pp. 435-442.
[26] Michael Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouverner En Belgique Occupee, p. 298.
[27] Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, p. 358.
[28] Gay and Fisher, Document 168, p. 286.
[29] New York Times, 4 May, 1917.
[30] The Times, 20 July, 1917, p. 5.

Guest Blog: EDITH AND THE SPIES – Researching the ‘Second Edith Cavell’ – Hugo Lueders

People  generally  ignore the amazing story of the ‘Commission for Relief in Belgium’. It is not taught in history courses in schools or colleges. In complete contrast, the story of Edith Cavell has been transformed into a myth bordering on a case for canonisation. Despite years of carefully focussed research and the growing evidence of Edith’s complicity in espionage, Hugo Lueders, an independent policy analyst based in Brussels, remains impressed by the refusal of officialdom to acknowledge newly available facts and insights. We invited him to express his experiences in researching what he terms the ‘Second Edith Cavell’

BBC Radio 4’s recent broadcast about the spying activities of the ‘Cavell network’ timed to precede the century celebrations of Nurse Edith Cavell’s execution by the German Army in Brussels on 12 October, [1] remind us of Pope Francis’s landmark apologies in July 2015 for the ‘many grave sins’ perpetrated by the Catholic Church against the indigenous peoples of America. Many grave sins have indeed been committed by those who extolled Edith Cavell’s virtues in a manner which misrepresented her activities to promote disingenuous propaganda and damn the Germans as murderers.

A ‘confidential and secret report’ on German war crimes, submitted to His Majesty’s Government as early as February 1920, concluded that the execution of the British war heroine, now ‘identified’ a saint by the Church of England, [2]  was legally justified. In contrast to the original claims that Edith was summarily shot in cold blood, the report concluded that the German court martial “was justified” in condemning her to death. [3] This report was not made known to the public, nor recorded in the many official statements and hagiographies which continued to promote the myth of Edith’s innocence. They all, including the Church of England, stirred world opinion against ‘the murdering Hun’ to their own purposes, namely to turn world opinion and in particular America, against the Germans and encourage young men to enlist in the infantry.“The blood of this brave woman will be the seed of armed men” – “They could have done no deed better calculated to serve the British cause”. [4] It is estimated that as many as three full battalions were formed on the back of Edith Cavell’s execution. [5] Even today, articles and speeches, even those from allegedly responsible by UK Ministers [6]  continue to talk about the ‘assassination’ of Edith Louisa Cavell.

On top of this, the powers who ordain Cavell’s espionage revelations have suddenly produced an acknowledgement that Edith was involved in a network which was clearly spying for the British secret service while actually managing to confirm that she was just an ‘incidental  spy’. This alone is an amazing admission. ‘Incidental spy’? What an amazing concept. It is as likely as ‘half pregnant’. Dame Stella Remington, formerly head of MI5, fronted a BBC Radio 4 broadcast called ‘Secrets and Spies’ in September 2015 [7] and admitted that Nurse Cavell kept close company with several members and was herself ‘a leading member’ of a spy network based around Brussels.

After nearly a century of sustained denial, the British services involved have apparently changed their position. Now they want to be seen as the honest brokers willing to uncover the truth. Or at least, part of the truth. The major source for Dame Stella’s revelation comes from documents held in the ‘Musée Royal de l’Armée’ (in Flemish: ‘Koninklijk Legermuseum’) in Brussels; documents that have been happily ignored by mainstream historians till just recently, fearful perhaps, that by investigating the original sources, a very different story would emerge. Fearful too of writing about the spy network lest it brought Edith’s name into disrepute just at the point of their centenary ‘commemoration’.

Edith was shot along with another patriot, Philippe Baucq, but all of the others who had been condemned to death in October 1915 had their sentences commuted to years of hard labour in prison. One of her friends and co-conspirators inside the network which rescued hundreds of soldiers isolated behind enemy lines was Louise Thuliez, a schoolteacher and underground activist. [8]  When she returned to Brussels after three desperately difficult years in a German prison, she wrote a pamphlet about the ‘Cavell organisation’ which specifically detailed their secret service contacts and the espionage with which they were involved. Concerned that this would disturb the proceedings at the Versailles Peace conference, and destroy the myth of Edith the martyr, Louise Thuliez’s memoire was denied permission for publication. [9]

The evidence held in Brussels recorded by another Belgian patriot, Herman Capiau, [10] was unearthed quite recently, but only given the stamp of official acknowledgement by Dame Stella’s radio broadcast of 16 September 2015. The real Edith was not as they wanted to portray her. She was undoubtedly a very brave and religious patriot, and like all of the brave men and women who risked so much to save those stranded British, French and Belgian soldiers, deserves recognition and praise for her patriotism.

What has made Edith Cavell’s position so vulnerable today is the preposterous level of disinformation unleashed by the secret British War Propaganda Bureau installed at Wellington House in London, swallowed so willingly by the Church of England and deliberately contorted into anti-German hysteria from 1915 onwards. Had the truth been told, we might never have heard anything about Edith Cavell. Her brave story was but one of several. Though there were not many, female spies were shot by both sides during the war, [11] but Edith Cavell’s fate was dressed in other clothes. Most importantly, she had not been executed as a spy, and only later the Germans referred to her as ‘the spy Cavell’. Now, the ‘Cavell – the – spy’ deniers are in quandary. How far can they admit Edith’s involvement in espionage? Was she just an ‘incidental spy’ or perhaps ‘an occasional spy’? Indeed, our experience has been to ask, do they want to know the truth at all, or do they simply want to live in the past, wrapped in the confidence of their propaganda? What are they afraid of?

Recent investigations and findings about Edith’s clandestine visit to Ghent in April 1915, only a few months before her arrest, have been ignored by Cavell historians and apologists seeking to maintain the myth that she was not involved in anything other than her nursing school and the saving of displaced and wounded soldiers. A memorial plaque on the side of the former café ‘La Ville d’Audenarde’ in Ghent (today’s ‘Residentie Cavell’ with the plaque still intact) was clearly placed there in commemoration of Edith’s visit. [12] The Times of London published a photograph of the hostelry in 1924, with the caption ‘Nurse Cavell’s Hiding Place’, but without any accompanying explanation. The café and guesthouse ‘La Ville d’Audenarde’ was described in the local press of that time as a meeting place for racketeers, members of the resistance movement and would-be-spies. [13]  According to the many newspaper and other local sources, Edith Cavell stayed there for several days and, according to local reports,  met, beside others, Princess Marie de Croÿ. We are left to assume – until this secret meeting can be be confirmed through much needed in-depth research – that they had much information to impart, and that they were aware of the world around them. When historians write about Edith it is as if she stayed in her office and limited herself to the confines of the Berkendael Institute. She was braver and more daring than that. [14]

One of the many problems researching the ‘Second Edith Cavell’ is the constant and stubborn denial and opposition to new evidence by official historians and so-called Cavell-experts. For them the evidence from the café ‘La Ville d’Audenarde’ is just an ‘anecdote’ devoid of any relevance. They even deny that Edith Cavell had ever been in Ghent, and insist that she never visited this secret hub of underground activity. The memorial plaque and the inauguration ceremony in August 1924 (in the presence of many high-level representatives including British officials) does not count as proof. They act like the priests who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope: ‘What may not be, cannot be’. It is more than just turning a blind eye; their attitudes constitute a deliberate denial.

Dame Stella Rimington, in her aforementioned BBC Radio 4 transmission contributed another lesser known fact. The spy network sent secrete information to London in minuscule handwriting, sewn into the clothes of the repatriated soldiers. Edith kept a diary, sewn into a cushion for safety, and what has survived from that was also written in minuscule handwriting. [15] Coincidence or what?

What is at stake here is not Edith Cavell’s reputation. Her bravery, selflessness and daring determination to save others marks her out as an example to be admired. That she was also spying is immaterial to her valour. But such an admission has darker consequences. The British propaganda machine at Wellington House in London [16] unleashed an onslaught against Germany based on a lie. Edith, the ‘Angel of Mercy’ was wilfully translated into Edith the ‘Avenging Angel’. Young men were inspired by that lie to give their own lives in a futile struggle. They were exhorted to join up by priests in the pulpit, by women’s groups in the street, by newspaper tirades against the ‘Huns’, and pompous parliamentarians in the House of Lords crying that she had been ‘shot in cold blood’. [17]  To admit the full extent of her activities would unmask the shadowy people who manufactured her image to such cruel ends.

Will it take another hundred years before the world can learn the full truth, if ever possible and not just a vague acknowledgement that Edith was ‘associated with a spy network’? Will we ever be told the truth about the information she sent home? Recent ‘Hidden History’ blogs have shown on this site that her associations with the ‘Commission for Relief in Belgium’ and its side-kick, the ‘Comité National de Secours et Alimentation’ raises further questions about their involvement in her death. Will we ever see some serious academic research about it? Possibly not, but it is up to us to continue piecing together the puzzle from the scraps that continue to reveal a deeper truth about the real Cavell tragedy?

It would be so much simpler to follow Pope Francis’s example, not to wait for five hundred more years before apologising for all the lies and give the world the full picture. Such apologies which in all fairness are morally required, should be presented tmore sincerely than the recent ‘qualified apology’ for the Iraq War. [18] When can Edith Louisa Cavell’s reputation be finally spared the embarrassment of gross over-exaggeration and downright untruths so that she can rest in peace? An apology from those who perpetuate the lies would be a welcome start.

