'All who have given attention to Napoleonic literature must have recollections of prints of the death of the Duc D'Enghien--the firing party under the glare of the torches, the prisoner standing on the brink of his newly dug grave. In Napoleon's lifetime, and for many years after, nothing hurt his personal reputation more than this summary, furtive execution in the dead of night that seemed to proclaim its own blood-guiltiness. But the great Frenchman acted in this matter with the motives and in the manner of an Eastern Sultan. He saw a man whom, rightly or wrongly, he believed to be a danger to himself; he arrested him lawlessly on foreign soil, and struck him down lawlessly. But what is there in common between such an episode and the midnight execution of a defenceless woman who never meant harm to any human being, who only came within reach of the criminal law by her superior regard for the higher precepts of mercy and compassion?
'When we think of the scene in that Brussels jail we may well wonder that at this time of day it should be possible to get men to participate in such a deed. Is it that insufficient blood has been shed during this past year that men should hunger after one harmless life? Yet we should evidently make a great mistake to treat our heroic countrywoman's end as if a mere case for compassion.
'One cannot mourn beyond a certain point for such a death. Who could have dreamed a few years ago that English womanhood would be producing such a heroine--the counterpart and realization in actual life of the Antigone whom the tragedian's inspired imagination has held up to the world's admiration for so many centuries?'
'We do not know whether any comment would be adequate in a case like this, or whether, indeed, all comment is not superfluous. We have had large experience of the brutality with which the enemy conducts his warfare, and especially the inhuman recklessness with which he pursues his vengeance against the civilian population of the countries which he invades. We venture to think, however, that in the case of a nurse, a woman whose life is dedicated to the alleviation of pain, cruelty of this kind, cruelty that presses against her the very extremity of martial law, is more diabolical even than all the other counts of a growing indictment. No other nation in Europe, we believe, would have put a nurse to death in circumstances of this kind. They would have made some allowance for her woman's tender heart, even though she had been guilty of an offence, and therefore deserved some punishment. Nothing, probably, can now brand with fouler infamy the German name, stained as it is by all the damning items in its past record, from Louvain and the _Lusitania_ down to the murder of an English nurse.'
