INVISIBLE SPIES
In the decade leading up to the First World War in 1914, Britain was in a heightened state of alert over German spies operating both within and outside of the country. By 1909 the fear of German spies had risen to fever pitch, bordering on a national paranoia. Although this apprehension was exaggerated, Germany’s wider threat to the stability of Western Europe was not. In the early 1900s spying was extended to colonial territories; and South Africa (part of the vast British Empire) became fertile territory for Britain to recruit intelligence officers and agents to conduct espionage against German-occupied regions, like south-east Africa. Between the end of the Boer War in 1902 and the outbreak of the First World War, British agents gathered intelligence on new weapons that the Germans were rumoured to be developing, in particular a new gun. The diamond mining regions of South Africa, with their international connections, created an ideal cover under which British spies could travel and observe the state of Germany’s military forces in the region, including any mobilisation or increase in those forces.1
Concerns about Germany’s expansionist ambitions, especially in Europe, were ultimately proven to be correct. On 4 August 1914, German forces crossed the border into Belgium and occupied the country for the next four years. Britain declared war on Germany. Neighbouring Holland and France remained neutral and unoccupied, and they would become important bases from which to conduct espionage and intelligence missions for both Britain and Germany.
On 13 August 1914, the War Office in London despatched a number of special army personnel to France under the direction of Major (later General Sir) Walter Kirke.2 They were the embryonic Intelligence Corps and consisted of one major, four captains, seven lieutenants and over
forty ‘scouts’; the latter would be sent out to gain intelligence from reconnaissance missions. There were no women among them, but that would change three years later. War was very much a male domain, and women were not permitted to serve in fighting forces or on the front line. However, it would not be long into the conflict before civilian women began to play a crucial role as intelligencers and spies.
Before 1914, women had already been working as nurses and governesses across Europe. After the outbreak of war, some of these women were prepared to operate behind enemy lines, though they did not see themselves as spies. Often their common link was a knowledge of languages, and none had had any prior intelligence training. Female spies behind enemy lines were valuable because they were inconspicuous. Their male counterparts stood out in a population where most younger men were fighting with their regiment; young men not in uniform immediately fell under suspicion of espionage and were arrested. Women could move much more freely in occupied countries, using their ‘invisibility’ to gather and deliver sensitive and valuable information for the Allies.3 Given this relative freedom, some male spies occasionally disguised themselves as women.
Edith Cavell
The woman who is most synonymous with heroism in the First World War is the British nurse Edith Cavell, who aided French and British soldiers to escape from Belgium into neutral Holland.
At the outbreak of war in 1914, Edith Cavell was forty-eight years old and, since 1902, had worked as a nurse at 149 Rue de la Culture in Brussels. From August 1914, it is well known that she headed an escape organisation, smuggling British and French soldiers from Brussels into neutral Holland, and Belgians who wished to join their king in exile. It was perilous work and involved many secret meetings in her home.4 With Belgian architect Philippe Baucq, she founded a clandestine organisation which came to be known as the Cavell–Baucq Organisation. She recruited women and men who were prepared to risk their lives to save wounded soldiers and escort them out of enemy-occupied Belgium. She used guides to escort soldiers over the border and engaged forgers to provide fake identity papers. Further precise details of how she
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operated are scant as she left no paper trail and there are no operational files for her organisation in a national archive. More insight can be gleaned about the individuals who worked for her than about Cavell’s own clandestine life. Among them were Abbé Vallez, whose home was used as a safe house on the French side of the Belgium border. In her network were Belgian aristocratic women like Princess Marie de Croy. Marie de Croy was born in London in 1875 to a British mother, Elizabeth Mary Parnell, and a Belgian father, Prince Alfred Emmanuel de Croy. When war broke out, de Croy was staying with a friend in England, Violet Cavendish-Bentinck, whose mother, Louisa Scott, was well connected as the maternal grandmother of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and great-grandmother of Elizabeth II. De Croy left England for Château de Bellignies, her ancestral home in Belgium, which was being used as a hospital by Cavell. She went on to shelter Henri Giraud, then a junior French officer (and future general and leader of the Free French Forces), whose escape had been assisted by Cavell.