[1] For a brief summary of Edith Cavell see: https//en.wilipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Cavell with many more references.
[2] The Church of England ‘Calendar of Saints’ appointed 12 October for Edith’s commemoration (see http://www.edith-cavell-belgium.eu/events.html and the above Wikipedia entry.) See also the Norwich ‘Sunday Worship’ in honour of Edith Cavell, ‘A nurse who tried to do her duty’, broadcasted by the BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 11th Oct. 2015, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06gthk2.
[3] HMG “Committee of Enquiry into Breaches of the Laws of War,” 26 February, 1920. pp. 419-428 ‘Execution of Edith Cavell: p. 424, ‘ … the Feldgericht was justified … to condemn her to death. (see http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D7736306#imageViewerLink )
[4] A.G. Gardner, Bishop of London, The Guardian, 23rd Oct.1915, in: Irene Cooper Willis, ’England’s holy war; a study of English Liberal idealism during the Great War’, 1928, p. 231 (http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007555282); and ‘The Times’, 20th Oct. 1915.
[5] A conservative estimate of between two and three battalions was given by Dame Stella Rimington on the BBC Radio 4 transmission, Wednesday 16 September, 2015. Several other sources speak of hundreds of thousands and even of a million men. (Katie Pickles, Jan Van der Fraenen etc.)
[6] For example: Dr Andrew William Murrison MP (Conservative), ‘Surgeon Commander’, and since 2012, Minister for International Security Strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Murrison.) He spoke in Paris on 11 April, 2012 as UK representative at the 1st International Diplomatic Conference for the preparation of the worldwide WW1 remembrance years 2014-2018, referring again to the murder of Edith Cavell, of ‘l’assassinat’. Minutes of this conference can be viewed on http://sozial.goetheanum.org/fileadmin/sozialwissenschaft/2012/Initiatives/CR_r%C3%A9union_internationale_de_Paris_du_11_04_2012_doc.pdf page 18.
[7] Former Director-General of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington admitted that the ‘Cavell network’ smuggled secret information to British Intelligence Services (see ‘Secrets and Spies: The Untold Story of Edith Cavell’, BBC Radio 4, Wednesday 16 September, 2015. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b069wth6
[8] For Louise Thuliez see: https//fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Thuliez
[9] Phil Tomaselli, BBC History, September 2002, p. 6.
[10] For Herman Capiau and newly discovered documents see: Lueders “Edith’s Wonderland – In Memoriam of Edith Cavell, 12 October, 1915, pp. 14-17. Chapter “From the Shadows” available online at ‘academia.edu: https//wwwacademia.edu/9532093/Edith_S Wonderland_In_Memoriam_of _Edith_Cavell_12_October_1915.
[11] Exchange Telegraph Company wire, printed in The Times, Wednesday 3 November, 1915, p. 9.
[12] For the Ghent ‘phantom story’, see (forthcoming): Arthur De Decker, “Edith Cavell in Ghent” (in Flemish). An advance copy, still without pictures, is available on-line at: http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/blog/arthurdedecker/2015/09/25/edith-cavell-in-gent (‘De Wereld Morgen’, 25th September, 2015. Additional information can be found (also in Flemish) through a rediscovered interview with the daughter of the innkeeper (24 years of age in 1915, and also honored, same as her mother, with a high-ranked Belgian decoration on 24th Aug. 1924), source:
interview with Mrs Berthe Kinsoen-Steurbaut by F. De Vynck, in ‘Het Laatste Nieuws’, 18th May 1965 (p. 6); with a reprint available in the ‘Genealogia Steurbaut’, nr 2, 1999, pp. 46-52 and nr 5, 2002, p. 41.
[13] For local press article and other available sources, see: Arthur De Decker, “Edith Cavell in Ghent” as note above. Edith’s secret stay, hiding safely in the cafe, has been recently confirmed to the author by the granddaughter and other family descendants of the innkeeper at that time. Its focus as a hub for all of the activities mentioned in the text was also confirmed.
[14] Dr Emmanuel Debruyne’s recently published book, ‘Le réseau Edith Cavell’ (Racine, October 2015), a must-read for everybody interested in the Cavell tragedy, stands out for what is said, and even more so, for what is not said. A great book with great gaps: Beside many new and valuable nice-to-know insights into the working of the network, essential need-to-know elements are mentioned just by name or missing completely, such as: – the financial and logistical support of the network or parts of it through C.R.B. and C.N.S.A. channels; – the key role played by agents like the ‘grand chef’Dr Tollemache Bull; – a complete blackout on Edith Cavell’s presumed activities in Ghent and other places outside of Brussels; – hardly any new information given on even well-known spying activities through the network or the British propaganda, active in 1915 as today, to deliver and trying desperately to maintain an exclusive picture of the ‘First Edith Cavell’, the innocent, brave and religious Edith Louisa (but even here without any real understanding of the deeper spiritual nature of Edith Cavell, just calling her en passant a ‘saint laïque’). Additional research is urgently needed for all these matters, just to mention a few.
[15] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, 2010/2015, p. 229.
[16] For information on Wellington House and British propaganda see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington_House or H C Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 16.
[17] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 October 1915, vol. 19 cc. 1100-1104.
[18] On Tony Blair’s Iraq ‘apology’ of 25th Oct. 2015 see for example Lindsey German, from the ‘Stop the War Coalition’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NQcAYc6bSkQ&app=desktop.

Edith Cavell 7: The Victim

In 1919 Edith Cavell’s body was disinterred from its unmarked grave in Brussels and given a formal memorial service in the Gard du Nord in the presence of the Allied Commanders. The coffin was loaded with all reverence onto a special train draped in black and covered with beautiful flowers. Her remains were met with great ceremony in England, and Queen Alexandra attended the military service at Westminster Abbey. Finally, Edith was laid to rest outside Norwich Cathedral with all the panoply of a grateful nation. [1] Let it be clearly understood that she was a patriot who willingly gave her life to save other brave men. Her self-sacrifice is beyond doubt and worthy of high honour. They called her a martyr, and amid the holy pomp and circumstance of the iconic cathedral, she was lauded in triumph. [2] On the other hand we now know that Edith was knowingly and unrepentantly a key figure in a Belgian resistance network which was spying for the allies and sending military intelligence to London. [3] Furthermore, she had a tale to tell.

And the deliberate myth-making, the manipulation of her contribution, contrived to deflect criticism away from the Commission for the Relief of Belgium (CRB) and the Comite National de Secours et Alimentation (CNSA) and the fact that through these organisations the allies were effectively feeding the German army. With the Cavell/de Croy organisation broken, the flow of adverse criticism from Belgium was somewhat stemmed. There would be no more compromising letters from the Berkendael Institute. The supply of food available to the German army continued; so too did the fighting. The British Foreign Office and War Office, the German Foreign Office and the elites who ordained the war, needed to sustain the flow of foodstuffs through Belgium. The CRB’s massive international organisation comprising bankers and financiers, shipping magnates and grain exporters could breathe more easily. So too could the Belgian bankers. The whistleblower had been silenced.

In addition there was an ironic bonus for the Secret Elite. With her body buried in an unmarked Belgian grave in 1915, the monsters of propaganda twisted Edith Cavell’s Christian values so that the protective Angel of Mercy was translated into an Avenging Angel. [4] The Bishop of London pronounced that ‘the blood of this brave woman will be the seed of armed men’ [5] Recruitment posters appeared with Edith’s image set against an emboldened background which proclaimed ‘Murdered by the Hun’. Sadly her example of selflessness was transformed into a rallying call for enlistment. Her life’s purpose had been to save others but her image was rebranded and distorted to send tens of thousands to their graves on the Western Front. A recent estimate claims that 40,000 more men, or somewhere between two and three infantry divisions were formed on the strength of the Cavell propaganda. [6] It was such perfect timing, for the flow of volunteers to Kitchener’s rallying call was fast drying up. Edith’s sacrifice smoothed the path to conscription in 1916. And it was all based on vile propaganda.

The British War Cabinet set up a secret committee under the Attorney-General in November 1918 to ‘Enquire into the Breaches of the Laws of War’ committed by the German army, and considered the case of Nurse Edith Cavell. In a report that was kept buried deep, the committee duly found that the court-martial (Feldgericht) was justified in finding that she had committed the offences of which she was charged, and had the power in law to condemn her to death. [7] In the cool reflection of a two-year old victory, the secret report of 26 February 1920 decided that; ‘it seems impossible to say that the tribunal which tried Miss Cavell, or the persons which carried out its sentence, were guilty of a war crime’ [8] and there was ‘no prospect that the prosecution of any of the persons concerned in the trial of Miss Cavell would result in a conviction.’ Having buried the truth, the Secret Elite had no interest in any further debate. So much for Lord Desart’s rhetoric of ‘tried in cold blood’. [9] Edith was a patriot, but she was guilty of the charge the Germans chose not to bring against her. Espionage.

Edith Cavell was certainly a victim of war, but whose victim?

Let us recap the main points raised over the course of our blogs. Nurse Cavell was a strong-minded, principled woman who, when war was declared, chose to return to her teaching post in Brussels. From August 1914 she became part of an underground network which was structured to aid and repatriate British, French and Belgian soldiers stranded behind enemy lines. The network, which was originally led by Prince Reginald de Croy, also spied on German trench positions, armaments stores, and general morale and passed information back to London.

Despite the ban on sending mail between Belgium and Britain, Edith was a regular correspondent, and defied German edicts by writing both to her family and the press. The image of Edith, bedecked in red-cross uniform, and tied to her office in Brussels suits the propagandists but evidence proves that she secretly met Marie de Croy in Ghent in April 1915. [10] She was very conscious of the dangers that surrounded the network, but would not abandon her involvement.

Senior officials close to the Secret Elite knew of her activities. At least two different departments of government in London, the Foreign Office and the War Office supported the de Croy network. British Intelligence was linked to Edith’s underground group through Harry Barton, and the French Intelligence service through Herman Capiau. [11] Who was running the show? Capiau named the ‘grand chef’, the controller of networks, as Dr. Bull, a person about whom little was known until his identity was confirmed in a recent BBC Radio broadcast. In the programme, Stella Rimington, formerly Director-General of MI5, named Dr Tollemache Bull as a senior British intelligence officer in charge of several spy networks. [12] According to a report in an American newspaper in 1922, Tollemache Bull was a dental physician who regularly met with Edith Cavell in Brussels during the war. [13] Bull was also related by marriage to the Whitlocks. (see Edith Cavell 3:) He was arrested and tried by the Germans in 1916 for providing Edith with funds and was defended by Maitre Braun. Not only did this British secret agent meet her regularly, but he was also channeling funds to her. [14] His cover was perfect. Who would have suspected a dentist as the link between several spy networks? This was not opportunistic or occasional espionage, but a carefully managed intelligence organisation that lead directly to London.

And Edith’s work delved into ever more clandestine activity. When the soldiers she had helped save landed back in Britain, they were extensively debriefed by intelligence officers from the War Office [15] before returning to their regiments. Many were inadvertently carrying secret messages sewn into their clothing, penned in microscopic handwriting. [16] Interestingly, Edith sewed her own diary, written in microscopic handwriting, into a cushion. Sadly only a fragment survived, [17] but it is surely instructive to realise that Edith used the art of miniature calligraphy herself. Was this one of the threads of her espionage?

The Americans also knew what was going on. By March 1915, her letters were routed through the American Legation in Brussels where they had every opportunity to read her mail. We know that her surviving letters became more openly incautious, [18] possibly because of the confidence she had misplaced in the diplomatic safety afforded by the Americans. Edith contributed her second report from Brussels for the Nursing Mirror, dated 29 March 1915. The editor, clearly annoyed that something had been removed, told his readers that the postmark on the envelope was 15 April, and that it had arrived at his offices four days later ‘torn open on both sides and resealed by the General Post Office.’ In other words he believed that he had not received everything that Edith had sent him. Having read and several times reread both the editor’s notes, placed on page one, and the anodyne article that followed, we cannot help but suspect that something much more controversial had been removed. What could Edith have written that upset British Intelligence? The article spoke of a very calm and unremarkable Brussels, far from the extreme alarm for a starving population which had been circulated by Hoover, Whitlock and the CRB. But given the knowledge she garnered from all of her underground contacts, the word her nurses heard on the street and what she saw for herself on her visits outside the capital, did she also write about the abuses of food being imported into Belgium through the CRB for the German army? It makes sense. Was it a question of what she wrote about Belgian Relief, or spoke about German food supplies to Dr Bull, that alarmed the Secret Elite in London? It may well have been both.

Herbert Hoover, as head of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, spent much of March and April fire-fighting the angry claims from Britain that the CRB was feeding the German army. He was most indignant at ‘the rumours in England of misuse of food supplies by Germans’ and the ‘severe drilling’ he had been given at the Foreign Office. [19] Unquestionably the War Office and British Intelligence knew precisely what was going on in Belgium, but not the general public. A strict embargo was placed on such information. Every soldier who made it back was not only debriefed but, under the Official Secrets Act, was strictly forbidden to tell anyone about their experiences. [20]

Hoover was in Brussels during Edith Cavell’s trial. He lunched with Brand Whitlock on 6 October and had discussions with Baron von der Lancken on the afternoon of 8 October. [21]  The Chairman of the CRB left the city on 9 October, the very Saturday on which the German Judges sat in secret session to decide the sentences of the military court [22] and only three days before Edith Cavell’s execution.

It may already be apparent to our regular readers that every aspect of Edith Cavell’s arrest, imprisonment and execution was framed by the CRB or its Belgian partner, the CNSA. All the received histories have built their accounts of Edith’s fate on ‘evidence’ presented by members of the American Legation who were associated with the CRB. Furthermore, this ‘evidence’ is still accepted as fact. Thus the lies continue.

