Edith Cavell, a British nurse, was shot by a German firing squad in Brussels at dawn on October 12, 1915, for helping Allied soldiers escape from occupied Belgium. She admitted what she had done and refused to be talked into a false account. She had been matron of a nurses' training school in Brussels since 1907, and when the war came she stayed to run the hospital, and she used the place to shelter wounded British, French and Belgian soldiers and to pass the able-bodied ones on toward the Dutch border, roughly 200 men in all.
The trial was short. She was arrested in August with more than thirty others. She was tried by court-martial and condemned under the German military code for conducting soldiers to the enemy, which carried the death penalty. The American and Spanish legations tried to intervene. The military governor argued against the sentence. The order was confirmed anyway. She was shot at the Tir national range at seven in the morning.
Her last words were reported and printed everywhere. She told the English chaplain who visited her the night before that patriotism was not enough, that she must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone, and the sentence, true or shaped by the time, became the text the whole war read. The German authorities argued, with some cause, that she had been lawfully sentenced under the code that governed occupied territory, and that a man who did the same would have been shot with less comment.
The effect ran against Germany. The neutral press, the American papers and the Allied governments all took her as a martyr, and Britain's recruiting and propaganda turned the execution to account within a fortnight, with posters and a stamp and a film. A memorial statue stands outside the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the anniversary of her death is still kept by the nursing profession.