Homage to Nurse Cavell

Kai Tiaki : the journal of the nurses of New Zealand, Volume XV, Issue 3, 1 July 1922, Page 114

Homage to Nurse Cavell

It is pleasing to read in the accounts of the recent visit of their Majesties King George V. and Queen Mary to the battlefields and cemeteries in Belgium and France that a tribute was paid to the nurse heroine Edith Cavell. We read as follows : — When the King and Queen went to Tir National (rifle butts) with a memorial wreath, they stood on the spot where the German firing party had stood when they shot Nurse Cavell. Around the simple memorial granite slab, with the names of thirty-five patriots carved in indelible letters of gold, is a small chained enclosure with four marks of the legs of the chair on which Miss Cavell, rendered too weak by her incarceration to stand, sat before the German firing party.

The Royal tribute was of red roses and arum lilies, with palm leaves on a base of laurel, entwined with the British, Belgian and French colours. It was reverently placed in position, the King holding the British and Queen Mary the Belgian ribbons. Around this small national memorial, it was noted, was a narrow bed of flowers with a profusion of forget-me-nots among them. Madame Willame, one of Nurse Cavell 's assistants, who herself was imprisoned, presented to the King and Queen medals commemorating Nurse Cavell and Marie Depage. The latter, who was lost in the Lusitania, was the wife of Surgeon-General Depage, head of the Belgian Army Medical Service, and he attended the ceremony.