And they grow darker. The German military governor who ordered that Edith be shot at dawn on 12 October 1915, General Traugott Martin von Sauberzweig, was a burly, aggressive brute of a man who endorsed violence as a tactic. [23] His stay in Brussels was so comparatively short that one can but conclude that he was specifically sent there on a mission. Sauberzweig was allegedly unknown to Brand Whitlock, who claimed never to have met him. On the day before Edith’s execution, Whitlock noted in his diary that von der Lancken ‘Finally telephoned the Military Governor, a new one, I must get his name…’ [24] We are asked to believe that the Head of the American Legation did not know the name of the recently appointed German military governor when so many Belgian citizens were being tried by a military court? Perhaps Whitlock’s memory had simply failed him once again. By 2 November, Sauberzweig was reported to have been removed from office and replaced, [25] but that may have been wishful thinking. Other sources claim that he held on to his post until June 1916. [26] Whichever, we believe that he was parachuted in as military governor to ensure that Edith Cavell was silenced.

How strange it all was, but no stranger than the later meeting that the cursed General apparently requested with Herbert Hoover and his CRB colleague, Vernon Kellogg, when they ‘happened to be in Berlin’ in August 1916. According to Hoover, Sauberzweig, haunted by remorse, [27] asked to speak with him and confessed that he had been responsible for having Edith Cavell shot before there was any time for an effective appeal. How convenient for Hoover and the CRB that Sauberzweig should accept full responsibility, referring to himself as ‘the murderer’. [28] Here for the historical record was their ‘proof’ that Cavell’s death had nothing to do with the CRB.

In his account, Vernon Kellogg painted a very different image of Sauberzweig’s remorse. He was drunk, ‘on his nth whisky’, and had just come from his son’s hospital bed where the young man was lying blinded and disfigured. ‘And the sight of his son – and the memory of Miss Cavell made him remark that this was a horrible war.’ [29] He repeatedly referred to ‘Die Cavell’; that ‘Die Cavell was a thing that interfered with German control of Belgium. It had to be got rid of, so I had her shot’. [30] Not much remorse there, no matter how you read it, but what did Sauberzweig mean by stating that Edith Cavell interfered with German control of Belgium? After his stay in Brussels, Sauberzweig was appointed Quartermaster-General at the Imperial German Supreme Headquarters. [31] Who better to understand the importance of the unfettered CRB supplies reaching his troops than the man responsible for feeding the German army?

No matter how it was dressed up in fraught meetings and bitter recriminations, the CRB’s relationship with the German war effort could only be described as collaboration. Anyone who endangered the status quo was indeed interfering with the war effort, but not just Germany’s. A sense of a multi-layered self-interest pervaded the Commission and its work. We believe that decisions were taken at the highest levels of real power which embraced America, Britain, France and Germany. Had the CRB collapsed, the American economy would have been immediately damaged. So much had been invested through the Morgan – Rothschild axis, the Kuhn, Loeb and Co. banking house, through Bethlehem Steel and America’s blossoming armaments industry, that any action which risked a sudden end to the war would have affected them all. Some writers have claimed that the decision to have Edith Cavell killed could be traced back to the British Head of the Secret Service in New York, Sir William Wiseman. Not so. Wiseman was recuperating in Britain from gas poisoning inflicted on him in Flanders earlier in 1915, and when he was posted to the United States in December, Edith Cavell had been dead for two months. [32] Never the less, the American connection was spread much further than Herbert Hoover and the Brussel’s Legation.

Nor should we imagine that British hands were clean. Though they never acknowledged Edith’s role as a spy (no government would) we have shown that she worked for the Intelligence Services. One hundred years later the former Director-General of MI5, Stella Rimington, admitted so in public. [33] Most of all, the Foreign Office in the personages of Sir Edward Grey and Lord Eustace Percy knew about the vast tonnage of food and thousands of livestock which were transferred into Germany while the CRB maintained its ‘humanitarian’ front. They knew the pressure that Hoover’s men were under to stop such information reaching London. This is a matter of record. [34] They were all in collusion.

On her way to prison in Germany, Princess Marie de Croy, sat on her cases in a railway station and inadvertently summed up this whole episode with a single observation.

‘The sergeant told me he was going on holiday and, like all the German soldiers whom I saw travelling, he was loaded with provisions to take home. Although a promise had been made to America that food should not be taken out of Belgium, which was the condition the United States had made for provisioning the population, this was certainly done.’ [35]

The Committee for Relief in Belgium was not supplying provisions for the sole use of the ‘starving’ Belgian population. It was feeding Germany too; feeding the German army and sustaining the German population. In dissecting the myriad of lies which have been woven around Edith Cavell, the conclusion we have come to is that the German, American, Belgian and British authorities colluded in her murder. Had she lived to expose the truth behind the CRB, the consequences for the Secret Elite would have been catastrophic. Her death ensured that the agony of a miserable war was prolonged.

[1] The Times, 16 May 1919 pp. 13-14.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Phil Tomaselli, BBC History, September 2002, p. 6.
[4] Hugo Lueders, https://www.academia.edu/9532093/EDITH_S_WONDERLAND_IN_MEMORIAM_OF_EDITH_CAVELL_12_OCTOBER_1915#signup/close
[5] A G Gardner, The Guardian,  23 October 1915; quoted in Irene Cooper Willis, England’s Holy War, p. 231.
[6] Dame Stella Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast on 15/09/2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b069wth6
[7] National Archives, PRO/CP 1813, p. 424.
[8] Ibid., p. 428.
[9] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 October 1915, vol. 19 cc. 1100-1104.
[10] Again we are indebted to Hugo Lueders, an independent policy analyst in Brussels for advice and up to the moment research he is undertaking.
[11] See blog Edith Cavell 3: The Constant Threat.
[12] Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 15/09/2015.
[13] The Batavia Times, April 22, 1922. http://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%2010/Batavia%20NY%20Times/Batavia%20NY%20Times%201921-1925%20Grayscale/Batavia%20NY%20Times%201921-1925%20Grayscale%20-%200555.pdf
[14] http://whitlockfamilyassociation.com.s3.amazonaws.com/sources/newspapers/NP0261.pdf
[15] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, p. 187.
[16] Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 15/09/2015.
[17] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 229.
[18] Ibid., p. 248.
[19] George Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 33, page 52.
[20] Beaumont, Old Contemptible, pp. 187-8.
[21] Brand Whitlock, The Letters and Journals of Brand Whitlock, Chapter V,  6-9 October 1915.
[22] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 346.
[23] Ibid., p. 320.
[24] Whitlock, The Letters and Journals, Chapter 5, 11 October 1915.
http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bw05.html
[25] New York Times, 2 November 1915.
[26] Sophie Schaepdrijver, Gabriel Petit, The Death and Life of a Female Spy, p. 92.
[27] Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under German Occupation, p. 198.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Vernon Kellogg, Fighting Starvation, p. 66.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Schaepdrijver, Gabriel Petit, p. 92.
[32] The Times, 18 June 1962, p.14;  Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Sir William Wiseman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Christopher Andrews, Secret Service, The Making of the British Intelligence Service, p. 209.
[33] Rimington, Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast 15/09/2015.
[34] George Gay and HH Fisher, Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Documents, 46-50 pp. 79-84.
[35] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 204.

Edith Cavell 5: The Circus Of Denials

Of the 70 people initially arrested by the German secret police, 35 were tried together in the Senate House in Brussels on 7th and 8th October 1915. The 22 men and 13 women were charged with a variety of related crimes including, conveying soldiers to the enemy, assisting with their safe-keeping, circulating seditious pamphlets and illegally carrying letters and correspondence. [1] It was a closed trial, and neutral observers were not permitted to attend. The five German judges were unnamed, but the central prosecutor, Kriegsgerichtsrat Eduard Stoebar, had allegedly been ‘brought to Brussels especially for this case as he was known as a hanging judge’. [2]

Edith pled guilty to the charge laid against her, namely aiding enemy soldiers to return to their homeland and was not questioned about her other activities. The precise nature of the charge under paragraph 68 of the German military penal code included ‘conducting soldiers to the enemy’ which carried the death sentence, [3] though no-one apparently expected it to go that far. We know that she was a prolific correspondent, and the Germans had in their possession a letter that had been recently delivered to her through the American Legation, but though she was clearly in possession of illegal correspondence, Edith was not accused of illegally sending or receiving mail. What embarrassment would that letter have caused had it been produced in court? Yet no reference was made to it at all. Why? It has been suggested that in her plea of guilty, she took the opportunity ‘to conceal greater and more serious activities, including spying’. [4]

While that is an interesting way of suggesting that Edith somehow set the parameters of the charges she faced, the responsibility for framing the trial lay entirely with the German court. The pertinent question would ask why she was not interrogated about the content of the letters she had sent or the frequency of such correspondence? She was known to be an honest, frank, God-fearing woman who would not have lied under oath. Had she been asked, would Edith have spoken out about the German use of the food imports facilitated through the CRB? Was this what she meant when she told her mother that she ‘could tell you many things, but must save them till later?’ [5] Could the Germans or the Commission for Relief in Belgium have afforded to take that risk?

Edith was not the only non-Belgian, nor even the only English woman on trial. The highest profile female prisoner, Princess Marie de Croy, was born in London, a fact recorded on her charge sheet, and made known to the court. [6] If the purpose of the exercise was to frighten or subdue the population and stop the repatriation of refugee soldiers, then the execution of that noblewomen alone would have sufficed. She was both English and of Belgian aristocracy. Her brother was held to be the leader of the underground movement. But they spared Marie de Croy and executed the English nurse and one unlucky other, Philippe Baucq, the man responsible for La Libre Belgique which had lampooned General von Bissing. The Spanish Ambassador, the King of Spain [7] and even Pope Benedict XV became involved in international pleas for mercy. The remaining members of the network who were condemned to death with Edith had their sentences remitted to imprisonment with hard labour. Only  Edith and Philippe Baucq were summarily shot by firing squad. Members of the CRB, the American Legation and the CSNA would have us believe that they did everything humanly possible to save Edith Cavell. Judge that for yourself, please.

Brand Whitlock was unwell and kept himself out of the action. He did however know about Edith Cavell’s dire circumstances. In his journal, Whitlock casually recorded on 11 October, ‘I don’t remember whether I mentioned her in my notes before of not. She was arrested weeks ago….’ [8] He could not remember whether he had mentioned her before? Amazing. Apart from the convenience of poor recall, Whitlock was admitting prior interest in Edith’s fate, though nothing about her was included in his earlier diaries or journals. However, at the eleventh hour, he sprang into action. If the accounts from Hugh Gibson and Gaston de Leval are to be believed, and these are the sources from which historians have drawn their conclusions, the charade of last minute pleadings went as follows.

Whitlock records that he was brought news of Edith’s death sentence at 9.00 pm on 11 October by his friend and confidante, de Leval who had ‘just heard from the nurses who were keeping him informed…that the sentence of death had been pronounced on Miss Cavell at two o’clock that afternoon and that she was to be shot next morning.’ [9]. In his later account, Belgium Under German Occupation, Whitlock altered the timing to read, ‘the sentence of death had been pronounced on Miss Cavell at half-past four in the afternoon and she was to be shot at two o’clock the next morning.’ [10]

Perhaps he just wanted to heighten the tension. There is a further point. No-one has ever explained how these nurses knew what was happening, yet the most influential men in the land apparently did not. But that is not all. With divine prescience or, more likely, in the expectation of such news, Brand Whitlock, on the advice of Maitre Gaston de Level, had that very afternoon signed a plea for clemency to the Governor General (von Bissing) and a ‘letter of transmittal’ to be given to the head of the German Political Department,  Baron von der Lancken. Whitlock described it as a ‘premonition’ [11] They claimed not to know about the court’s verdict, but had prepared letters of appeal in advance. What amazing foresight.

