17 MAY 1919, Page 3

The body of Nurse Cavell was brought home to England

on Wednesday in a destroyer, for interment in Norwich Cathedral after a military funeral service in Westminster Abbey. We are profoundly glad that her countrymen have been enabled le express by these solemn rites something of their proud sorrow for the heroic woman. The judicial murder of Nurse Cavell b1 the Germans in Brussels, for assisting fugitive British soldiers to escape the death sentence indicted on them in utter disregard of the rules of war, was a crime that British people can never forget. But we prefer now to think of the courage and devotion of that simple Englishwoman who, after nursing German and Belgian wounded, went to her trial and her death so uncom- plainingly. Joan of Arc, in that trial at Rouen which many generations of English people have lamented as a stain on English chivalry, bore herself no more finely than did Edith Cavell in her last hours at Brussels—a martyr for the cause of right against the hideous tyranny which we have now destroyed.