ho were
compelled to sit behind them. Nor could they see the witnesses, who were
also placed behind them.

The charge brought against the accused was that of having conspired to
violate the German Military Penal Code, punishing with death those who
conduct troops to the enemy.

[Sidenote: The trial secret.]

[Sidenote: Miss Cavell's attitude.]

[Sidenote: Admits aiding English soldiers.]

We have no record of that trial; we do not know all that occurred there
behind the closed doors of that Senate chamber, where for fourscore
years laws based on another and more enlightened principle of justice
had been discussed. Miss Cavell did not know, or knew only in the
vaguest manner, the offense with which she was charged. She did not deny
having received at her hospital English soldiers whom she nursed and to
whom she gave money; she did not deny that she knew they were going to
try to cross the border into Holland. She even took a patriotic pride in
the fact. She was very calm. She was interrogated in German, a language
she did not understand, but the questions and responses were translated
into French. Her mind was very alert, and she was entirely
self-possessed, and frequently rectified any inexact details and
statements that were put to her. When, in her interrogatory, she was
asked if she had not aided English soldiers left behind after the early
battles of the preceding Autumn about Mons and Charleroi, she said yes;
they were English and she was English, and she would help her own. The
answer seemed to impress the court. They asked her if she had not helped
twenty.

"Yes," she said "more than twenty; two hundred."

"English?"

"No, not all English; French and Belgians, too."

But the French and Belgians were not of her own nationality, said the
judge--and that made a serious difference. She was subjected to a
nagging interrogatory. One of the judges said that she had been foolish
to aid the English because, he said, the English are ungrateful.

"No," replied Miss Cavell, "the English are not ungrateful."

"How do you know they are not?" asked the inquisitor.

[Sidenote: Miss Cavell makes a fatal admission.]

"Because," she answered, "some of them have written to me from England
to thank me."

It was a fatal admission on the part of the tortured little woman; under
the German military law her having helped soldiers to reach Holland, a
neutral country, would have been a less serious offense, but to aid the