British nurse Edith Cavell helped British allies to escape from behind German lines. Despite being English, she was allowed to stay on as Matron of the hospital in Belgium where she worked and while there, she gave shelter to more than 200 allied personnel in her home and facilitated their escape back behind friendly lines. In 1915, the Germans caught on and she was executed for treason. As it happened she had, earlier, been recruited by Britain’s SIS so they might well have added espionage to her crimes, but it suited the British to play that side of Cavell down and portray her as an innocent, dedicated healer brutally treated at the hands of the Germans.
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