Edith Cavell

It makes

it very difficult because I think there's fascinating stuff about people like Edith Cavell, maybe, that I would like to know more about whether she was a spy, not just somebody who helped Allied soldiers, you know, cross over.

Yeah, I think, is it Helen Fry has written recently about the Don Blanche and says she definitely is and that this comes out from Belgian records she's

got.

Johanna Hoffmann is certainly more valuable to the Germans than I ever could be to the United States.

My dear Mrs. Scheiber, that official said, Suppose the British government in the last war had had a chance to exchange Edith Cavell.

Well, he was wrong there.

I'm certainly no Edith Cavell.

But my friend Kitty is.

I only followed where she led.

English readers would probably like to know how these idolizations and reactions have affected the books they are most familiar with about Joan.

There is the first part of the Shakespearean or pseudo-Shakespearean trilogy of Henry VI, in which joan is one of the leading characters this portrait of joan is not more authentic than the description in the london papers of george washington in seventeen eighty of napoleon in eighteen o three of the german crown prince in or of lenin in nineteen seventeen it ends in mere scurrility the impression left by it is that the playwright having begun by an attempt to make joan a beautiful and romantic figure was told by his scandalized company that english patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a french conqueror of english troops and that unless he at once introduced all the old charges against joan of being a sorceress and harlot and assumed her to be guilty of all of them his play could not be produced as likely as not this is what actually happened indeed there is only one other apparent way of accounting for the sympathetic representation of joan as a heroine culminating in her eloquent appeal to the duke of burgundy followed by the blackguardly scurrility of the concluding scenes that other way is to assume that the original play was wholly scurrilous and that shakespeare touched up the earlier scenes as the work belongs to a period at which he was only beginning his practice as a tinker of old works before his own style was fully formed and hardened it is impossible to verify this guess his figure is not unmistakably evident in the play which is poor and base in its moral tone but he may have tried to redeem it from downright infamy by shedding a momentary glamour on the figure of the maid when we jump over two centuries to schiller we find die jungfrau von orleans drowned in a witch's cauldron of raging romance schiller's joan has not a single point of contact with the real joan nor indeed with any mortal woman that ever walked this earth there is really nothing to be said of his play but that it is not about joan at all and can hardly be said to pretend to be for he makes her die on the battlefield finding her burning unbearable before schiller came voltaire who burlesqued homer in a mock epic called la pucelle it is the fashion to dismiss this with virtuous indignation as an obscene libel and i certainly cannot defend it against the charge of extravagant indecorum but its purpose was not to depict joan but to kill with ridicule everything that voltaire righteously hated in the institutions and fashions of his own day he made joan ridiculous but not contemptible nor comparatively unchaste and as he also made homer and st peter and st denis and the brave dunois ridiculous and the other heroines of the poem very unchaste indeed he may be said to have let joan off very easily but indeed the personal adventures of the characters are so outrageous and so homerically free from any pretence at or even possibility of historical veracity that those who affect to take them seriously only make themselves pecksniffian samuel butler believed the iliad to be a burlesque of greek jingoism and greek religion written by a hostage or a slave and la pucelle makes butler's theory almost convincing voltaire represents agnes sorel the dauphin's mistress whom joan never met as a woman with a consuming passion for the chastest concubinal fidelity whose fate it was to be continually falling into the hands of licentious foes and suffering the worst extremities of rapine the combats in which joan rides a flying donkey or in which taken unaware with no clothes on she defends agnes with her sword and inflicts appropriate mutilations on her assailants can be laughed at as they are intended to be without scruple for no sane person could mistake them for sober history and it may be that their ribald irreverence is more wholesome than the beglamoured sentimentality of schiller certainly voltaire should not have asserted that joan's father was a priest but when he was out to harasser la femme the french church he stuck at nothing so far the literary representations of the maid were legendary but the publication by kisseragh in eighteen forty one of the reports of her trial and rehabilitation placed the subject on a new footing these entirely realistic documents created a living interest in joan which voltaire's mock homerics and schiller's romantic nonsense missed typical products of that interest in america and england are the histories of joan by mark twain and andrew lang mark twain was converted to downright worship of joan directly by later on another man of genius anatole france reacted against the quixotic wave of enthusiasm and wrote a life of joan in which he attributed joan's ideas to clerical prompting and her military success to an adroit use of her by dunois as a mascot in short he denied that she had any serious military or political ability at this andrew saw red and went for anatole's scalp in a rival life of her which should be read as a corrective to the other lang had no difficulty in showing that joan's ability was not an unnatural fiction to be explained away as an illusion manufactured by priests and soldiers but a straightforward fact it has been lightly pleaded in explanation that anatole france is a parisian of the art world into whose scheme of things the able hard-headed hard-handed female though she dominates provincial france and business paris does not enter whereas lang was a scot and every scot knows that the grey mare is as likely as not to be the better horse but this explanation does not convince me i cannot believe that anatole france does not know what everybody knows i wish everybody knew all that he knows one feels antipathies at work in his book he is not anti joan but he is anti clerical anti mystic and fundamentally unable to believe that there ever was any such person as the real joan mark twain's joan skirted to the ground and with as many petticoats as noah's wife in a toy ark is an attempt to combine bayard with esther summerson from bleak house into an unimpeachable american school teacher in armor like esther summerson she makes her creator ridiculous and yet being the work of a man of genius remains a creditable human goody-goody in spite of her creator's infatuation it is the description rather than the valuation that is wrong andrew lang and mark twain are equally determined to make joan a beautiful and most ladylike victorian but both of them recognize and insist on her capacity for leadership though the scots scholar is less romantic about it than the mississippi pilot but then lang was by life-long professional habit a critic of biographies rather than a biographer whereas mark twain writes his biography frankly in the form of a romance protestant misunderstanding of the middle ages they had however one disability in common to understand joan's history it is not enough to understand her character you must understand her environment as well joan in a nineteenth century environment is as incongruous a figure as she would appear were she to walk down piccadilly to-day in her fifteenth-century armor to see her in her proper perspective you must understand christendom and the catholic church the holy roman empire and the feudal system as they existed and were understood in the middle ages if you confuse the middle ages with the dark ages and are in the habit of ridiculing your aunt for wearing medieval clothes meaning those in vogue in the eighteen nineties and are quite convinced that the world has progressed enormously both morally and mechanically since joan's time then you will never understand why joan was burnt much less feel that you might have voted for burning her yourself if you had been a member of the court that tried her and until you feel that you know nothing essential about her that the mississippi pilot should have broken down on this misunderstanding is natural enough mark twain the innocent abroad who saw the lovely churches of the middle ages without a throb of emotion author of a yankee in the court of king arthur in which the heroes and heroines of medieval chivalry are guise seen through the eyes of a street arab was clearly out of court from the beginning andrew lang was better read but like walter scott he enjoyed mediaeval history as a string of border romances rather than as the record of a high european civilization based on a catholic faith both of them were baptized as protestants and impressed by all their schooling and most of their reading with the belief that catholic bishops who burnt heretics were persecutors capable of any villainy that all heretics were albigensians or hussites or jews or protestants of the highest character and that the inquisition was a chamber of horrors invented expressly and exclusively for such burnings accordingly we find them representing peter colchon bishop of beauvoy the judge who sent joan to the stake as an unconscionable scoundrel and all the questions put to her as traps to ensnare and destroy her and they assume unhesitatingly that the two or three score of canons and doctors of law and divinity who sat with cochon as assessors were exact reproductions of him on slightly less elevated chairs and with a different head-dress and of part two part three of st joan preface comparative fairness of joan's trial the truth is that cochon was threatened and insulted by the english for being too considerate to joan a recent french writer denies that joan was burnt and holds that cochon spirited her away and burnt somebody or something else in her place and that the pretender who subsequently personated her at orleans and elsewhere was not a pretender but the real authentic joan he is able to cite cochon's pro joan partiality in support of his view as to the assessors the objection to them is not that they were a row of uniform rascals but that they were political partisans of joan's enemies this is a valid objection to all such trials but in the absence of neutral tribunals they are unavoidable a trial by joan's french partisans would have been as unfair as the trial by her french opponents and an equally mixed tribunal would have produced a deadlock such recent trials as those of edith cavell by a german tribunal and roger casement by an english one were open to the same objection but they went forward to the death nevertheless because neutral tribunals were not available edith like joan was an arch heretic in the middle of the war she declared before the world that patriotism is not enough she nursed enemies back to health and assisted their prisoners to escape making it abundantly clear that she would help any fugitive or distressed person without asking whose side he was on and acknowledging no distinction before christ between tommy and jerry and pitou the poilus well might edith have wished that she could bring the middle ages back and have fifty civilians learned in the law or vowed to the service of god to support two skilled judges in trying her case according to the catholic law of christendom and to argue it out with her at sitting after sitting for many weeks the modern military inquisition was not so squeamish it shot her out of hand and her countrymen seeing in this a good opportunity for lecturing the enemy on his intolerance put up a statue to her but took particular care not to inscribe on the pedestal patriotism is not enough for which omission and the lie it implies they will need edith's intercession when they are themselves brought to judgment if any heavenly power thinks such moral cowards capable of pleading to an intelligible indictment the point need be no further laboured joan was persecuted essentially as she would be persecuted to-day the change from burning to hanging or shooting may strike us as a change for the better the change from careful trial under ordinary law to recklessly summary military terrorism may strike us as a change for the worse but as far as toleration is concerned the trial and execution in in fourteen thirty one might have been an event of to-day and we may charge our consciences accordingly if joan had to be dealt with by us in london she would be treated with no more toleration than miss sylvia or the peculiar people or the parents who keep their children from the elementary school or any of the others who cross the line we have to draw rightly or wrongly between the tolerable and the intolerable

