NURSE CAVELL.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 February 1916, Page 6

NURSE CAVELL.

A FELLOW-WORKER'S STORY. To a small Irish magazine entitled "The Missionary Record" Miss Mary O'Reilly contributes a moving account of the work and character of Miss Cavell, with vrliom she was Intimately associated at Brussels. •During one short, stern year Miss Cavell called me "Friend," as I called her "Sister.' Brussels was her second home. In August, 1915, I/Ecole Infirmiere Beige, which she had started in one small room with four probationers, had grown to be a vast building, with a large staff of nurses. She was in her English home when w?r was declared. "My duty is over there," she said simply. 'The bravest woman in Brussells" reached the threatened city none too soon. . . . One sunset the terrible men in grey were at the gate. . . . By the barricade, beneath a Belgian army ilaTe, stood Sister Cavell in her prim, crisp gown, calmly selecting refugees who must have emergency lellef. DEFIED GERMAN GENERAL, Presently she called upon the German commander to place her surgical institute at the services of the enemy wounded. General von Luttwitz announced that in every hospital recognised by the invaders all nurses should give formal undertakings to act as gaolers to the patients. Sister Edith set the standard for her fellow-work-ers: "Wc are prepared to do all that we can to help wounded soldiers to recover—but to be their gaolers—never!" The German General's clenched fist smote the table, but he defied a will as unbreakable as his own. "He looked," reported Sister Edith (apd she laughed as she told it), "he looked as if he would like to shoot lne dead." From that day the German authorities in Belgium began to deal harshly with British Red Cross nurses cut off from the world. Sister Cavell summoned her girl nurses to warn them, as a mother might her daughters, of the personal dangers which threatened 1 . "But, but," gasped the startled nurse, "are we surrounded bv Zulus?' Edith Ca veil's answer was instant—"Daughters, we are surrounded —not by Zulus."

"PITY A WASTE OF FEELIN'G." Appealing to a German brigadier on behalf of some homeless women and children, her argument was answered'bv this quotation from Xietzsche:—"Pity is a waste of feeling, a moral parasite injurious to the health." Besides directing three hospitals, Sister C'avell gave six lectures every week, attended the operating theatre daily, and responded personally to the calls of the poor. Only one hour of each arduous day was reserved—that even hour when she and her Flemish sheep dogs. Jack and Con (scrubbed and sterilised), romped with the night-gowned kiddies in the children's ward until the sandman came. ... She was amused when the Germans threw me out of Brussels as a disturber of the peace. When, as a free-born American citizen, I motored back "to see my Minister, Urand Whitlock," I carried with me my maid's passport, Hugh Gibson, Secretary of the Embassy, told me with grave foreboding about the young nurses at the British Hospital. I hurried to Sister Edith. Gravely and insistently I begged her to come with me to Holland and safety. She listened patiently, as one. listens to a well-meaning child, and then said, smiling, "Impossible, friend: my duty is here." We never saw her again. When the end came she was alone. But I know that she was content.