by Ann Kramer
The women who worked with La Dame Blanche did so for many reasons. Giving the lie to Hamil Grant’s disparaging views of women spies, patriotism was a powerful motive. With German forces occupying Belgium, it was almost impossible for men who wanted to join the Belgian Army to escape into Holland. As a result, in Landau’s words, ‘Spying was the only patriotic outlet that remained’, and for men being a soldier in La Dame Blanche provided their only opportunity of fighting, albeit in a covert organization. Working with La Dame Blanche, gathering information or spying for British intelligence also provided women, who would not have been able to enlist, the same opportunity to fight and act as soldiers for their country against the German invaders. Revenge for a son, husband or other male relative killed in the war was another powerful motive, while involvement in La Dame Blanche, although dangerous and sometimes frightening, was exciting and gave women a strong sense of purpose. Working with the Resistance was also proof positive that a woman was not collaborating with the enemy, a constant risk for women in occupied territory.
Husbands and wives, and often wider families, worked together within the different platoons of La Dame Blanche, which helped to cement the network and also provided a good source of new recruits as one member of family brought relatives into the organization. One woman named Anna Kessler, a widow in her fifties, lost her only son in the fighting in 1914; she joined La Dame Blanche and encouraged her four daughters to work with her to help British intelligence. Her service records described her as a ‘patriotic and courageous mother’. Different members of the same family sometimes undertook different tasks: while one member of the family took responsibility for collecting information, another might be a courier. Working together as a family was not only efficient but also enabled family members to look after each other. Conversely of course a family unit was vulnerable; if its activities were discovered, the entire family might be arrested, imprisoned or shot.
Watching railways and making notes of German troop movements was the core work of La Dame Blanche and provided significant military information for British intelligence about the movement and strength of German forces. By the end of the war there were more than fifty train-watching posts, each with its own identifying number. As Landau commented in his history of La Dame Blanche, ‘the work of spying went on night and day’, and railways certainly had to be observed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Families often undertook this commitment, working in shifts. From September 1917 until the end of the war Felix Latouche, for instance, together with his wife and their two young daughters, aged 13 and 14, maintained a train-watching post from their cottage in Fourmies in Northern France that overlooked the Hirson-Mézières railway line. During the day the two young girls scrutinized the trains as they went by; at night M. and Mme. Latouche continued the observation. To disguise the information, they jotted down their findings as items of food: beans for soldiers, chicory for horses, coffee for cannons and so on. Completed lists, which were written on scraps of paper, were hidden in the hollowed out handle of a broom that stood against a wall in the kitchen, until a courier arrived. Family groups also provided safe houses for agents, and drop-off points for information, not just receiving intelligence but also passing it on to another group or member of the network. Usually able to move around the country more easily than men, women often operated as couriers. When one male agent, Cresillon, who acted as a ‘letter box’ and courier, feared he was under surveillance, his wife took over the role of courier. Being a midwife, she travelled frequently visiting pregnant women, and was ignored by the Germans.
‘A remarkable feature not only of the Hirson Platoon, but of the whole ‘White Lady’organisation was family cooperation. Husband, wife, children, even the dog (watching at the door), and often the furniture (a hiding place for compromising documents), each played a part.’
(Henry Landau, Secrets of the White Lady)
Dangers and imprisonment
Covert operations in occupied territory required immense courage and dedication and carried huge risks. The German secret police were constantly on the alert for spies and on various occasions, sometimes successfully, attempted to infiltrate networks. Working as a courier was particularly risky partly because the agent would be carrying material that provided evidence of his or her espionage activities and partly because travel in the occupied territories was very restricted. The German occupying forces had imposed travel restrictions and a strict curfew, as well as introducing a pass system whereby civilians had to carry identity papers and passes to get from one place to another. Anyone in the streets or countryside after the curfew was likely to be stopped by German military police. Agents at the frontier were at particular risk. A ten-foot high barbed wire fence separated Belgium from France and was patrolled by German sentries and secret police who were constantly on the watch for spies trying to cross from one country to the other. Even so, some daring agents succeeded. On one occasion two young women, Clémie de l’Epine and Marie-Antoinette, both daughters of aristocratic Belgian families and members of La Dame Blanche offered to make the crossing to meet with a man who was to found a new platoon. Dressed as peasant women, the two girls, with an experienced guide who was carrying a sack of potatoes that he was supposedly taking to a farm, made their way through thick forest. Arriving at a small farm, they were stopped by Germans who demanded identity cards. Their guide was taken away and the young women waited nervously for some hours. Their guide returned safely but without the potatoes. Continuing their journey, they managed to cross the border scrambling through a hole in the barbed wire barrier. Arriving in France they stayed one night with a sympathetic French farmer, then spent a day travelling on foot and by river to the town of Charleville, making detours to avoid German soldiers. On one occasion, seeing German soldiers in the town, they dived into a nearby house for safety; the occupants were apparently not surprised and gave them shelter. Eventually the two young women made contact with M. Dommelier and Mme. Grafetiaux and passed on instructions from La Dame Blanche for setting up a new train-watching post at Charleville. Their mission accomplished, the two girls made their long way home.
