12/10/2026
Today we celebrate Edith Cavell 😇🙏💚✝️ - The third of three Feast days celebrated today 🙂
Edith Cavell, born in 1865, was a British nurse and pioneer of modern nursing in Belgium who was executed by a German firing squad during World War I for helping Allied soldiers escape.
Cavell served as the matron of a nurse training school in German-occupied Brussels, treating wounded soldiers of all nationalities without discrimination.
Alongside her medical work, she helped roughly 200 British, French, and Belgian soldiers escape from occupied Belgium to the neutral Netherlands.
German authorities arrested Cavell on August 5, 1915, and she was court-martialled and convicted of war treason for aiding enemy combatants.
Despite international pleas for mercy from the United States and Spain, she was executed by firing squad at dawn on October 12, 1915, at the Tir national shooting range in Schaerbeek, Brussels.
Before her ex*****on, Cavell famously remarked: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone.”
Her ex*****on drew widespread global outrage, boosted Allied recruitment, and intensified anti-German sentiment, particularly in Britain and the United States.
Edith Cavell's body was reburied at Norwich Cathedral in 1919, and monuments were erected in her honour, including the Edith Cavell Memorial near Trafalgar Square in London.
