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Heroes from History People Really Don’t Appreciate Enough

Khalid Elhassan November 10, 2020 32 min

William Colby - William J. Donovan — William Colby (oak leaves on cap) with OSS personnel and Norwegian Resistance members in Norway. Special Operations

33. A Courageous English Nurse in German-occupied Belgium

German troops on parade in central Brussels in 1914. Pintrest

Edith Cavell was visiting her mother in England, when Germany kicked off WWI in the west by invading Belgium. She felt it was her duty to return to Brussels immediately. By August 20^th, 1914, Brussels was occupied by the Germans, and Cavell’s nursing school was transformed into a Red Cross hospital that treated soldiers from all sides, as well as civilians.

In September 1914, Cavell was asked to help two wounded British soldiers trapped behind enemy lines. She treated them, then helped smuggle them out of occupied Belgium into the neighboring and neutral Netherlands. That was the start of her involvement in a clandestine network that sheltered Allied soldiers and Belgian men of military age, and arranged for their escape. Over the following 11 months, Cavell helped over 200 British, French, and Belgian soldiers and civilians. She sheltered them in her hospital, furnished them with false identity papers, and arranged to smuggle them across the border to safety. As she put it: “I can’t stop while there are lives to be saved“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.