La Dame Blanche houses were sometimes raided, necessitating quick thinking on the part of agents. La Dame Blanche used a large house on the banks of the River Meuse as its secretariat, the place where reports were typed up and prepared for sending to British intelligence. Acting on information in an anonymous letter, the German secret police raided the house. When they arrived, two couriers were leaving the house; they were seized and the police entered the house where they found Madame Goessels, a highly respectable 35-year-old woman who ran the secretariat, two brothers – Louise and Antony Collard, agents of La Dame Blanche – and some intelligence reports. The police arrested everyone and discovered the intelligence reports. During their first interrogation, the quick-witted Mme. Goessels, who did not deny her involvement, claimed that one of the couriers was her lover, who knew nothing about her espionage activities and the other was just his friend. Her courage and quick thinking saved the lives of the couriers, but the Collards were later executed. Madame Goessels was initially sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to imprisonment with hard labour.
Many other female agents were caught, arrested, interrogated and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour either in St Léonard prison in Liège or the German prison at Siegburg. Exact figures are difficult to obtain but probably around 300 women were imprisoned at Siegburg during the war, having been convicted of spying for the Allies. Conditions in the prison were extremely harsh. Until 1917 women were forced to wear prison clothing – ankle-length woollen or grey dresses with aprons and neckerchiefs – and were kept in cells 12ft long, 8ft wide and 9ft high. Food consisted of black bread, a vegetable soup often containing insects, black coffee and thin gruel. Lights were switched off early and women spent up to fifteen hours a day in darkness. Sanitation was primitive – dysentery, typhoid and TB were rife – and there was virtually no medical care. Wo
men supported each other, keeping up morale and nursing each other when sick. They also attempted in whatever ways they could to continue their resistance and defy the Germans; on one notable occasion they went on strike, refusing to make shells and grenades.
Women who were imprisoned in Siegburg included Louise Thuliez, who had been arrested with Edith Cavell for helping Allied soldiers to escape capture. She had initially been sentenced to death but, following the furore after Cavell’s execution, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and penal servitude. Despite the harsh conditions, she survived the war. Another was Jeanne Delwaide, who was one of the earliest recruits to La Dame Blanche and a significant catch because of her importance in the organization. Arrested in 1917, she was taken first to prison in Namur where she was kept in solitary confinement. Dewé smuggled in a letter urging her to ‘Remember you are a soldier. Remember your oath. Deny everything.’ Despite seven months of intense interrogation, Delwaide remained true to her oath, so helping to protect the leaders of La Dame Blanche. Brought to trial she was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour and eventually sent to Siegburg. Other women too, such as Madame Goessels, refused to disclose any information despite abusive interrogation.
Frenchwoman Louise de Bettignies was among the women who were imprisoned in Siegburg during the war, one of the ringleaders of the aforementioned strike, who was trained by British intelligence and helped Allied soldiers to escape capture. She also collected information from informants in occupied France which she passed on to British intelligence. Arrested in 1915, she was initially sentenced to death but this was commuted to penal servitude and she was sent to Siegburg, where she died in September 1918.
Louise de Bettignies
SOMETIMES DESCRIBED AS the ‘Joan of Arc of the North’, because of her courage, Louise de Bettignies was born in 1880 in St Amand, France, into a once-wealthy family. She was well educated at Girton College, Oxford, spoke many languages and was a devout Catholic. Accounts describe her as an active, independent-minded woman. When war began both French and British intelligence approached her to work for them but she chose to work for British intelligence, reporting to a Major Kirke. She was given some training in codes and other spy craft, then, under the assumed name Alice Dubois, began to work for the British in February 1915. From spring 1915 a young Frenchwoman, Leonie Vanhoutte – alias Charlotte Lameron – became her close assistant. Bettignies set up an extremely effective network around Lille, consisting of eighty people who gathered a wealth of sensitive military information such as the positioning of artillery batteries, munition stores, troop placements and movements, and information about airfields. Information was passed to British intelligence within 24 hours. De Bettignies headed the team of agents and couriers but also took many personal risks herself often carrying the information, on thin sheets of Japanese paper, to the Netherlands and making frequent trips to Britain. Vanhoutte was captured on 25 September 1915 and imprisoned in Saint-Gilles prison. Postcards from someone called ‘Alice’ were found in her boarding house. De Bettignies was captured at Tournai on 20 October 1915 as she was trying to cross the Franco-Belgian border using false identification papers. She was initially taken to Saint-Gilles prison, where she and Vanhoutte communicated with each other by tapping Morse code on the walls, and in March 1916 was charged with espionage and sentenced to death, although the German war council was unable to prove that she was Alice Dubois. The sentence was commuted to fifteen years’ hard labour and she, together with Vanhoutte, was sent to Siegburg prison, near Cologne, where she continued acts of defiance, refusing to produce arms for the German army and instigating an uprising in the prison. She died on 17 September 1918 from complications during an operation. The British intelligence service recorded that De Bettignies had provided an ‘invaluable’ service. Following the war De Bettignies’ body was repatriated and she was posthumously awarded the Légion d’honneur, the Croix de Guerre, an OBE and the Palm medal – the British military decoration for outstanding bravery. A memorial statue was erected in Lille in 1927.