As the circus gathered, key figures could not be found. General von Bissing was at his chateaux at Trois Fontaine, apparently playing bridge. Hugh Gibson and Gaston de Leval found the Spanish Ambassador, Marquis de Villalobar at Baron Lambert’s house in the company of the most powerful banker in Belgium and the executive president of the CNSA, Emile Francqui. Happily the meal was not greatly ruined since they were already at coffee. All, save Francqui, rushed round to Baron von der Lancken’s empty offices at Rue Lambermont, only to be told he was at ‘Le Bois Sacre’, a seedy variety theatre. [12] Von der Lancken insisted on waiting until the end of the performance. He dismissed claims of Edith’s impending execution as ‘impossible’, but was prevailed upon to phone the prison. He claimed that it was only at that point that he learned Edith was indeed to be executed in the dark of night. Or so the story was written by the Americans. Let us recap here. Von der Lancken claimed not to have known about the decision to shoot Edith Cavell and Philippe Baucq. Von Bissing was at his chateaux playing cards. The most important figure in Belgian politics and finance, Emile Francqui chose to remain at his friend’s house and finish his coffee while the others rushed about like headless chickens. At what point did coincidence collide with convenience and mutate into fiction?

While Hugh Gibson, de Leval and the Marquis de Villalobar appealed for clemency or at worst, the postponement of the death sentence, a different round of buck-passing began. Baron von der Lancken claimed that von Bissing, though Governor-General, had no power to over-rule the new Military Governor, General von Sauberzweig, on matters decided by a military court, and it was up to him to grant a stay of execution. Von Sauberzweig refused. He had been appointed only days before, and his temporary stay in Brussels raises questions which will be considered in a future blog. Interestingly he later became quarter-master for the German army, which suggests that von Sauberzweig had more than a passing interest in the work of the CRB.

The token appeals for clemency were dismissed about midnight and, according to Hugh Gibson, two hours later Edith Cavell faced the firing squad. [13] The phrase ‘you couldn’t make it up’ summarises Gibson’s account. Edith was executed at dawn on 12 October 1915, in the company of another hero, Philippe Baucq. In her last hours with the British chaplain, the Reverend H Stirling Gahan, she calmly reflected: ‘I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.’ [14] She died as she lived, a heroine and a patriot … and a key member of a successful underground network working against the German invaders.

Spies were regularly shot and it was not unknown for women spies to suffer the same fate. The French authorities had executed Marguerite Schmidt and Ottillie Voss for spying in March and in May 1915, [15] but Edith Cavell had not been charged with espionage. Though she was later referred to as the ‘Spy Cavell’ by the German authorities, no-one appeared to have expected that the military court would pass the death sentence even though warnings about the consequences of harbouring enemy soldiers had been widely posted across Brussels. Spies were shot, yes; smuggling soldiers across the border was cause for imprisonment. Not this time.

The German Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Arthur Zimmerman, issued a formal press release from Berlin about Edith Cavell’s execution. It stated: ‘no war court in the world could have given any other verdict, for it was not concerned with a single emotional need of one person, but a well thought out plot, with many far-reaching ramifications, which for nine months succeeded in doing valuable service to our enemies to the great detriment of our armies.’ [16]

This claim was perfectly fair. He added that her execution was regrettable but necessary and just, because as a result of the underground activities, ‘countless Belgian, French and English soldiers are again fighting in the ranks of the allies’ thanks to the group ‘whose head was the Cavell woman.’ [17] The German authorities in Belgium knew that Edith Cavell was not in charge of the network. Von Bissing, wrote a letter to his cousin on 23 October 1915 in which he categorically stated that ‘the brother of the princess (Reginald de Croy) was the leader of the organisation and, if arrested, would undoubtedly have been condemned to death.’ [18] So the Germans knew that Edith Cavell was directly involved but not the leader of the organisation. Did the German Under-Secretary lie, or was he not made party to all the facts?

Governor General von Bissing was not interested in clemency. Marie de Croy thought that she saw him sitting amongst other officers in the Royal Box in the Senate House during the first day of the trial, ‘but later it was announced that he was out of Brussels at the time’ [19] What a strange denial. Why would the German authorities need to distance the General from the trial? Unless of course his complicity goes far deeper than historians have recorded. And of what were they so scared that they sentenced Edith to death in camera, and carried out the sentence almost immediately? These are questions on which we should ponder, for the consequence of Edith Cavell’s execution was far reaching. It stirred violent emotion and the cycle of blame was rapidly twisted into a whirlwind of propaganda, lies, and contempt for Germany, much of which is being repeated as truth in the current centenary commemorations.

Now, as then, there is a darker purpose. Edith’s death deflected attention away from the CRB and its role in feeding the German army. A role which Belgian historians seem determined to suppress.

[1] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 325.
[2] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 176.
[3] Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under German Occupation, Vol. 2, p. 11.
[4] Katie Pickles, Transnational Outrage – The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavel, p. 29.
[5] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 249.
[6] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 179.
[7] Ibid., p.190.
[8] Brand Whitlock, Letters and Journals, 11 October, 1915. http://www.ourstory.info/library/2-ww1/Whitlock/bw05.html
[9] Ibid.
[10] Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, vol. 2., p 15.
archive.org/stream/belgiumundergerm02whit#page/68/mode/2up/search/edith+cavell
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p 19.
[13] Hugh Gibson, ‘A Journal from our Legation in Belgium’.
[14] firstworldwar.com Primary Documents – The Rev H. Stirling Gahan on the execution of Edith Cavell. Source Records of the Great War, Vol. III, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923.
[15] Exchange Telegraph, Paris, November 2, 1915.
[16] firstworldwar.com – Primary Documents – Alfred Zimmern on the execution of Edith Cavell
[17] Ibid.
[18] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 165.
[19] Ibid., p. 176.

Edith Cavell 4: The Constant Lies

Edith Cavell was arrested in her office at the Berkendael Institute in Brussels on Thursday 5 August 1915. [1]

In his self-serving memoirs, Hugh Gibson, first secretary to the American Legation in Brussels and close friend of Herbert Hoover, claimed that Edith was ‘quietly arrested’ and that ‘it was some time’ before the news reached the Legation. [2] That is simply untrue. Edith was escorted from her office by Otto Mayer, head of the German Secret Police, and her distraught nursing staff witnessed the deed. She had expected to be arrested. Her associates in the underground network, Louise Thuliez and Philippe Baucq, had been taken into custody on Saturday 31 July and news of their fate spread fast. Realising that the whole network had been compromised, Reginald de Croy rushed to Brussels to warn Edith, and other members of the group to destroy all evidence. This was no quiet affair. For a start, Edith was just one of seventy initially imprisoned of whom thirty-five were charged with harbouring soldiers and conducting them back to the enemy. [3] Marie de Croy’s arrest followed soon afterwards, but to the chagrin of the German authorities her brother Reginald, Prince de Croy, escaped their clutches. To claim that the arrest and imprisonment of such distinguished people went unnoticed by members of the CRB is utterly ridiculous.

Edith was first held in a communal women’s cell in Brussel’s main police station at the Kommandantur, opposite the Royal Park, and held there for two days until she was transferred across the city to the harsher quarters of  St Gilles prison. Hugh Gibson’s claim that he did not know about Edith Cavell’s arrest becomes even more preposterous when weighed against the fact that she was initially incarcerated barely one street away from Hoover’s headquarters. At the end of December 1914, Herbert Hoover had moved his commission’s offices from 48, Rue de Naples to take possession of three floors of the magnificent Societe Generale building at 66, Rues de Colonies. [4] It had formerly served as the headquarters of the Banque Belge pour L’Etranger and comprised a glorious sweep of imperial grandeur on the hill leading to the Kommandantur. They were virtually neighbours, barely 200 yards apart.

From the very beginning, everyone officially associated with the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB) denied knowledge of what was happening. Given that the de Croy’s network had close ties to the Americans, [5] that when arrested, Edith had in her possession a letter sent through the American Legation [6] and the general stir caused by the flurry of arrests, it is simply incredible that Hugh Gibson and his colleagues did not know what was happening around them. But that was their claim; a claim accepted without demur by the British government. It formed the basis of their justification for being unable to take steps with sufficient speed to save Edith Cavell.

What unfolded was no less that a macabre pantomime in which all of the key players who might have influenced the Germans managed to delay their intervention sufficiently long enough to ensure that Edith could not be saved from her fate. The American Legation had accepted international responsibility for all British citizens in Belgium after the German occupation and thus had a legal duty of care for Edith Cavell. The senior diplomat responsible for her safety, and head of the American Legation, Brand Whitlock, ‘was ill in his bed at this time’. [7] His role was assumed by Hoover’s loyal agent at the Legation, the aforementioned Hugh Gibson. He had been a member of the CRB in Brussels from October 1914.

A formal letter from Maitre Gaston de Leval, the Belgian legal advisor who had worked for the Americans for many years, was sent to Brand Whitlock, the chief of the United States Legation, on 12 October 1915, the day Edith was executed. It claimed: ‘As soon as the Legation received an intimation that Miss Cavell was arrested, your letter of August 31st was sent to Baron von der Lancken’ [8] (who was in charge of German political department in Brussels.) De Leval clearly felt it necessary to send a formal letter to his friend and employer, Whitlock, to have it appear on the record that the American legation did not hear of Edith’s arrest until more than three weeks after the event. The immediate American reaction to her execution was to cover their own backs.  The letter served to excuse, retrospectively, their studied inaction.

Others, on the other hand, immediately tried to have Edith released. The loyal nurses who witnessed her arrest rushed to the Kommandantur but were subjected to ridicule by the guards. On 10 August they learned that Edith had been transferred to the prison at St Gilles and  turned to the one friend  ‘in whom we could confide or from whom we could ask information’, Maitre van Alteren. He was the lawyer who represented the governors of the Nursing School and he agreed to plead her cause with the military authorities. Van Alteren was promptly arrested and imprisoned. [9] The medical confraternity in Brussels knew of Edith’s arrest, as did the governors of the Nursing School, but de Leval alleged that the American Legation knew nothing  for almost a month.

Consider the implication of the timing of these events. Edith Cavell had been arrested on 5 August in plain daylight, yet the Legation, itself fully aware of the de Croy network, claimed not to have known for 26 days. This is not just unlikely, it is impossible. Networks by their very essence, connect, and breaks to the connection become immediately apparent. Edith’s own family in England were notified by a Dutch source that she had been imprisoned. They even knew that the date of her arrest was 5 August. Having heard no more than that, her brother-in-law, Dr Longworth Wainwright wrote directly to Sir Edward Grey at the foreign office on 24 August. The British Foreign Secretary, Grey, formally asked Walter Page, the American Ambassador in London to investigate what had happened in Brussels. [10] Page cabled Brand Whitlock on 27 August, yet the official record later released by the Foreign Office and published in great detail in The Times [11] would have us believe that it was 31 August before the American legation knew about the arrest and contacted the German authorities. Hugh Gibson’s published journal clearly claimed that that was the case. Again, it was an outrageous lie.