The hardest part was figuring out where to go.

I didn't want to explain military life before talking about what I needed.

And so you make your way past there, and this is London.

And then you cross another road, and you're coming up just towards where Pret-a-Manger is, and you've got that magnificent statue of Edith Cavell.

And the inscription on that, I think, hits it all, mate.

Hits it all.

But there's places around the world that commemorate, celebrate her.

But that is Edith Cavell, and the bridge is closed.

It seems to be closed every time there's a quake.

If you felt it, I need to know about that quite quickly.

Heddle Friday.

I was going to say Heddle Friday.

But the Edith Cavell Bridge is closed.

And get in touch if you want to be a part of the show.

She was, you know, still more plugged in, especially in the 50s, to, you know, the world around her.

Your favourite heroines in real life, she mentions Edith Cavell, who was a war nurse.

Yes.

Famous in part for her work in Belgium.

Notable works of mine have included the memorial to C.S. Lewis and Sir John Gielgud for Westminster Abbey and the memorial to Edith Cavell for Norwich Cathedral.

This episode is being supported by one of my businesses, a brilliant local business called Stortbox.

If you've ever moved house, you'll know the pain of hunting for cardboard boxes, building them, taping them up, and then figuring out what to do with them afterwards.

I'm specifically a letter carver in stone and wood, type designer, sculptor, glass engraver.

feature a few things.

Notable works of mine have included the memorial to C.S. Lewis and Sir John Gielgud for Westminster Abbey and the memorial to Edith Cavell for Norwich Cathedral.

And I sit on a number of boards as well.

So I sit on the Fabric Advisory Committee for St. Edmundsbury Cathedral.