Other women aiding Cavell were Countess Jeanne de Belleville, whose stately home was a safe house at Montignies-sur-Roc, and Louise Thuliez, a French school teacher who operated as a guide for the organisation.5 It is believed that around 15,000 French soldiers were secretly escorted into Holland by Cavell’s organisation. The exact number of British escapers is harder to ascertain, but thought to be in the hundreds.6
On 20 July 1915, Cavell received a visit from Count de Borchgrave, whose daughter was working as a nurse for Cavell. Borchgrave’s wife was living in England at the time.7 The purpose of his visit is unclear, but when he arrived at Rue de la Culture he found three plainclothes Germans searching Cavell’s house for papers. Nothing was said to him by Cavell or the men. As Borchgrave left, one of the men signalled to another man to follow him. The following morning a young English girl, whom the Count did not know, arrived at his home with a message from Cavell. It was to be delivered urgently to the Belgian consul in Rotterdam and to Cavell’s mother in England to warn them both about German spies operating in the UK and urging them not to give any information about Cavell’s whereabouts in Belgium. Undercover
German spies in Britain were trying to obtain details about her by penetrating her circle of family and friends. Although MI5 was already tracking most of the German spies, there was a need to safeguard Cavell’s security and operations in Belgium.
Cavell warned them about one man whom she described as having ‘a reddish face, fair, short military moustache and a very cockney accent’, and who had admitted to her that he visited England whenever he wanted.8 Count de Borchgrave wrote to his wife in England the same day. When she received the letter eight days later, she immediately sent it to the local authorities to forward on to Cavell’s mother, whose address she did not have. The local authorities passed it to MI5, who posted it to Cavell’s mother.9 By the time Mrs Cavell received the warning, her daughter was already dead.
With informers everywhere, the risk of betrayal was high and Cavell had known it. She was betrayed, arrested on 5 August 1915 and taken to St Gilles prison in Brussels.10 At her two-day trial that October, Cavell was accused of hiding officers in her house and at a convent, then escorting them by night via trams to Brussels station to board a train for the Dutch border.11 Crucially, what sealed her fate were allegations that she, along with Prince Reginald de Croy and Countess de Belleville, was running an espionage organisation.
Cavell and thirty-five members of her organisation, thirteen of whom were women, faced charges. Twenty-six were found guilty and five received the death sentence.12 Cavell and Philippe Baucq, who had forged identity papers for her and planned escape routes, were sentenced to death by firing squad. Miss Louise Thuliez, Countess de Belleville of Montignies-sur-Roc, and Princess de Croy all stood trial during October 1915 on charges of espionage. The trial initially condemned them to death, but their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in the case of Thuliez and Belleville, and ten years in jail for Princess de Croy.13 Thuliez was held in a cell with Cavell and was the last person to say goodbye to her before her execution.
In the weeks before her death, Cavell reflected on the meaning of her life. She was visited in prison by a British chaplain, Revd H. Stirling Gahan. He found her brave in the face of her imminent fate. She said to him: ‘I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.
I thank God for these ten weeks quiet before the end. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.’14
At 2 a.m. on 12 October 1915 Cavell and Baucq were taken to the execution ground of Tir National in Brussels and shot.15 Afterwards, the German chaplain who was present at the execution reported to Revd Gahan that Cavell was ‘brave and bright to the last. She professed her Christian faith and that she was glad to die for her country.’16 Cavell’s execution was widely covered in the newspapers and provoked condemnation and shock in wartime Britain. Vernon Kell, the head of MI5, received photographs in the post from the French authorities of the execution ground and Cavell’s grave with its simple wooden cross.17 He wrote a compassionate letter to her mother and enclosed the photographs in the hope that it would be helpful to her in her grief. MI5 did not officially exist then, and Mrs Cavell had no idea that Kell was the head of the Security Service. She replied to him via the War Office, using black-edged notepaper, as was customary at the time of bereavement in a household. She expressed her appreciation at receiving the photographs during her ‘time of great loss’.18 The letter and photographs, in declassified files, still have the power to move the reader over a hundred years later.
British intelligence mounted an investigation into Cavell’s death, conducted jointly by MI5 and MI1(c). They passed her case to British officers of the Intelligence Corps, based in France, working on military intelligence and running agents behind enemy lines.19 They succeeded in identifying Cavell’s betrayer as a man called Georges Gaston Quien.20 Quien was interrogated three times by Captain Sigismund Payne Best (Intelligence Corps), who later joined SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service) and was betrayed in the famous Venlo incident of November 1939, when two MI6 officers were arrested on the Dutch–German border in a sting operation by the Germans. Quien claimed to have been drafted into Cavell’s organisation for a few days and ferried messages from Cavell and Princess de Croy to Prince de Ligna and Lieutenant Colonel Desprey in Holland. Quien told Payne Best that he was arrested by the Germans on 19 November 1915, having arrived at the organisation’s headquarters from a mission in Holland to find Cavell and much of her network had been arrested. He was kept in solitary
confinement at St Gilles prison from November 1915 to 23 July 1916, then transferred to a civilian prison at Sennelager and finally an internment camp in Switzerland.