It beggars belief that it took the Legation a further ten days before their lawyer, Maitre de Leval, officially requested permission to visit Edith Cavell in prison. Two days later, according to him, the German authorities refused. [12] Edith’s legal representation was an orchestrated farce. De Leval neither met with her nor represented her, though ‘history’ was to claim otherwise. As ever, when the Secret Elite bury their involvement, facts and circumstances become mired in confusion. So it was with Edith’s legal representation.  While it was the duty of the American Legation to represent  British citizens in Belgium who might be in trouble, for some unfathomable reason in Edith’s case that duty was assumed by Emile Francqui’s Comite Nationale de Secours et Alimentation (CNSA). One of its senior committee members, Eugene Hanssens, agreed to defend her. [13]

However, since he was a constitutional lawyer, Hanssens had no accreditation to plead before a military tribunal. He in turn chose as his substitute, Thomas Braun of the CNSA. [14] Braun hailed from a distinguished legal family and his father, himself an eminent lawyer, had been appointed to represent Princess Marie de Croy. The crucial point to note is that Hanssens and Braun were senior members of the CNSA and can be identified in the Belgian war-time records of the Comite National in session.  [15] Despite the claims of ignorance made by the Americans and their paid counsellor, the men from the CNSA with whom they met on a regular, often daily basis, had put together a legal team to represent the de Croy/Cavell network. The men with whom they shared responsibility for the daily disbursement of foodstuffs had stepped forward to protect the captive network … including Edith Cavell.

Matters became mystifyingly convoluted. According to the documents and letters released by Brand Whitlock, when the Legation wrote to Baron von der Lancken for clarification about Edith Cavell on 31 August, [16] it was informed that the legal representation for Miss Edith Cavell was in the hands of Advocate Braun, who ‘has already been in touch with the competent German authorities’. This official reply from von der Lancken was written on 12 September, [17] but there was a fatal and worrying flaw to his claim. ‘Advocate’ Braun had previously been removed from the case. Braun had received a letter from the German government of occupation dated 1 September, 1915 accusing him of improper behaviour in defaming them in court, being incapable of objectivity and of using his position to his own political advantage. [18] As of 1 September, Thomas Braun was banned from representing anyone, by order of the German Military. Yet Whitlock could produce a letter from von der Lancken dated ten days later, which claimed that Edith’s case was being represented by Braun, her appointed lawyer. Either one or both were lying.

Thus at a stroke, in a crucial twenty-four hour period between 31 August and 1 September, Edith Cavell was cut off from any representation associated directly with the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Once the American Legation was obliged to admit that they knew about Edith’s arrest, the Germans banned Thomas Braun from the case. Was this an act of collusion? These had been trying months for Hoover. His negotiations with London and Berlin to keep the funds flowing and the food pouring into Rotterdam, despite the  mounting allegations in Britain that the Germans were greatly benefitting from it, had been fraught with dangerous allegations in newspapers. We have already established Edith’s links to both the press and the War Office in London. Furthermore, the threats  she made in her letters that she had damning information which would one day be made public [19] would have caused great concern, assuming that more than just her family read her mail. We have to ask whether the timing was chance or were the Germans asked to extricate the CRB/CNSA from any responsibility for Edith’s fate? Suddenly, no-one even loosely associated with Herbert Hoover was directly involved in attempting to save her.

Next in line for this poisoned chalice was an established member of the Brussels’ Bar, Maitre Sadi Kirschen, who was approached by both Hanssens and Braun on 7 September. [20.] Kristen was not involved with the CNSA. Sadi Kirschen wrote to ask Edith if she would accept him as her defence replacement, but his letter never reached her. Furthermore, the Germans decided to deny Maitre Kirschen access to Edith immediately before the trial [21] and he was not given sight of the prosecution’s evidence. Sadi Kirschen discussed the case with his legal colleagues, and the unanimous opinion was that the worst she might expect was five or so years in prison. [22]

In his later report, which was no better than a litany of excuses, Gaston de Leval made great play of his willingness to attend the trial in person and of being advised not to do so by Mr Kirschen lest the Germans be affronted by his presence.  Apparently de Leval’s attendance might have prejudiced Edith’s case! What a bizarre excuse. Every sentence in de Leval’s Report was written to absolve himself, the Americans and key figures of the CRB from responsibility or complicity. [23]

Why did the Americans go to such lengths to protect themselves but not Edith? Their constant denials begin to grate. By wrapping themselves around their own supposedly legal statement which was rapidly published by the British government, repeated in Gibson’s diary and apparently ‘authenticated’ by Brand Whitlock, these men wrote their own version of history; a version that goes uncontested, even although it is ridiculous. Their story became even more ridiculous.

In Brand Whitlock’s second volume about his years in Belgium, written in 1919, he opened his account of Edith Cavell’s tragic betrayal with the following words: ‘Early in August Brussels had heard, and all Belgium – or at least all that part of Belgium that lived in chateaux – had heard that Princess Marie de Croy and the Countess of Belleville had been arrested.’ [24] While concentrating on the Belgian noblewomen, he mentioned ‘Mademoiselle Thuliez, and certain others’ and claimed that the Princess did not know what became of the allied soldiers they were protecting ‘after they reached Brussels.’ Then with carefully chosen words, he stated: ‘One day in August it was learned at the Legation that an English nurse named Edith Cavell had been arrested.’ [25] To coin a phrase, this was utter drivel, a blatant attempt to misrepresent events to cover his back.

By relegating his knowledge of her predicament until ‘One day in August’ Whitlock sought to alter history so that he could acknowledge that ‘all Belgium’ knew about the aristocrats and the demise of the underground network, yet distance himself from the responsibility he held for Edith Cavell. That it was the twenty-seventh day apparently slipped his mind. The lies simply got ever more ridiculous. His bold claim that Marie de Croy knew nothing about the fate of these soldiers once they reached Brussels is absurd. Princess Marie de Croy wrote a precisely detailed book when she returned from captivity, in which she detailed the underground work overseen by her brother Reginald.  This included her visit to Edith and and his admiration for her dedication. [26] Recent evidence doggedly researched by Hugo Lueders and his associate in Brussels has unearthed proof that Edith Cavell and Marie de Croy met together in Ghent in April 1915 at La Ville D’ Audenarde. Edith Cavell stayed several times at the guest-house, known to be an important hub for members of the Belgian and French resistance movements as well as profiteers associated with the relief movement. [27] Marie knew what she was talking about.

Whitlock didn’t  …

Marie de Croy’s autobiographical account of the trial added yet another twist to the tale. She was represented by Alexander Braun whose services had been employed by her many influential friends in Brussels, but she specifically identified his son, Thomas Braun as part of the defence team for all the accused.  He led the final defence summary  ‘with a fine appeal’  pleading that the Belgian defendants had been faced with the choice between helping their countrymen or denouncing them. [28] Thus Thomas had been removed from representing Edith, but retained as a leading player in the defence team. This astounding piece of evidence lends credence to the fact that the CRB wanted Edith’s defence distanced from their associates.

Let this blog end on a very worrying note. Maitre Gaston Leval’s report on the Execution of Edith Cavell is currently being presented on the net by firstworldwar.com as a Primary Document for readers, schools and universities. It is little more than a bundle of misleading, self-serving assertions that do not stand up to scrutiny.  It is part of the propaganda to which the British government was happy to accede in 1915. One hundred years later, it is still presented as the truth.

[1] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 271.
[2] Project Gutenberg, A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium, by Hugh Gibson, The Case of Miss Edith Cavell. http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoir/legation/Gibson8.htm
[3] First World War Primary Documents, Maitre Gaston de Leval on the Execution of Edith Cavell  http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/cavell_deleval.htm
[4] Tracey Kittredge, The history of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, p. 97.
[5] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, pp. 173-4.
[6] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 271.
[7] Princess Marie de Croy, War Memories, p.192. https://archive.org/details/warmemories00croyuoft
[8] Charles F. Horne, Source Records of the Great War, Vol. III, ed., National Alumni, 1923. firstworldwar.com – Primary Documents – Maitre G. de Level on the Execution of Edith Cavell.
[9] Jacqueline Van Til, With Edith Cavell in Belgium, pp.125-131. https://archive.org/details/withedithcavelli00vant%5D
[10] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 313.
[11] The Times, Friday 22 October 1915, p. 9.
[12] First World War.com – Primary Documents – Hugh Gibson on the Execution of Edith Cavell
[13] John Hamill, The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover, Under Two Flags, p. 333.
[14] Charles Tytgat, Nos Fusilles (raconteurs et espions) p. 67. http://www.bel-memorial.org
[15] La Belgique et la guerre. Georges Rancy Edition Henri Bertels 1927 http//www.1914-1918.be/photo.php?image=photos2/president hoover/president hoover 006.jpg
[16] Brand Whitlock to von Der Lancken, 31 August 1915 as quoted in Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under the German Occupation vol. 2, p. 4.
[17] Baron von Der Lancken to Mr Whitlock, 12 September, 1915 as quoted in Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under the German Occupation Vol. 2, p. 5.
[18] Tytgat, Nos Fusilles, pp. 68-69
[19] See previous blog: Edith Cavell 3: The Constant Correspondent.
[20] Sadi Kirschen,  Devant les Conseils de Guerre Allemands, p. 54.
[21] ibid., p. 136.
[22] Kirschen, Devant les Conseils de Guerre Allemands, p. 55.
[23] firstworldwar.com – Primary Documents, Maitre G. de Leval on the execution of Edith Cavell, 12 October 1915.
[24] Brand Whitlock, Belgium Under German Occupation, vol. 2, p. 2. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/cavell_deleval.htm
[25] Ibid., p. 3.
[26]  Marie de Croy, War Memories, pp. 127-8. https://archive.org/details/warmemories00croyuoft
[27] Antoine Redier, La Guerre des Femmes, Histoire de Louise de Bettignes et de ses compagnes, p. 30.
[28] Ibid., p. 186.

Edith Cavell 3: The Constant Threat

The German secret police became increasingly suspicious of the de Croy organisation and they in turn became aware of this. As 1915 wore on, it was evident that the police were watching them and their safe houses. In April of that year they met secretly in Ghent. Both Marie de Croy and Edith Cavell suffered the indignity of having their homes searched and realised the great danger they were facing. Marie wanted to close down the network, but Edith would not take her advice, insisting that ‘if one of these men got caught and shot, it would be our fault’. [1] A compromise was agreed whereby no more allied soldiers would be sent to her clinic, but Edith would continue to organise and direct the guides who ran the escape routes to Holland. It was too late.

Inevitably, traps were set and, betrayed by a collaborator, Gaston Quien, most of the members of the network were apprehended. In all, the secret police arrested 70 suspects in a wide sweep around Brussels and the surrounding area. [2] The first to be apprehended were Phillipe Baucq and Louise Thuliez.  Baucq was an architect and committed patriot who printed and disseminated free newspapers which carried anti-German stories. His clandestine news sheet, La Libre Belgique, incensed the German Governor-General with its sarcasm and jibes. [3] Indeed von Bissing took personal umbrage at being lampooned. [4] Louise Thuliez, a school teacher, was one of the principal guides who ferried lost soldiers across Belgium to safety in Holland.

Thuliez was originally condemned to death, but her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. On return from captivity in Germany in 1918 she penned a long report on what she termed ‘The Cavell Organisation’ in which she admitted that, while working with Edith Cavell, she had actively sought out military intelligence about a supply dump at Cambrai in German occupied territory in north east France. [5] This evidence clearly indicated that Edith was operating inside a Belgian spy ring. But it ran deeper. Matron Cavell ‘was closely connected to Britain’s intelligence services’. [6]

Henry Baron, a British agent in France, was ‘working with the Cavell Organisation’. [7] When he later learned that his former contact, Louise Thuliez, was about to publish a booklet ‘on the Cavell affair’, Baron reported his fears to British Intelligence. Her revelation not only implicated Edith Cavell in spying but also ‘speaks about the participation of members of the agency in the Cambria spy affair’. [8] Such explosive information had to be suppressed. Knowing that proof of Edith’s involvement in espionage would blow apart the official British narrative, publication was forbidden. Baron was instructed that the British military authorities considered it ‘highly undesirable that anything that implicated Edith Cavell in ‘matters of espionage’ should be published until after the Versailles Treaty had been finalised. [9] It never was.

