The Pursuit of Laughter (57 page)

Edith Cavell’s execution was a cruel and very stupid act from the German point of view. It was considered a German atrocity, she was said to have been murdered. The Military Governor of Brussels, von Bissing, was away at the time. The Spanish Ambassador who, urged on by the nurses from the clinic, did his best with the German authorities, wrote that ‘had von Bissing been in command the outcome would have been very different’.

Yet Duff Cooper is quoted, from a speech he made years later to army officers: ‘If ever a woman was justly executed according to the rules of warfare Nurse Cavell was.’ Bernard Shaw hit the nail on the head as usual when he wrote: ‘Such recent trials as those of Edith Cavell by a German tribunal and Roger Casement by an English one could never seem fair; the accused should have been tried by neutrals.’

Shaw added that ‘Edith, like Joan of Arc, was an arch heretic: in the middle of the war she declared to the world that “patriotism is not enough”.’

Mr Ryder’s book leaves a number of questions unanswered; probably nobody is now alive who could answer them. One gets a strong impression that Nurse Cavell herself hardly realised the grave risk she was running. Did Colonel Boger, one of her first
escapers
and the highest in rank, explain to her ‘the rules of warfare’? She did a number of unnecessarily rash things, like taking notes about her activities and stuffing them into a cushion. They were not discovered by the Germans, but they easily could have been. The ‘Tommies’ when they got bored with waiting in the attics for her to give them their
disguises
shouted and sang ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ so that passers-by in the street heard them. Did they know the ‘rules of warfare’, and that their thoughtless behaviour was
putting
their benefactress in mortal danger? During her trial Nurse Cavell herself envisaged being sentenced to a term of imprisonment in Germany.

Mr Ryder writes in an artless way which at times comes near to boring the reader. Research into the childhood and youth of a Norfolk vicar’s daughter a century ago must have been uphill work; the results are meagre. Here is Edith having a summer holiday: ‘During these holidays Edith Cavell’s favourite occupation included, at first, building sand castles with bucket and spade, shrimping expeditions with Eddy, and paddling with her
sisters
. The days of paddling over, Edith turned her attention to swimming.’ There are descriptions of her appearance with special reference to her ‘clear-cut East Anglian
profile
’, whatever that may mean. By its very artlessness, however, the book builds up a
picture
of a simple, good, brave and truthful woman. It was typical of her that at her trial she spoke the whole truth; she was incapable of the prevarication usual with accused persons.

During her life she never laughed and seldom smiled, according to her friends. This admirable imperturbability served her well at the terrible climax, when she faced the firing
squad with calm courage. Her sybilline pronouncement ‘patriotism is not enough’ remains mysterious. What exactly did she mean by it? Rowland Ryder describes her tragedy well; it is the tragedy of a very ordinary person who is yet extraordinary in her self-control and her bravery.

Both Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell were heroines, and perhaps they were also saints. It is probably as well that they never met. The Lady with the Lamp had a fairly low opinion of other women. Queen Victoria wrote to the Duke of Cambridge, Commander in Chief, ‘I wish we had her at the War Office,’ but Florence herself could not even find a woman fit to be her secretary. ‘They don’t know the names of the Cabinet Ministers, they don’t know which of the Churches has Bishops and which not,’ she complained. All the same, her axiom ‘To be a good nurse one must be a good woman’ fitted Nurse Cavell
perfectly
.

Edith Cavell
, Ryder, R.;
Florence Nightingale
, Huxley, E.
Books and Bookmen
(1975)

Early in the nineteenth century, a missionary fervour and fever seized Europeans and North Americans, and in particular the Nonconformist youth of England and Scotland. The object of their concern was enormous: the whole non-Christian world, no less. From the benighted heathen of the African bush to the highly civilised Moslem or Hindu sages and princes of India, and the philosophers and mandarins of China, nobody was to escape their ministrations, exhortations, prayers and sermons. They were convinced that they had but to make known the Good News of the Gospels for the multitudes to flock to them. They dreamed of mass baptisms, of Christianity triumphant from Pole to Pole.

The courage of these pioneers of the Faith was exemplary: physical courage, and moral courage. They endured all the hardships of intrepid explorers at the mercy of flood, fire, famine and disease, and also the hostility of those whose souls they had hoped to save. Sometimes a dangerous hostility, always incomprehension; occasionally they were cooked and eaten, more often ignored or made fun of.

The Moffats chose Africa as the field of their mission. Robert Moffat left England in 1816 and Mary followed three years later; they were married in Cape Town. The journey out was daunting. For three months the ship was alternately buffeted and becalmed, the wretched passengers, who became very quarrelsome, suffered from seasickness and the sickness that came from eating the ship’s fare. They endured tropical heat for weeks on end, stifling in airless cabins or going up to find the sailors had amused themselves by killing sharks so that the decks were awash with blood and the stench unendurable. When the future Mrs Moffat opened her porthole she was drenched in sea water; she was also bitten from top to toe by the bugs which infested the ship’s timbers. All this time she was
buoyed up by the thought that together, she and Robert Moffat would convert the
heathen
in droves. It was a heady prospect, to be taking the Good News of man’s salvation to countless millions in central Africa who had never before set eyes on a white man.

This life of Mary Moffat is a catalogue of disasters and hardships described by Mary in her letters home. The Moffats went from the Cape by ox-wagon hundreds of miles north, and settled at Kuruman among the Bechuana people. Sometimes they had to flee for their lives, when murderous hordes swept down, killing and maiming the peaceful Bechuana and driving away their cattle. The Bechuana themselves, though not killers, were the source of endless frustrations to the missionaries. Robert Moffat complained of their ‘deplorable want of mental energy.’ The fact that they never asked a question was more depressing than their thieving ways, though less shocking than their nakedness.