Suspicions in Cavell’s organisation about Quien possibly being a German agent started to materialise after he told different stories to people about his background and identity as a doctor, a flying officer and a Frenchman.21 Payne Best struggled to obtain a true picture from his interrogations and concluded that Quien’s account lacked both detail and documentary evidence to support his version of events.
Quien was sentenced to death for his betrayal of Cavell. Princess de Croy was among the women who gave evidence at his trial.
A Spy?
Opinion has been divided for decades on whether Edith Cavell was a spy behind enemy lines for the British Secret Service in the First World War. With the benefit of declassified files in Britain and Belgium it is now possible to answer this question conclusively and reveal that Cavell performed espionage and ran a spy network for British intelligence. This was conducted alongside her work in the escape and evasion of Allied soldiers. Of relevance is the fact that the Germans believed she was guilty of espionage and executed her for that reason.
After Cavell’s death, and on the instructions of British intelligence, Payne Best interviewed a number of Belgian women who had been part of her clandestine organisation.22 Their testimonies provide a much clearer idea of their activities and confirm that the Cavell–Baucq organisation was engaged in intelligence gathering. (It is not possible to verify whether Cavell set up this intelligence operation under the formal direction of the British Secret Service because SIS/MI6 does not release its files.) Whether formally or informally working for the British, Cavell was recognised as the organisation’s leader. Miss Louise Thuliez, Countess de Belleville, Elise Grandprez and Princess de Croy were among the prominent women engaged in intelligence gathering for Cavell. Also included was Princess de Croy’s cook, Charlotte Matha.
Scant details survive about these women’s backgrounds and how they were recruited but it was primarily via family members and trusted
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friends. They had no formal training and used their judgement on what information would be useful to British intelligence. They worked with Hermann Capiau, an engineer by profession, who guided soldiers to Cavell. He was witness to their intelligence work and wrote a report which reveals as much.23
Madame L’Hotelier was another member of Cavell’s network who was questioned by Payne Best. She relayed how she had been imprisoned in eight jails for sheltering a French agent who was subsequently arrested and taken prisoner by the Germans on the Dutch border.
Louise Thuliez and Mrs Cavenaile had direct contact with British and French intelligence agents.24 Thuliez travelled to Cambrai to obtain plans of German ammunition depots and took the diagrams to an architect, Mr Bauk, in Brussels, to be passed on to his British contact. It was while she was with Bauk that she was arrested by the Germans on 31 January 1915.25 Her sister, Mrs Aubertine Houet, who was married to a telegraphist, also worked for Cavell. Thuliez and Houet corresponded in invisible ink.26 Their letters were carried by soldiers from Siburg to Brussels, where they were copied and forwarded to MI1(c) officers in Saint-Waast, northern France. Through Houet, British intelligence received details of the whereabouts of men who were suspected of working for the Germans as agents and spies. This is espionage and counter-espionage work, not escape and evasion.
With the constant threat of discovery, there were precarious moments for Cavell’s agents – as in the case of Mrs Bodard who, fearing imminent arrest, bundled up and hid incriminating papers and special maps to be used in crossing the frontier.
Further insights into this clandestine world can be found in the National Archives of Belgium, including interviews with others who worked with Cavell. One testimony is provided by Octave Malice, who confirmed that he and the network sheltered English soldiers at the home of Baucq.27 Baucq handed letters to the soldiers to post once they were back in England. Malice first met Cavell at a house on Rue de la Culture, and in subsequent days was introduced to some of Cavell’s senior agents, Prince Reginald de Croy, Mr Capiau and Miss Thuliez. Malice was given folders of material by Capiau to deliver to a duke at Roosendaal in Holland. It is clear that Malice was recruited by Cavell
as an important courier, for the purpose of espionage, and he operated via her agents who acted as handlers and gave him his instructions.