Yet another source of incriminating evidence was recently unearthed from private archives in the Royal Museum of the Army and History of War in Brussels. [10] Herman Capiau was part of the de Croy/Cavell underground network in 1915, and like Louise Thuliez was arrested, tried and condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to 15 years hard labour. [11]

Before his arrest, Capiau wrote a secret report in which he identified another agent linked to the underground network’s spying activities and yet again, Edith Cavell knew and approved. He wrote: ‘… In agreement with Miss Cavell and Mademoiselle Thuliez, I sent the French government, through the intelligence agent Paul Godefroy, a request for material assistance for large-scale organisation of an evacuation service for young French recruits …’ So not only were British intelligence services supporting Edith’s work in Brussels, but the French government was directly approached for support and aid. This was likely to be financial since repatriation was an expensive business. Although the majority of Belgian citizens willingly helped the underground network without personal gain, some looked for payment. [12]

But Capiau’s report revealed that the network’s activities went beyond helping stranded soldiers to escape: ‘… whenever it was possible to send interesting intelligence on military operations, this information was forwarded to the English intelligence service punctually and rapidly’. [13] Spying was not an occasional activity. Capiau was clearly admitting that at every opportunity, information about German military activity was passed to British Intelligence, ‘punctually and rapidly’. By May 1915,  precise information on trench formations, vehicle and troop movements, arms caches and aircraft manoeuvres around Valenciennes was sewn into the clothes of soldiers who were being repatriated. [14]

Herman Capiau cited Paul Godefroy as his link with the secret services, but unfortunately Godefroy died in the Rheinbach prison in 1916. [15] After the war the prison was occupied temporarily by British military units and his files disappeared. How often is the truth denied through such action? Herman Capiau also left a handwritten note, now in the archives of the Royal Museum of the Army and History of War in Brussels under the title, ‘L’Affaire Cavell’ which names Edith, Louise Thuliez, Paul Godefroy and himself as members of the ‘organisation’ with a further list of names attached. [16] In addition to its recognised work on behalf of displaced soldiers this was a clandestine organisation which was spying on Germany.

Capiau’s lists also placed Edith as the prime link in the Brussels hub of the network whose ‘grand chef’, literally ‘big chief’ was Dr Bull, War Office. (see above) Doctor Tellemache (or Telemachus) Bull was, according to the Whitlock family archives, King Albert’s personal  dentist, and a relation by marriage to Brand Whitlock. [17] He appears to have remained  inexplicably airbrushed from the Edith Cavell story until relatively recently, when a BBC Radio 4 programme, Secrets and Spies  [18] identified Bull as a British Secret Service operator who ran a number of networks from Belgium. He was arrested by the German secret police, charged firstly with treason and tried in Antwerp on May 19, 1916, but received an extremely light sentence of 3 months imprisonment and a five thousand mark fine. [19] No matter how distant, his family connections with the Whitlocks seems remarkably coincident. The head of the American Legation was preparing to throw a party for Doctor Bull to celebrate his release in July when he discovered that Bull was to face a second trial directly related to his involvement with Edith Cavell. [20] This took place on 16 October 1916 with a representative from the American legation present. Bull and sixteen others were charged with conspiring to help Edith Cavell in ‘aiding young men to cross the frontier’, and of supplying her with funds to assist them. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment. [21]

Apart from any further and as yet unknown connections, Bull’s direct involvement means that Edith’s activities were part of an ongoing War Office and Secret Service clandestine operation. Edith Cavell was deeply involved in more than nursing the wounded and the Brussels she wrote home about must have been on a planet far distant from that portrayed by Herbert Hoover.

The very survival of Hoover’s CRB was at risk in the first quarter of 1915. Continued support was threatened by the bad press it was receiving in Britain and the awkward questions raised in the House of Commons about the foodstuff ‘taken’ by the German army. Herbert Hoover was certainly suspicious that his organisation was being undermined by individuals inside Belgium. In a letter to Brand Whitlock dated 6 March 1915, he complained that he had been severely grilled about the amount of food which was requisitioned by the German army of occupation and was alarmed that the London government intended to follow up claims to that effect which had originated in Belgium. He berated the ‘constant lying reports which appear in the English press with regard to our foodstuffs being taken by the Germans or devoted to their requisitions in the operation zone …’ [22]

Who was this coming from? Who in Belgium had the contacts and confidence to make such damning allegations? Who would be so morally outraged that, if the government appeared to be doing nothing, they could write directly to their contacts in the British press? These were not ‘constant lying reports’, but the products of good intelligence.

Hoover was himself a consummate liar and master of press manipulation. Lies were his stock-in-trade. The CRB’s propaganda campaigns were immediately stepped up. A special meeting in the Carnegie Hall in New York, called in support of the Allies by American fund-raisers, heard a message from Brand Whitlock stating: ‘Supply of food now in Belgium is sufficient only to last through this month, and that after April 1st, the need of food and clothing would be as pressing as ever, and that the entire Belgian population must continue to depend for subsistence on the generosity of the American People’. [23]

The entire Belgian population? What nonsense; but a terrific sound-bite.

Yet the Nursing Mirror reported in April 1915 that in Edith Cavell’s Brussels, the cafes were open and cigars were still being smoked. [24] Some commentators have claimed that Cavell’s article exposed the fact that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was feeding the German army. This is not so. Having carefully checked her published report in the Royal College of Nursing in Edinburgh, we can categorically state that no mention is made of the CRB. Not a word. Nothing about starving children. How strange is that in itself? Please remember that in our last blog we explained that when the editor of the Nursing Mirror received the correspondence from Edith Cavell, it had been opened and resealed. Which brings us back to the question of what other information was originally included?

What Cavell’s article did demonstrate was at complete odds with Hoover’s alarmist reports.

Can you imagine how angry the vested interests in the CRB were when they were made aware of this? The woman was dangerous. What would she write next? Given her intelligence contacts all over Belgium, what else did she know? What else had she already reported? If the network was indeed the ‘Cavell Organisation’, as Herman Capiau suggested, rather than the more aristocratic ‘de Croy organisation’, then Edith’s role must have been more proactive. To whom was she reporting?

In June 1915, Hoover left the comfort of his London home to go to Belgium in person to meet with Baron von der Lanken, head of the German political department in Brussels, and a key German figure in the international liaison of the CRB. It is important to remember that the leading members of the CRB and the Belgian Comite National de Secours and Alimentation (CNSA) moved naturally within the highest circles of the German administration in Belgium. Hoover was there to negotiate the fate of the coming harvest, a role he assumed, though the CNSA strongly objected to his presence. [25] He was well aware that London wanted an end to the press stories about German abuse of the relief organisation. So too did the Germans. Their war effort had become dependant on the food supplies they accessed through Belgium. 

In view of the strong links between the underground network for which Edith worked and its direct connections with the War Office, the Foreign Office and British intelligence that were facilitated by the de Croys, Edith was in a prime position to provide regular information to London. We know she wrote directly to the Nursing Mirror, and to the editor of The Times, [26], but given the evidence of Edith’s complicity in espionage, the British Secret Service would have known that and much more. She would have reported to them. Such knowledge would also be the concern of the CRB and the American Legation, for those were prime conduits for the transfer of information to London. Had Edith become a potentially dangerous thorn in the side of the CRB and the Secret Elite? Matron Cavell was a well-known professional figure who carried weight in the British press. Her word could poison their whole venture. She was a constant threat.

And the American, Belgian, British and German authorities knew it.

[1] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 127.
[2] Brand Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, a personal narrative, vol.2, p. 46.
[3] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 199.
[4] La Libre Belgique, issue 30, June 1915.
[5] Phil Tomaselli, BBC History Magazine, September 2002, p. 6.
[6] Public Records Office papers released in 2001-2 and quoted in the above.
[7] Tomaselli, BBC History Magazine, September 2002, p. 6.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Our thanks here to our colleague in Belgium,  Hugo Lueders,  who shared his personal research with us. Hugo does sterling work on centenarynews.com https://www.academia.edu/9532093/EDITH_S_WONDERLAND_IN_MEMORIAM_OF_EDITH_CAVELL_12_OCTOBER_1915#signup/close
[11] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, p. 192.
[12] Ibid., p. 172.
[13] Emmanuel Debruyne and Jehanne Paternostre, “La résistance au quotidien 1914-1918, Témoignages inédites”, Racine, Brussels, 2009: ‘Trois échelons vers la Hollande’, pp. 45-51 (here: page 51) as cited by Hugo Leuders, see below.
[14] Dame Stella Rimington, BBC Radio 4, Secrets and Spies, broadcast on 15/09/2015.
[15] Hugo Lueders, Edith’s Wonderland, footnote 35 p. 15. https://www.academia.edu/9532093/EDITH_S_WONDERLAND_IN_MEMORIAM_OF_EDITH_CAVELL_12_OCTOBER_1915#signup/close
[16] Undated hand-written note by Capiau, private archives Herman Capiau, Centre de documentation, Musée Royal de l’Armée et d’Histoire militaire, Brussels.
[17] See relevant page from website below. whitlockfamilyassociation.com.s3amazonaws.com/sources/newspapers/NP0261.pdf
[18] Dame Stella Rimington, BBC Radio 4, Secrets and Spies, broadcast on 15/09/2015.
[19] Brand Whitlock, Belgium under the German Occupation, a personal narrative, vol.2, pp. 138-9.
[20] Ibid., p. 183.
[21] Ibid., pp. 225-6.
[22] Hoover to Whitlock, 6 March 1916, Document 33, Gay and Fisher, The Public Relations of the Commission for Belgian Relief, p. 52. http://www.gwpda.org/wwi-www/CRB/CRB1-TC.htm
[23] New York Times, 18 March, 1915.
[24] Nursing Mirror and Midwives’ Journal, vol. XXI no. 526, p. 64.
[25] George H. Nash, The Life of Herbert Hoover, The Great Humanitarian, 1914-1917, p. 136.
[26] The Times, 15 August 1914, p. 8.

Edith Cavell 2: The Constant Correspondent

Like many of her generation, Edith Cavell was an avid letter-writer. She served on the editorial board which launched Belgium’s first nursing magazine, “L’Infirmiere”, in 1910, and wrote occasional articles for the weekly Nursing Mirror and Midwives Journal in Britain. Edith believed passionately about nursing, about nursing techniques and good practice and understood the value of promoting educational articles. When war broke out she wrote to the editor of the Times on 12 August 1914, [1] launching an appeal for subscriptions from the British public to support her preparations to deal with ‘several hundreds’ of wounded soldiers anticipated to arrive shortly in Brussels, signing herself as Directrice of the Berkendael Medical Institute. She was concerned about her widowed mother’s health and welfare, and as the German occupation made life ever more restricted, she rarely knew if her letters reached home.

