![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jul. 6th, 2010 11:34 amThere are a couple of new people on here from the Awesome Ladies Friending Meme (which, by the way, makes me enormously happy; even if you're not feeling the need to extend your reading list at this time, it's kind of a wonderful thing to see hundreds of comments entirely devoted to fangirling female characters.) Hi, guys!
Anyway, I guess it is therefore sort of fitting that today I have a real-life awesome and intriguing lady to bookblog about: Edith Cavell, WWI SPY NURSE (and some of you Milliways types will probably guess why I have suddenly taken a deep interest in WWI SPY NURSES, um.) The book I found about her told me a little more than Wikipedia, but not all that much more, which was kind of disappointing. A Whisper of Eternity: The Mystery of Edith Cavell promised all kinds of fascinating discussion in its first chapter - analysis of the propaganda phenomenon that happened after her death! wacky conspiracy theories! - and then kind of failed to deliver.
Edith Cavell was a British nurse who founded a nursing school in Belgium; she was still there when the war broke out, and ended up as part of an organization that shuffled wounded British and French soldiers who'd gotten lost behind enemy lines back to the front, treating them at the nursing school and then sending them on their way. From the way the book made it sound - and I don't know how trustworthy a source it was - everyone involved treated it kind of like a game. The soldiers would go down to the local pub to have a pint while they were convalescing, and none of the student nurses actually thought much more would happen to them than a slap on the wrist if they were caught. Then they were actually caught, and she calmly confessed everything. People have a couple different theories about why on earth she would have done this:
THEORY 1: Edith Cavell was TOO INNOCENT AND PURE to tell a lie! Propaganda loves this one. Real people find it less believable, especially given that Edith Cavell was in her forties and had been running a soldier-smuggling ring for almost a year; I personally would like to give her greater credit for agency and intelligence than this.
THEORY 2: Edith Cavell was secretly planning to become a martyr to galvanize anti-German public opinion! This is at the very least a fun conspiracy theory, which the book hints at and then refuses to follow up on, instead chasing a completely irrelevant line of thought about the useless American embassy. Frustrating!
THEORY 3: Edith Cavell had a death wish. Plausible but depressing.
Anyway, Edith Cavell was in fact executed (though all of her nurses were, in fact, let go with a slap on the wrist) and promptly became a great figure of martyrdom in the UK and the US; the propaganda line basically appears to have been, "Look at those evil woman-shooting Germans! If they are not stopped they will shoot EVERY BRITISH WOMAN." This is fairly ironic when one considers all the women of various nationalities and ethnicities who must have been injured and killed over the course of WWI (not to mention over the whole ugly course of British imperial history), when Edith Cavell did, in fact, do the thing that she was accused of, was given a trial, and confessed. I would love to read more about the propaganda campaign that went on here, and hopefully someday I will find a book that does a better and more thorough job of treating the whole story than the one that I found.
Anyway, I guess it is therefore sort of fitting that today I have a real-life awesome and intriguing lady to bookblog about: Edith Cavell, WWI SPY NURSE (and some of you Milliways types will probably guess why I have suddenly taken a deep interest in WWI SPY NURSES, um.) The book I found about her told me a little more than Wikipedia, but not all that much more, which was kind of disappointing. A Whisper of Eternity: The Mystery of Edith Cavell promised all kinds of fascinating discussion in its first chapter - analysis of the propaganda phenomenon that happened after her death! wacky conspiracy theories! - and then kind of failed to deliver.
Edith Cavell was a British nurse who founded a nursing school in Belgium; she was still there when the war broke out, and ended up as part of an organization that shuffled wounded British and French soldiers who'd gotten lost behind enemy lines back to the front, treating them at the nursing school and then sending them on their way. From the way the book made it sound - and I don't know how trustworthy a source it was - everyone involved treated it kind of like a game. The soldiers would go down to the local pub to have a pint while they were convalescing, and none of the student nurses actually thought much more would happen to them than a slap on the wrist if they were caught. Then they were actually caught, and she calmly confessed everything. People have a couple different theories about why on earth she would have done this:
THEORY 1: Edith Cavell was TOO INNOCENT AND PURE to tell a lie! Propaganda loves this one. Real people find it less believable, especially given that Edith Cavell was in her forties and had been running a soldier-smuggling ring for almost a year; I personally would like to give her greater credit for agency and intelligence than this.
THEORY 2: Edith Cavell was secretly planning to become a martyr to galvanize anti-German public opinion! This is at the very least a fun conspiracy theory, which the book hints at and then refuses to follow up on, instead chasing a completely irrelevant line of thought about the useless American embassy. Frustrating!
THEORY 3: Edith Cavell had a death wish. Plausible but depressing.
Anyway, Edith Cavell was in fact executed (though all of her nurses were, in fact, let go with a slap on the wrist) and promptly became a great figure of martyrdom in the UK and the US; the propaganda line basically appears to have been, "Look at those evil woman-shooting Germans! If they are not stopped they will shoot EVERY BRITISH WOMAN." This is fairly ironic when one considers all the women of various nationalities and ethnicities who must have been injured and killed over the course of WWI (not to mention over the whole ugly course of British imperial history), when Edith Cavell did, in fact, do the thing that she was accused of, was given a trial, and confessed. I would love to read more about the propaganda campaign that went on here, and hopefully someday I will find a book that does a better and more thorough job of treating the whole story than the one that I found.
