Originally published: Beagle Books, 2011. British edition published with the title Fatal destiny: Edith Cavell, World War I nurse.

Edith Cavell was born in 1865, daughter of a Norfolk vicar, and shot in Brussels on 12 October 1915 by the Germans for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border. Following a traditional village childhood in 19th century England, Edith worked as a governess in the UK and abroad, before training as a nurse in London in 1895. To Edith, nursing was a duty, a vocation, but above all a service. By 1907, she had travelled most of Europe and become matron of her own hospital in Belgium, where, under her leadership, a ramshackle hospital with few staff and little organization became a model nursing school. When war broke out, Edith helped soldiers to escape the war by giving them jobs in her hospital, finding clothing and organizing safe passage into Holland. In all, she assisted over two hundred men. When her secret work was discovered, Edith was put on trial and sentenced to death by firing squad. She uttered only 130 words in her defence. A devout Christian, the evening before her death, she asked to be remembered as a nurse, not a hero or a martyr, and prayed to be fit for heaven. When news of Edith's death reached Britain, army recruitment doubled. Diana Souhami brings one of the Great War's finest heroes to life in this biography of a hardworking, courageous and independent woman.

In May of 2019, it was a hundred years since the remains of Edith Cavell were brought back to England from Belgium to be given a proper burial—one deserving of a war heroine. Edith Cavell was unique in many ways. She was a Victorian girl raised in a strictly devout Christian family who lived their lives according to the Scriptures. They cared for the welfare of others and regularly gave alms to the poor. Nursing, therefore, became a natural career choice for her and her sisters. An excellent nurse, she was invited to Belgium to modernize the nursing system. But then World War I broke out and a brutal martial law was imposed on the land, which severely interfered with her project. But in Edith Cavell all it did was to bring out her innate humanitarian instincts. Righteous and fearless, she defied the ruthless German military and joined an underground movement, and used her hospital to nurse and hide Allied soldiers who were wounded or had become detached from their regiments, men who would have been shot if caught. Eventually, she was arrested, incarcerated, court-martialled, and then executed by a firing squad; but not before helping hundreds of men escape to neutral Holland. Katie Pickles, in her book, Transnational Outrage: The Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell, describes her killing as ‘one of the most famous atrocities of the Great War.’

"Based on the US edition, originally published by Beagle Books, LLC, under ISBN 978-09841813-2-2"--Title page verso.

Born in 1865 to an English vicar and his wife, Edith becomes a governess, then at the age of thirty a nurse, opening a nursing school in Belgium and serving there during World War I, when her compassion leads to her arrest for aiding the enemy.

Edith Piaf was one of the most greatly loved singers of the twentieth century. From the start of her exceptional career in the 1930s, her waif-like form and heart-wrenching voice endeared her first to the French, then to audiences around the globe. As she moved from her youth singing in the streets to the glamour of the Paris music-halls, Piaf formed lasting friendships with such figures as Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau and Marlene Dietrich; she wrote many of her own songs, aided the Resistance in the Second World War, and mentored younger singers like Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour. Yet her path to stardom was full of tragedies - the death of her daughter in infancy; the death of Marcel Cerdan, her greatest love, in a plane crash; her many illnesses, affairs and addictions, all of which nourished her passionate performances and strengthened her enduring bond with audiences. In this mesmerising, definitive new biography Carolyn Burke gives us Piaf in her own time and place, illuminating through sympathetic readings of sources hitherto unavailable both the charm and the pathos of the 'Little Sparrow' who enchanted generations and still enthralls us today.

This book examines the myriad identities and portrayals of Edith Cavell, as they have been constructed and handed down by propagandists, biographers and artists. Cavell was first introduced to the British public through a series of Foreign Office statements which claimed to establish the “facts” of her case. Her own voice, along with those of her family, colleagues and friends, were muted, as a monolithic image of a national heroine and martyr emerged. The book identifies two main areas of tension in her commemoration: firstly, the contrast between complexity of her own behaviour and motivations and the simplicity of the “Cavell Legend” that was constructed around her; and, secondly, the mismatch between the attempts of individuals and professional organisations to commemorate her life and work, and the public construction of a “heroine” who could be of value to the nation state.

Already a decorated heroine of the First World War, British-born Mary Lindell, Comtesse de Milleville, was one of the most colourful and courageous agents of the Second World War, yet her story has almost been forgotten. Evoking the spirit of Edith Cavell, and taking the German occupation of Paris in 1940 as a personal affront, she led an escape line for patriotic Frenchmen and British soldiers. After imprisonment, escape to England, a secret return to France and another arrest, she began to witness the horrors of German-run prisons and concentration camps. In April 1945, a score of British and American women emerged from the Women's Hell – Ravensbrück concentration camp – who had been kept alive by the willpower and the strength of one woman, Mary Lindell. She combined a passion for adventure with blunt speech and persistently displayed the greatest personal bravery in the face of great adversity. To counter German claims that they had no British or American prisoners, Mary smuggled out a plea for rescue and produced her list from her pinafore pocket, compiled in secret from the camp records. This vital list contained the names of captured women, many of whom were agents of British Military Intelligence, the Special Operations Executive or the French Resistance. Poignantly supported by first-hand testimony, Lindell's List tells the moving story of Mary Lindell's heroic leadership and the endurance of a group of women who defied the Nazis in the Second World War.

Claude has an intuitive faith in something splendid and feels at odds with his contemporaries. The war offers him the opportunity to forget his farm and his marriage of compromise; he enlists and discovers that he has lacked. But while war demands altruism, its essence is destructive