The medal's obverse bears conjoined busts of Marie Depage and Edith Clavell, facing left, with laurel branch behind them. Around, MARIE DEPAGE - EDITH CAVELL; signed on truncation, A BONNETAIN / 1919
The reverse bears legend only, 1915 / REMEMBER
Marie Depage and Edith Cavell were heroines of World War I on the Allied side. Marie Depage was the wife of the prominent doctor Antoine Depage, who was a surgeon to the Belgian King. In 1907 she founded a laicised non-denominational medical institute in 1907, the Berkendael Medical Institute (also known as L'École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées), in Uccle near Brussels, with British Edith Cavell as head nurse.
Depage travelled to the US in January 1915 to raise funds for the L'Océan hospital. After raising $100,000 in a few weeks, she received news that her middle son Lucien would be joining her eldest son Pierre at the front, and decided to return to Belgium. She booked passage on the RMS Lusitania, leaving New York on 1 May 1915 for Liverpool via Queenstown in the south of Ireland. The ship was torpedoed by German submarine U-20 at about 2:10 pm on 7 May 1915, and rapidly sank. Depage assisted other passengers to board lifeboats, and treated some injured on the deck of the sinking vessel. As the ship sank, she became entangled in ropes and drowned, one of nearly 1,200 killed from almost 2,000 aboard.
Edith Cavell continued to work at the Berkendael Medical Institute, where she helped hundreds of allied soldiers escape. Her humanitarian actions, which she freely confessed after her arrest, rendered the normal protections accorded to medical personnel void. She was court-martialed, sentenced to death for treason and, despite international pleas for mercy, executed by firing squad.
Both women were celebrated as martyrs and heroines and monuments as well as medals commemorate their lives and deaths.
The circular medal measures 58mm in diameter and was struck in bronze by Jules Fonson and Company. No mintage is reported.
