The martyrdom of Nurse Cavell

Excerpt: Like Charlotte Brontë another vicar’s daughter Edith Cavell first learned something of the wider world in a Brussels school. It was commoner then than now—meaning by “now” before the war—for English girls to be sent to Belgium to school. Charlotte Brontë’s Brussels life has left us at least one imperishable book. Edith Cavell has left no written memorials of those times; but if we would reconstruct her life we may imagine some such background as that of “Villette”: the strangeness of a foreign city fascinating by its novelty yet repelling by alien atmosphere. The lot of a school-girl is not too happy at the best among new companions. When their language and ways are those of a foreign country they can become a source of torture to a sensitive child. Some of these school-girl irritations Edith Cavell had to bear; yet such early annoyances evidently left little mark on her for she returned many years later to Brussels of her own free will and conquered the affections of the Belgians a second time.