Malice undertook intelligence work alongside escape and evasion; frequently, the lines between them were blurred. On 30 September 1914 Malice escorted nine evaders to the military hospital at Mons, and a further twelve English soldiers on 5 October. A week later, on 11 October, he was asked by a Miss Manners and Miss Hozier, who were involved with the Cavell network, to undertake a secret mission to the Admiralty in London. No further details have emerged about these two women, but it is known that Malice escorted a seriously injured English soldier to Villerot and on to Dunkirk. Three days later, they left by boat for Dover. Malice recalled how he stayed with Winston Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty); after three days of rest, Malice left the Admiralty and returned to Belgium via Folkestone. MI1(c) had one of its principal offices in Folkestone, although Malice does not mention whether he met any intelligence officers there. He returned to the English Ambulance Service in Mons and handed over the precious mail from London.28
Malice’s secret mission to the Admiralty provides a rare glimpse into the high levels at which at least one of Cavell’s agents was operating, and a concrete link between her organisation and British intelligence in Whitehall.
A wide network of Belgian aristocrats worked for Cavell, among them Baron and Baroness Crombrugge, who escorted soldiers to the Dutch border. They also worked with the English Ambulance Service in Mons. Intelligence was written on handkerchiefs and cloths which were then sewn into escapers’ clothes and hidden in the soles of their shoes.
Marie Charlet had been rescuing soldiers for Cavell since September 1914, including sheltering in her own home two aristocrats who were attached to the French secret service.29 On 6 September 1914 she escorted eleven Belgian prisoners of war to the frontier to rejoin their battalion. She hid Belgian spies in her home, including Joseph Goris, who undertook the clandestine mail service for British intelligence behind the lines in Belgium; he was given a room in Charlet’s house for sorting that mail. The correspondence was then taken to whoever it was
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intended for within the network, carried by a woman called Marie Pinnoc. Charlet also hid weapons and pigeons for Cavell’s network. Pigeons were important carriers of secret messages, which were placed in tiny capsules tagged to their legs; the birds would then fly back to their loft in France, which was being run by British intelligence officers of MI1(c).
Charlet was arrested by the Germans on 22 June 1916. In prison, she was placed in solitary confinement for twenty-one months, but never gave anything away. She was transferred to a harsh labour camp, which she survived until the Armistice brought her release. In her testimony she said that she suffered torture by the guards during her long internment, but she never regretted what she had done for her country.
It is clear that Cavell ran both male and female agents in her intelligence network. This discovery is significant because, historically, her spy status has been ambiguous or contested. Until recent times, a combination of official secrecy and lack of evidence has obscured her true legacy not only as a spy, but as a spymistress – a woman who founded, established and ran the beginnings of an amateur intelligence network behind enemy lines for SIS. That Cavell was an exceptionally important spymistress for the British Secret Service may explain why an experienced SIS officer, Payne Best, conducted the investigation into the betrayal that led to her execution.
The Alice Service
The fact that Edith Cavell, as a woman, headed an espionage organisation in wartime was not unique. Women were very capable of setting up and running intelligence networks for the British Secret Service. Louise de Bettignies, for instance, founded the Alice Service in January 1915, a spy network for the British that covered the region of Lille and had deep connections to agents in Brussels.
Born in 1880, Bettignies was the daughter of a Lille porcelain manufacturer, a devout Catholic, educated at Girton College, Cambridge, and spoke several languages.30 Prior to 1914, she was employed as a governess to nobility in Austria and Italy. At the outbreak of war, she joined the Red Cross and was stationed in Lille when the Germans occupied the region. When she escaped to England the following year,
she brought valuable information about the German military positions and offered herself to British intelligence. She received no formal training (which was no different for male recruits at this time), except a briefing from intelligence officers on invisible inks, safe houses, dead letter boxes and codes. She operated under the pseudonym Alice Dubois and received a salary from British intelligence. In January 1915 she left England for Lille to set up a clandestine headquarters from her family home. She recruited friends and family into the nascent network.
Bettignies represented ‘the beginning of a new phase in espionage, when women were trained to fight and spy for their countries in resistance movements’.31 The women were trained in personal security and how to hide in plain sight, and were instructed on the kind of information that was needed about the enemy. They also learnt how to identify German battalions and regiments, uniforms and insignia – such details offered vital eye-witness evidence to enable British intelligence to assess the types of enemy forces and troops being moved towards the front line. They were thus in essence operating as intelligencers. Bettignies herself operated under different guises, as a teacher, peasant and lace seller. Messages were hidden inside rosaries and the headdress of Catholic nuns. The Alice Service helped Allied POWs to the borders, but also gathered intelligence on German troop movements, camouflaged installations and military positions that was of great value to the British. Bettignies sent secret messages about the precise time and date that the imperial train was carrying the Kaiser of Germany to the front line at Lille. The British attempted to bomb the train, but missed it.
