I keep returning to the pages of “Goodbye to All That” by Robert Graves which continue to interest, amuse and appal me. I hope that I don’t bore you.
He volunteered for the British Army in August 1914 after leaving school. Later he wrote –
“I was outraged to read of the German’s cynical violation of Belgian neutrality. Though I discounted perhaps twenty percent of the atrocity details as wartime exaggeration, that was not, of course, sufficient. Recently I saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings put in chronogical sequence:
‘When the fall of Anterp became known, the church bells were rung (i.e. at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany),- Kolnische Zeitung.
According to the Kolzinsche Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken – Le Matin.
According to what The Times has heard from Cologne, via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken, have been sentenced to hard labour- Corriere della Sera.
According to information which has reached the Corriere della Sera from Cologne, via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down -Le Matin’ “
Now to a true story, Canon Magnier of Dunmanway County Cork, refused to ring his Church bell on Armistice Day 1920 and was murdered in broad day light by an Auxiliary Police Cadet, for this refusal, together with a youth who was speaking to the Canon, in front of a large party of Cadets who were under the murderer’s command.
Another true story. For almost a century there has stood near Trafalgar Square in London, the statue of Edith Cavell, shot by the Germans in Belgium as a spy, which if true, followed the usages of war and not contrary to the Geneva Conventions. The British denied she was a spy and denounced the German “atrocity” vociferously. All war is atrocious but the British were lying through their teeth about Cavell’s activities. In 2015 Dame Stella Rimington ex-Director of MI5 revealed that the Germans had spoken the truth.
Edith Cavell was a night Sister at The Highgate Hospital N 19 before she went to Belgium. It was a Fever Hospital then mostly for children. There was a plaque to her memory on the wall in the Hospital Chapel. That she went to Belgium alone and not with a uniformed force e.g. The Red Cross..has always been a mystery until the MI5 revelation.
thank you Donal for comfirming this.
Doris M Daly.