When the war began, Edith contacted the editor of the Nursing Mirror and Midwives Journal and wrote an article headed ‘Nursing in War Time’ which was published on 22 August 1914. In March 1915, she repeated the process, and sent both a covering letter to the Editor and an article about Brussels under German rule. This in itself contravened German military law. She did not identify herself by name but signed the missive ‘from your Nurse Correspondent’ [2]

The Editor was at great pains to explain to the readers of Nursing Mirror that the package sent from Brussels had been ‘torn open on both sides’ and that the letter arrived at his desk ‘resealed by the General Post Office in London’. It had originally been dated 24 March, but the date-stamp on the envelope was 15 April. The most likely reason for this was that Edith had given the letter to some trusted person or someone from within the American Legation for onward transfer to England. It had been opened, presumably in London, by a government official. We do not know what else was in the package. Had other material been removed? Who, inside the War Office, Foreign Office, or the intelligence services, had a primary interest in Edith Cavell’s correspondence?

Questions has to be asked about the letters and postcards Edith received from soldiers whom she had helped escape from Brussels. Though it might seem ridiculous to us today, grateful soldiers did send messages back to Matron Cavell to announce their successful return to England. One such incriminating postcard was presented as evidence at her trial. Since she received mail from England it had to be sent via trusted contacts or the American Legation, and since the latter only accepted mail from British government departments, it had to have passed through official channels. This means that Edith Cavell was a known and trusted contact for officers in the British intelligence services.

Edith sent news to England, and not just to the Nursing Mirror. She maintained a steady flow of correspondence to her family and friends. She wrote a cautious letter to her mother on 15 September 1914, in which she claimed that ‘life goes on as usual’ and to her sister, Florence, three days later, in which she expressed concern about the homeless and the misery that might follow a bad winter in Belgium. [3] In these instances her mail was routed through Vecht and later, Bergen op Zoom in Holland, but Edith’s letters home became progressively incautious. In a reply to her cousin Eddy, dated 11 March 1915, she explained that she received his missive through the American Consul and enclosed a list of soldiers about whose safe return to England she had concern. Unwittingly, Edith Cavell became indiscreet. She told her mother on 14 March that she could ‘tell you many things but must save them till later’, [4] and described a Zeppelin passing overhead in Brussels. Ten days later she sent her epistle to the editor of the Nursing Mirror.

The international mail system had been subject to all kinds of restrictions and was virtually closed to unofficial correspondence, but Edith Cavell had diplomatic contacts which gave her a sense of confidence. On 14 June 1915 she confirmed to her mother that ‘if anything very serious should happen to me you could probably send me a message through the American Ambassador in London (not a letter)’ [5] Clearly this was a privilege which she greatly valued, but had to keep secret. That point was reinforced by her request to the editor of the Nursing Mirror not to try to forward a copy of the paper to Brussels. She had no wish to make public her contacts with London. [6]

Edith’s second article in the Nursing Mirror reads at first as a calm and considered account of daily life in Brussels. Indeed it was so non-controversial that the reader would wonder the value of printing it at all. The point of the article appeared to contradict the prevailing message from the Commission for the Relief of Belgium that the country was in crisis. She took the reader through the hoped-for success in the early days of August ‘when we were full of enthusiasm for the war and confidence in the allies’, to the arrival of the Germans with much ‘pomp and circumstance’. However, in stark contrast to the widespread impression that Belgium was being systematically raped by the advancing German army, Cavell’s article painted a widely different picture;

‘On August 21st many more troops came through….some were too weary to eat and slept on the street. We were divided between pity for these poor fellows, far from their country and their people…and hate of a cruel and vindictive foe bringing ruin and desolation on hundreds of happy homes and to a prosperous and peaceful land. Some of the Belgians spoke to the invaders in German and found they were very vague as to their whereabouts, and imagined they were already in Paris; they were surprised to be speaking to Belgians and could not imagine what quarrel they had with them. I saw several of the men pick up little children and give them chocolate or seat them on their horses and some had tears in their eyes at the recollection of the little ones at home.’ [7]

This image does not sit easily with that of the propagandist. No rape, no pillage, no starving children, no shootings or other such hideous maltreatment? Goodness, the Bryce Report was due for publication in May, and the story in the Nursing Mirror was completely at odds with the horror-stories and anti-German allegations contained in that shameful instrument of propaganda and hate. Edith’s City of Brussels is an almost silent one without cars or bicycles in the street; no sense of bustle, no newspapers except German-sponsored editions, nothing permitted from England; no telephone contacts and movement by train was greatly restricted. In her final paragraph, she depicts the Belgian attitude to the invader as one of quiet but studied rejection.

‘The people have grown thin and silent with the fearful strain. They walk about the city shoulder to shoulder with the foe and never see them or make a sign; only they leave the cafes they frequent and turn their backs to them, and live a long way off and apart. A German officer on a tram politely asked a gentleman for a light; he handed him his cigar without a word, and receiving it back, threw it in the gutter. Such incidents happen often and are typical of the conduct of this much-tried nation.’ [8]

So life in occupied Brussels was quiet, and the spirit of the people remained defiant. But what about the picture of national destitution being put about by the Commission for Relief in Belgium? What about the starving population that had become the international concern of Herbert Hoover? Perhaps these unfortunate people were in the countryside? Yet in Belgium, a mainly rural and agricultural nation, you would expect to find the starving populous in the great cities, like…well, like Brussels. Of course there was need and poverty. Such was the fate of the poor everywhere. Those with nothing are always the first to suffer. It was as true in Glasgow and London as it was in Bruges and Brussels. But this was not the focus of Edith’s attention. She wrote about the strain of the people, not the hunger. The café culture continued as before and gentlemen were still smoking cigars. Something does not ring true here. It is not possible to have both sets of circumstance. And Edith had no axe to grind. Her agenda was to save lives and repatriate allied soldiers. (We will revisit this important document in a future blog.)

Not that the German authorities would allow Edith and other British nurses to deal with their wounded. She found herself disbarred from her professional duties. Most of the wounded German troops were ‘sent straight back home, as far as possible’, and Allied wounded ‘do not come’. A few wounded men, too seriously damaged to be able to fight again, were nursed at the King’s Palace in Brussels which served as a military hospital. But they were ‘nursed by Belgians under their own doctors’. [9] Edith found herself isolated from her calling, left more like the head of a religious order than a nursing school. She was not involved in ministering to the injured and dying from either side, as the legend would have it, but instead, rendered unemployed, or at best, massively underemployed. This explains why she had the time to be so actively involved in the underground movement.

An interesting piece of corroboration of life in occupied Belgium comes from Harry Beaumont, one of the allied soldiers whom Edith Cavell helped to escape. Harry was injured in the retreat from Mons on 24th August 1914 and saved from capture by a Belgian family called Neussy. His escape route included Brussels, Louvain and the Monastery of Averabode, where the monks looked after a group of wounded British soldiers with immense care. [10]

Harry stated that Edith Cavell was ‘running’ the escape route and their Belgian courier ‘promised to report our position to Nurse Cavell’. His story is not one of hardship and austerity. He made no mention of starving children and desperate queues for food. The very opposite is true. Harry wrote of one safe house in glowing terms; ‘our hostess was a very wealthy woman. Her house was stocked with everything of the best and for eight days, we lived like Lords.’ [11] Indeed Harry Beaumont admitted that such was the generosity of the people that even when Belgian citizens were issued with ration cards, he and his fellow escapees received far more than they would have been entitled to had they depended solely on rations. There were shortages of meat and flour, but vegetable and eggs were plentiful and the local fraternity provided extras. [12]

He also, quite innocently, demonstrated the complicity of the Commission for Relief in Belgium which clearly knew all about the de Croy network. When one of the Belgian agents in Antwerp demanded cash payment for hiding him from the authorities, Harry and his companion, at that point an Irishman, went to the headquarters of the ‘American’ Commission for Relief in Belgium. They told the story of their escape and their need for funds. The money was forthcoming. Furthermore, the Americans took control and subsidised Harry’s relatively prolonged stay in Antwerp. He was given an allowance of sixteen francs a day and placed in a safe-house of their choice. Eventually, several weeks later, on 16 May 1915, having cracked open a bottle of celebratory champagne, he boarded a tram to the outskirts of the city and, through the trials and tribulations of naked determination, reached Holland safety. His guide was directly provided by the CRB. [13] Does anyone imagine that the Americans in Brussels were not fully informed of what was happening by their compatriots in Antwerp? Not only did the Americans know what was happening, they were actively and secretly complicit.

Harry’s account gives us some clear pointers. The network for escapees was organised in Brussels through Edith Cavell. The soldiers were well fed and well treated. There was no awareness of the alleged widespread hunger and want. The Americans knew all about them network, and actively supported it, albeit in a clandestine manner. They knew all about Edith’s correspondence, and most probably knew precisely what she was reporting to London. Spying on one’s allies is not a recent phenomenon. When she was arrested in her office by the Germans on Thursday 5 August, the police found a letter sent from London; it bore the seal of the American Consulate in Brussels. [14]

Thus Edith was a major figure in Brussels medical circles whose work was highly valued by her employer, the King’s personal physician. She was acknowledged as one of the leading nursing practitioners in the land, but forbidden to practice by the occupying forces. Edith was active inside an underground and espionage network which, amongst other work, repatriated soldiers stranded behind enemy lines. Her correspondence was widespread and fearless. We know that she wrote to her family, to the British press and the Nursing Mirror. She wrote about the conditions of the people as she experienced it, and hinted strongly of wrong-doing. Edith Cavell was sufficiently important to the authorities in London and Brussels that her correspondence was transmitted through the American Legation. They had just delivered a letter to her from London when she was arrested.

Yet the Americans at the Legation and in the Commission for Relief in Belgium apparently knew nothing about her arrest … or so they were to claim.

[1] The Times, 15 Aug, 1914, p.8.
[2] Nursing Mirror and Midwives’ Journal, vol. XXI no. 526, p. 57.
[3] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, pp 200-203.
[4] Ibid., p. 248.
[5] Ibid., p. 259.
[6] Nursing Mirror and Midwives’ Journal, vol. XXI no. 526, p. 57.
[7] Ibid., p. 63.
[8] Ibid., p. 64.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, p. 154.
[11] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 221.
[12] Beaumont, Old Contemptible, p. 95.
[13] Ibid., p. 181.
[14] Souhami, Edith Cavell, p. 271.

Edith Cavell 1: Patriot Nurse, Underground Agent

Note:  Before reading our series on Edith Cavell, it would be advantageous to the reader to peruse our previous two blogs on Belgian Relief.

Warning:  Those who might be offended by evidence that Edith was much more than an Angel of Mercy, or do not wish to believe that she was sacrificed to prolong the agony of war, should not read these blogs.

Edith Cavell was the most celebrated British heroine of the First World War. The distinguished head of a Belgian nursing school, the Berkendael Institute in Brussels, she was executed by order of a German military court on October 12, 1915. She admitted aiding over two hundred allied soldiers to escape from occupied Belgium and return safely to their regiments in France or Britain, in direct contravention of German military code. According to a recent BBC Radio 4 programme  by Dame Stella Rimington, formerly director of MI5, it was more likely to have been nine hundred. [1]

She died a patriot and was transformed into a martyr of iconic status in England and Belgium. The truth of what happened to her has been mired in false claims, officially concocted reports and hagiographies that exaggerated her virtues into sainthood. Despite this, Edith Cavell was undoubtedly a courageous patriot who put the health and security of her charges before her own safety.

Executed in secret, her exploits were immediately championed by the British propaganda machine and transformed into a rallying call to men and women alike, proof positive of the evil Hun and his disregard for the sanctity of womanhood. [2] Her death boosted recruitment to the British army, and was almost as valuable in terms of propaganda as the sinking of the Lusitania. [3] It spawned posters, articles, pamphlets commemorative medals and statues. Streets, hospitals, schools, gardens, parks and even a mountain bears her name, yet the circumstances of her conviction and death do not sit easily with the official history as originally pronounced by the American Legation in Brussels and the British Foreign Office.