Sentenced to death
By and large the Germans sentenced women spies to penal servitude rather than death but Edith Cavell was not the only woman who was executed for assisting the Allies. Another was Gabrielle Petit, although at the time her death passed almost unnoticed. Petit was born in Tournai, Belgium, in 1893 into a modest family. Following her mother’s death, she was raised in a Catholic boarding school. As a teenager she worked as a shop assistant in Brussels, then when war broke out she joined the Belgian Red Cross to work as a nurse. In 1914 she helped her injured soldier fiancé to escape into the Netherlands, and subsequently passed on information about German troops that she had obtained during the trip to British intelligence. They were impressed, gave her some training and hired her to spy on the German army. Using a number of false identities, she gathered information on troop movements and military technology that she passed on to British intelligence. Gabrielle Petit also worked with the Resistance movement, distributing the clandestine newsletter La Libre Belgique and helping the underground mail service Le Mot du Soldat which operated between Belgian soldiers on the front line and their families. Petit was betrayed and was captured in February 1916 and charged with espionage. Imprisoned in Brussels, she refused to reveal the identities of other agents, and was shot by firing squad on 1 April 1916. Aged 23, she went stoicly and defiantly to her death, refusing a blindfold and shouting ‘Vive la Belgique’. Unlike Cavell, Petit’s achievements and execution went virtually unnoticed at the time. After the war, however, she became a Belgian national heroine and a monument honouring her was erected in Brussels and a square in her hometown of Tournai was named after her.
Another Belgian woman executed for espionage was 47-year-old Elise Grandprez. She initially sheltered Allied soldiers and then, with her brothers and sister Marie, acted as a courier and ran a train observation post. She and her sister worked at night writing intelligence reports in invisible ink on wrapping paper or between the printed material on magazine pages before taking them to Liège. In January 1917 the whole family was arrested together with two other agents and Elise, her brother Constant, and one of their colleagues were sentenced to death and shot by firing squad. It is said that Elise Grandprez, a highly patriotic woman, made three small Belgian flags out of material brought into the prison for her by a nun. As she faced the firing squad, she gave two of the flags to the men with her, and pressed the other to her heart.
‘I will show them that a Belgian woman knows how to die.’
(Gabrielle Petit. Inscribed on her monument, Place St Jean, Brussels)
Two other women shot on charges of spying for the Allies were two young Flemish peasant women, Emilie Schattermann and Léonie Rameloo, aged 21 and 22 respectively. They lived in a small village on the Belgian-Dutch border and helped refugees to escape as well as acting as frontier guards for Louise de Bettignies and other agents in the Lille area. Caught with another agent, they were executed by firing squad on 12 September 1917.
The bravery and patriotism of women such as Louise de Bettignies, Louise Thuliez and the women of La Dame Blanche who risked their lives to assist the Allied cause was extraordinary but despite this most of their names have been lost. In fact, even allowing for some of the post-war memorials, very few people know the names of those involved, or even the existence of the Resistance and espionage networks that operated in the occupied countries during the First World War. The fact that they existed and that so many women risked their lives for patriotic and honourable motives completely challenges and undermines the stereotypical views presented by spy novelists and spymasters such as Hamil Grant. These were not passive women, or sexual vamps; they were by and large ‘ordinary women’ of great courage and patriotism who were prepared to risk their lives in the extraordinary conditions of wartime and the reality of occupying forces. They had considerable successes: according to Henry Landau during the last eighteen months of the war La Dame Blanche was supplyin
g the Allies with more than 75 per cent of the intelligence coming out of occupied Belgium and France. Immediately after the war, their contribution to the Allied war effort was recognized. All members of La Dame Blanche were awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE), usually in formalized military ceremonies in Belgium. Money was also provided to meet expense and hardship claims. Memorials to some of the women were also erected in their localities. Even though there are extensive archives about La Dame Blanche in Belgium, the existence of its members is hardly remembered today and the network receives no coverage in most histories of the First World War. The reasons for this neglect are debatable. According to historian Tammy Proctor, their existence may have been played down for propaganda reasons at the time: to have highlighted an efficient and active espionage service in Belgium might have undermined the propaganda image of Belgium as a bleeding, victimized and raped nation; it may also be because the contribution of women to war, as in most fields, is often overlooked. Either way, it is only women such as Mata Hari, portrayed as a sexual vamp, and Edith Cavell, presented as the patriotic martyr, who have stuck in the public mind, rather than the women of La Dame Blanche.
Walking a tightrope
One woman who spied for Britain in Belgium during the First World War gained the German Iron Cross as well as French and British decorations for ‘distinguished gallantry’. Marthe Cnockaert McKenna was born in Belgium in 1892, and for two years during the First World War she walked a daily tightrope, working as a nurse in a German military hospital while at the same time spying for British military intelligence. After the war she wrote a book entitled I Was a Spy!– it was published in 1932 and described her activities as a spy in exciting detail.