Von Bissing s Will

Von Bissing's Will

A group of pince-nezed London barristers scanned last week the will of Baron Walter von Bissing, arched their eyebrows in surprise. The Baron, as everyone knows, was half-brother to General von Bissing, notorious German Military Governor-General of Belgium during a part of the World War. Though Baron von Bissing was a naturalized Englishman and professed detestation for General von Bissing's tyranny over Belgium, he was suspected by many a Briton of being "German at the core," and was interned during the World War. How unjustified were these suspicions was revealed last week when a certain clause in his will revealed:

"I desire particularly to express in the most emphatic and precise terms that under no circumstances whatever is any German, whether a relation of mine or otherwise, to have any voice or right in or over the guardianship or bringing up of my children."

What moved Baron von Bissing to this abhorrence of his fatherland? His friends declare that a partial cause was the judicial murder of a woman whose death was laid at the door of General von Bissing by Allied propaganda-- Miss Edith Cayell. To erase that stigma from his family name was the futile hope and almost fanatical desire of the late Baron Walter von Bissing. The death of Miss Cavell has, of course, begun to seem less of a martyrdom to impartial neutrals as the facts have come to light.

When the World War broke, she, the 49-year-old matron of a medical institute at Brussels, transformed the institute into a Red Cross hospital. Moved by the plight of the British, French and Belgian wounded under her care, she conspired with Prince Reginald de Croy to smuggle into Holland numerous Allied soldiers for whom he contrived to forge passports. Arrested by the German Military Police, she confessed to abetting the escape into Holland of some 175 Britons, Frenchmen and Belgians of military age.

After a two-day court martial before five German judges, she was sentenced to be shot. By order of General von Sauberzweig, military governor of Brussels, the sentence was conveyed to her in secret the next day and she was executed the following morning (at 7 a. m., Oct. 11, 1915).

Because General von Bissing, as Military Governor-General of Belgium, was technically responsible for the German court martial system of trying civilians, he was marked by Allied propagandists as "the murderer of Edith Cavell."

The unique importance of Miss Cavell's death for propaganda purposes arose from the fact that she was the first woman executed by order of a German court martial in Belgium for "recruiting" as opposed to "espionage." Within a few months Allied billboards were o'er-plastered with posters showing a brute-faced German officer commanding a phalanx of soldiers to fire upon a youthful, blooming defiant girl in the costume of a Red Cross nurse. The caption: EDITH CAVELL NEXT.