Edith Cavell was born in 1865 at Swardeston in Norfolk. The eldest child of four, her upbringing as the daughter of the local vicar was strictly Christian. She worked as a children’s governess for some years before deciding, at the age of thirty, to become a nurse. After four years training at the London Hospital Nurses Training School, she moved to St Pancras Infirmary as night supervisor. Her next move took her to Shoreditch as Assistant Matron at the Infirmary, but, at the age of forty-one, the straight-laced, devout Christian was appointed to a prestigious nursing post in Belgium.

Edith Cavell’s work was recognised as pioneering. Well organised and demanding the highest of standards from her nursing staff, she was recruited by the eminent Belgian surgeon, Dr Antoine Depage, to be the Matron of his newly established nursing school in Brussels in 1907. The L’Ecole Belge d’Infirmieres Diplomees grew steadily under her progressive direction and by the outbreak of War she was training nurses for three hospitals and thirteen kindergartens. [4] The project had been part-funded by the eminent Belgian industrialist and philanthropist, Ernest Solvay to the tune of 300,000 francs. [5] He was an exceptionally important businessman and later President of the Comite National de Secours et Alimentation. (CNSA) Edith’s arrival in Brussels did not please everyone for she effectively challenged the monopoly previously held by the Sisters of Charity, nuns who by custom and habit, ‘had there own way of doing things’. [6] She also branched out into journalism and had sufficient self-confidence to publish the professional magazine, L’Infirmiere, from 1910 onwards. [7]

At the outbreak of war, Edith was at home in England visiting her mother and might easily have stayed there in relative safety. Instead, she chose to return at once to Brussels, where the Depage clinics and nursing school were given over to the Belgian Red Cross. She immediately involved herself in the preparations for emergency hospitals and relief stations for the wounded. [8] Her biographers depict Matron Cavell attending to the war-wounded Belgian, French, British and to a much lesser extent, German troops, and there can be no doubt that she did so with magnificent grace; [9] But that was not her only contribution.

Edith Cavell had become a very senior figure in Belgian nursing circles not least because of her association with Antoine Depage and his wife Marie. Antoine was the founder and chairman of the Belgian Red Cross and the Surgeon Royal, personal physician to King Albert, with whom he served in exile. Antoine had also founded the Boy Scout movement in Belgium in association with several figures from the upper echelons of Belgian society like Ernest Solvay, whose vast multinational chemical company had spread across central Europe. [10] Marie Depage, always active in the Belgian Red Cross, stayed behind in Brussells for the first two months of the German occupation but later joined her husband in exile with the King at La Panne. She agreed to go to the United States in 1915 to tour on behalf of the Belgian Red Cross and was magnificently successful in fund-raising across the continent of America before returning home on board the ill-fated Lusitania. [11] Marie Depage was drowned, her body recovered, taken to Ireland and reclaimed by a grieving husband, a victim of war like those for whom she gallantly campaigned.

Edith Cavell took charge of the clinics and hospital in Belgium in the full knowledge that she had access to all of the circles of influence and power that remained there. She was associated with the aristocratic De Croy family, the Depages, churchmen and diplomats at the American legation. Her work brought her into contact with increasing numbers of soldiers, many wounded, some lost or displaced from their regiments in the chaos of war, but all were refugees, striving to escape from the Germans and the certainty of imprisonment or worse if they were caught. German military law made it a capital offence to harbour enemy soldiers, and public notices warned of the dire punishments for any such infringement. [12]

Stranded soldiers were brought secretly to Brussels by members of an underground group with whom Edith collaborated. The official record of Nurse Cavell’s valour, leaves the impression that she was the sole figure in a dangerous wartime activity, whereas she was in reality a member of a highly organised and well-connected network comprising more than thirty equally courageous Belgian patriots working tirelessly to repatriate and save allied soldiers. [13]

As autumn 1914 passed into winter, the western front began to settle into a series of entrenched defences paralleling great stretches of no-mans’ land across the north of Belgium and then south across France. Stalemated defence systems and battlefield confusions made it difficult to determine precise boundaries. The first great battle at Mons, which began on 24 August 1914, resulted in men from both sides being isolated from their comrades in strange and unaccustomed terrain. Underground organisations were quickly set up in Belgium to assist displaced allied soldiers. These men also served to pass messages and information to London and to disrupt and unsettle the German forces of occupation. Spy networks abounded [14] and Brussels had long been a hub of intelligence activity. [15] While an essential part of this work was to assist Allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, wounded or otherwise, gathering information about the German army was also of great importance.

News of troop dispositions, the location of armament dumps and other supplies, railway timetables and information about enemy morale were equally valuable. The underground networks also carried mail and family messages to and fro between Brussels and London and aided in the distribution of anti-German news-sheets like ‘Private World’ and ‘Free Belgium’ [16] All of this was extremely dangerous work and marked anyone involved as a spy. The British Secret Service was the principle source and provider of funds for this activity, and regular reports on the German occupiers were channelled via Brussels and Holland to London and the war office. [17] British Military Intelligence knew about the organisation which successfully repatriated hundreds of soldiers, as did the foreign office, important players in what was to become a highly suspect game of denial.

The underground network in which Edith Cavell played a key role, operated from the Franco-Belgian border between Bellignes, Mons and Maubeuge, through Brussels itself and then on to Antwerp and various points on the Dutch border. It was a very prestigious organisation headed by Prince Reginald de Croy, the Belgian aristocrat and diplomat, and included his sister, Princess Marie de Croy, whose war memoirs provide a unique insight into the events surrounding the arrest and trial of the entire network in 1915. The de Croys belonged to one of the most prestigious families in Europe whose family ties crossed geographic boundaries.

The de Croy network included men and women from across the social spectrum. War is always a great leveller. The grand chateaux of the de Croys at Bellignes housed many escaped allied soldiers, especially after the battle of Mons, who, once suitably recovered, were routed to safety via Edith Cavell in Brussels where they were kept hidden in safe houses. [18] Noblewomen, including the Princess de Croy and the Countess de Bellevilles, worked with servants and townsfolk to help transfer literally hundreds of desperate soldiers across dangerous forests, minor roads and little used paths to the border. The Catholic clergy and religious houses were involved in what they saw as a work of mercy, and all along the route, ordinary citizens risked their lives to aid and abet these harried and often starving escapees. Food, clothing, false documentation and money were provided for them, though it often took weeks to organise. The Belgians did this without reward and without regard to their personal safety. There is however no doubt that Edith Cavell ran the Brussels-based hub of the de Croy network. [19]

It is important at this juncture to explain the international connections enjoyed by the House of de Croy. Reginald, Prince de Croy was a Belgian diplomat, who doubled as a messenger and conduit for the Resistance. Prior to the war, he spent ten years in the Belgian Embassy in London and risked arrest constantly as he ferried to and fro across the Franco-Belgian-Dutch borders. [20] His sister Marie explained in her memoirs that ‘He was entrusted with various messages from the French to the Commission of Relief for Belgium (CRB). He carried these to Brussels where the Committee sat, and also to the American Embassy [Legation], as several concerned breaches of our rules of war. Of course it was useless to complain of abuses’ [21]

What kind of breaches of the rules of war would concern the Commission of Relief for Belgium (CRB)? What breaches would the American Legation in Brussels be interested in? The Americans claimed to be neutral; the Commission was allegedly only involved in the provision of food and clothing for the starving Belgians and French in occupied zones. The ‘abuses’ must therefore have referred to the supply of food, and the most likely scenario is that the Resistance could see that the food was going, not just to the Belgian population, but to front-line German soldiers. Indeed by 1915 such allegations were known within the highest echelons of the Foreign Office in London, and had caused adverse comment in what Herbert Hover referred to as the ‘constant lying reports which appear in the English press.’ [22]

Reginald’s brother Leopold served on the Ypres salient, and such was his level of importance to the British war effort that when he returned through London he ‘called at the War Office, wherein he was able to catch up with news from ‘home’ from a dozen men recently come back from Bellignes’ [23] Both brothers were frequent visitors to the War Office where the troops who had escaped through de Croy network were debriefed. British Intelligence was aware of what was happening in that part of Belgium from all manner of sources. They knew of de Croy’s valuable network, and the role of Edith Cavell, that is certain, but were they simply passive recipients of occasional information, or actively managing a high-level spy network?

One amazing security lapse almost blew the network apart. Marie wrote that her brother Reginald, ‘after calling at the War Office’ was on his way to catch a boat back to Holland when his attention was drawn to a newspaper article which all but identified the underground network headed by the de Croy family. Reginald ‘rushed to a telephone and called an official, with whom he had been in touch, begging anxiously, that unless they wanted us all shot, this sort of publication should cease.’ [24] Thereafter the censors stepped in. Unfortunately they failed to stop some of the rescued soldiers from sending Edith Cavell postcards to express their gratitude and let her know that they had successfully returned home.

Marie de Croy stated that ‘Reggie’ was well aware of Edith Cavell’s personal investment in the safety of these Allied soldiers. She had spent all of her own savings on clothes and food ‘which had to be paid for in ready money, and Reginald was determined to try and obtain subsidies from the army, especially for Miss Cavell’. [25] Edith operated within a high-profile network, known to the British Government, the American Legation, the Belgian Government in exile, the Comite National de Secours et Alimentation in Brussels and the CRB. It actively liaised between them, was aided by them and sought funding from them as necessary.

Edith Cavell was a cog in a very influential organisation. However, evidence has emerged that proves she was more than a mere cog.

[1] Secrets and Spies, BBC Radio 4, broadcast on 15/09/2015
[2] Possibly the worst of the propaganda hagiographies is William Thomson Hill’s  The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell: The Life Story of the Victim of Germany’s Most Barbarous Crime. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1915.
[3] H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 61.
[4] Diana Souhami, Edith Cavell, p.105.
[5] Ibid., p. 19.
[6] The British Journal of Nursing, May 1924, p. 112.
[7] Helen Judson, “Edith Cavell”. The American Journal of Nursing, July 1941, p. 871.
[8] Nursing Mirror and Midwives’ Journal, vol. XXI no. 526
[9] Hoehling, A. (1957). “The Story of Edith Cavell”; The American Journal of Nursing, 1320-1322.
[10] Kenneth Bertrams, Nicholas Coupain, Ernest Homburg, Solvay, History of a Multinational Family Firm, p. 2.
[11] New York Times, April 27, 1915.
[12] Paragraph 58 of the German military code.
[13] Princess Marie De Croy, War Memories, pp. 100- 211. https://archive.org/details/warmemories00croyuoft
[14] Debruyne, Emmanuel: Patriotes désintéressés ou espions vénaux? Agents et argent en Belgique et en France occupées, 1914-1918, in: Guerre mondiales et conflits contemporains, 2008/4, no. 232, p. 25-45.
[15] Christopher Andrew, Secret Service, The Making of the British Intelligence Service, p. 45.
[16] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 117.
[17] Ibid., p. 111.
[18] Harry Beaumont, Old Contemptible, p. 148.
[19] Princess Marie de Croy, War Memories, p. 106.
[20] Ibid., p.111.
[21] Ibid.
[22] George Gay and H.H. Fisher, The Public Relations of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, Document 33, pp. 52-3 http://www.gwpda.org/wwi-www/CRB/CRB1-TC.htm
[23] Marie de Croy, War Memories, p.131.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid., p.118.