Robert spent months digging a trench from a river to the mission station in order to induce crops to grow there (he had been an under-gardener until he got the Call). When the Bechuana noticed that in fact the crops flourished, they never stopped cutting the channel so that water flowed into their own land. This was rather intelligent, but Moffat spent his time toiling back to see where to mend his trench when he felt he should have been about the Lord’s work spreading the Gospel, and he became understandably depressed.

The great work of his life was translating the Scriptures into ‘Sechuana’, a language he learnt with the utmost difficulty. At one stage in his gargantuan task he was told of a Mr Elliot who had devoted his entire life to translating the Bible into a rare language which meantime had become extinct, but Moffat was not to be put off. He thought he had but to teach the Bechuana to read, then put his Bible into their hands, in order to change them at a stroke into God-fearing and righteous Christians. How he squared this notion with the fact that wicked Europeans had had the benefit of the Bible for hundreds of years
without
becoming one jot less wicked there is no means of knowing. As he laboured year after year at the Pentateuch and the Prophets and the Gospels, putting them into
pidgin-Sechuana
, no doubts as to the supreme value of the work crept into his mind.

Despite some bad frights when murder and slaughter approached to the very edge of the oasis they had created, none of the missionaries was killed by the natives in this part of Africa, though one of them, a son-in-law of the Moffats, was blown to smithereens by a drunken English trader called Nelson. The Moffats had nine children, most of whom survived.

The missionaries hated the Boers, who were moving north to escape from English rule and found a republic to their own taste. The dislike was heartily reciprocated because the missionaries gave guns to the natives, something the Boers never did. The most annoying thing about the Boers, from the missionaries’ point of view, was that they were Christians too, and not only Christians but Protestants of the same low variety as themselves. It was tiresome beyond words to see that the Bible was part of the stock in trade of these Dutchmen and Huguenots who had made Africa their home for a couple of centuries
already. They interpreted the Bible in a different way, getting it wrong from beginning to end. One wonders whether Moffat sometimes had a suspicion that the Bechuana too might seize the wrong end of the stick. How interesting it would be to read their side of the story; what did they think of the English, the Scotch and the Boers? Did they enjoy the sermons? Did they like covering their oily bodies with Manchester cotton? Or did some of them run off into the bush just to get away from the Moffats?

Mary Moffat was not too enthusiastic about them: ‘It is not conferring with flesh and blood to live among these people’, she wrote. ‘In the natives of South Africa there is
nothing
naturally engaging; their extreme selfishness, filthiness, obstinate stupidity, and want of sensibility, have a tendency to disgust….’ She spent her life trying to turn them into
dainty
housewives and it was uphill work. Robert Moffat too was disappointed, for after he had told prospective converts that they would have to abandon all their wives but one, keeping only unto her, they were not for it. When a young Scotch missionary, David Livingstone, came to Kuruman, there had not been a convert for five years.

Livingstone married the Moffats’ eldest daughter, but he found Kuruman very tame and soon went further north. His mother-in-law disapproved, because she quickly realised that in him the missionary was secondary to the explorer and geographer. Elspeth Huxley’s short life of Livingstone is a model of excellence. She describes his journeys, from East Africa to the west coast, up and down the Zambesi discovering huge lakes and rivers, swamps and jungles, as well as healthy flowering highlands, and his suffering of untold misery from chronic dysentery, heat, hunger, insect stings and the bites of wild
animals
, year after year, which makes the Moffats’ tribulations seem like pin-pricks. All his stores and belongings, including his precious medicine chest and yet more precious
notebooks
, were stolen from time to time by the men he hired to carry them.

Livingstone had a touch of genius; the maps he made in these unpromising conditions were astonishingly accurate; and, however ill, he kept his notebooks written up. He was the grandson of crofters from the Hebrides, and he started work in a cotton mill at the age of ten. Before going to Africa he became a clergyman and took a medical degree. Although the Portuguese and the Arabs were the people who befriended him, and in fact often saved his life, he attacked them ferociously for being implicated in the slave trade. This vile traffic, which the Anglo-Saxons had given up in west Africa a generation before, still flourished in the east, and Livingstone awakened the conscience of Europe to what he called ‘the sore of the world.’ When he went to England he was lionised, met all the grandees and wrote a bestseller about his adventures.

However, he soon went back. He had moments of great joy in Africa, such as his first sight of the glorious Victoria Falls, but he also had endless disappointments. The Word fell on stony ground, and a ruined Portuguese monastery showed that white men had already tried it out, albeit in a rather mispronounced version, with no result. He thought that to open up Africa, and to persuade Englishmen to settle there, was the best way to serve the Lord. As we now know, this was a wicked idea for which Livingstone would be
in deep trouble with the race relations industry were he alive today.

Elspeth Huxley succeeds in making the reader almost love Livingstone, while feeling profoundly thankful not to have been led by him on an expedition into central Africa. It would be instructive to have an account by the Portuguese who were so good to him. What did they think of this man of God, his emaciated body covered in sores, who was always ready and even longing to go back for another frightful wild goose chase into the vast interior of the dark continent? Who, accepting their proffered help, denounced them as devilish slave traders?

Meanwhile at Kuruman what is described as ‘a great stone church’ went up. It was for all the world like any Victorian parish church in Surrey, and bore not the faintest
resemblance
to the splendid baroque cathedrals, truly to be called great, with which the Spanish and Portuguese adorned Central and South America. The Bechuana dozed off during the sermons, and when one fell over, asleep, the others annoyingly screamed with laughter.