Revenge and Edith Cavell

From ‘Reprisals’, The Spectator, 23 October 1915: The Germans lately executed Miss Cavell, a good and brave English hospital nurse, on a charge of harbouring fugitives. Are Englishmen prepared for such reprisals as this execution suggests? … Is there a single Englishman, no matter how many public meetings he has attended in support of reprisals, and no matter how many letters he has written to the papers demonstrating the infallible success that would attend reprisals, who is willing to make that horrible and criminal retort? We cannot believe that there is one.