Bettignies was so successful in her intelligence work that she was dubbed ‘the Queen of spies’ by officers in Military Intelligence.32 General Sir Walter Kirke, British director of Military Intelligence at headquarters in France, described her as a ‘regular, modern Joan of Arc’.33 She travelled between France and England more than a dozen times for British intelligence and commanded men and women of all ages. One of the women known to have operated as an agent for the Alice Service was Marie Leonie Vanhoutte (aka ‘Charlotte’). Twentyseven-year-old Vanhoutte came from Roubaix, France, and worked on the French–Belgian border. She and Bettignies expanded the Alice Service around Cambrai, Valenciennes and Saint-Quentin. Reports of
what they witnessed of German troop activities were secretly ferried through Belgium and Holland. Vanhoutte was arrested on 24 September 1915, survived the rest of the war in prison, but gave away Bettignies during brutal interrogation by the German secret police.
On 20 October 1915, Bettignies was arrested near Tournai and was found to be carrying forged passes. Just prior to her arrest, she had managed to alert French intelligence to the fact that the Germans planned an offensive at Verdun in early 1916, but her information was mistrusted and ignored. She was taken to St Gilles prison in Brussels and later sentenced to death, which was commuted to hard labour. The Alice Service did not survive her arrest and disintegrated without its visionary leader.
Bettignies was held in a punishment cell in solitary confinement and, in midwinter, issued only with thin cotton blankets – treatment intended to break her spirit. She contracted pneumonia and was close to death. She recovered, only to develop a small tumour on the breast. She was operated on in the prison, but it was unsuccessful. She died in prison on 27 September 1918, aged thirty-eight, just six weeks before the end of the war. After the Armistice, she received a full military funeral, her coffin draped in the French flag, placed on a gun-carriage and escorted through the streets of Cologne to the railway station. The French General Deboutte and General Simon of the British Army marched behind her coffin. Her body was laid to rest in Lille.
General Sir Walter Kirke wrote: ‘I cannot speak too highly of the bravery, devotion, and patriotism of this young lady. Her services to British intelligence . . . were simply invaluable.’34
The Woman Who Saved London
When Marthe Cnockaert (later McKenna) was first approached by her friend Lucelle Deldonck to spy for the British she was horrified. Unbeknownst to her, following the occupation of Belgium by German forces in August 1914 Lucelle had begun operating as a courier behind enemy lines. Marthe started work as a nurse at the hospital in Roulers, West Flanders, in January 1915, helping German soldiers wounded on the front line. Born in Westroosebeke in 1892, Marthe hated the occupation and secretly wanted to support the Allies but, as she admitted,
she was afraid of a German firing-party in the cold dawn.35 And things became more complicated for her after the Germans asked her to betray fellow Belgians. For a short time, she became a spy for both the Germans and the British. She offered information to the Germans which she believed would not harm Belgians or the British, but which her handler ‘Otto’ would believe to be important.
She was honest about the dilemmas she faced and admitted to feeling guilty if the intelligence she passed to the British led to the fatality of German soldiers. Her situation changed after the sudden death of her German handler, bringing an end to her double life, and she made a decision to work solely for the British. One of her first actions was to undertake, alongside another secret Belgian agent, the dangerous task of dynamiting a German ammunition depot. Overcoming her fear of death by firing squad, she went on to provide British intelligence with information that would ultimately save London.
By day, Marthe gathered intelligence from wounded German soldiers in the hospital. In the evenings she worked as a waitress at her parents’ café and this gave her another opportunity to pick up information from the conversations of German officers and soldiers. The intelligence was passed to an intermediary. Marthe worked with two other female agents, one of whom she only knew as ‘Canteen Ma’, a vegetable seller, and the other an agent called ‘No. 63’. Canteen Ma was an older woman whose activities did not arouse suspicion as she travelled the countryside selling her vegetables. She was able to deliver coded messages and instructions to Marthe. Canteen Ma disappeared and her fate remains unknown. Marthe never met No. 63, who dropped weekly reports for the Allies through the window of a small shop in Westroosebeke. As a result of her intelligence work, the Allies were able to bomb military targets – ordnance, train and ammunition depots.
In May 1916, Marthe was in the shop when German Commander Fashugel entered with one of his lieutenants. He spoke about a church parade for a whole battalion of German soldiers the following day. He turned to Marthe and asked if she would bring some of the wounded soldiers to the service. She knew that if she passed this information to the chemist on the square, it would cross the frontier by dawn; a coded message would be sent to Allied commanders such that Westroosebeke
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would receive a visit from their bombers. The fact that she was going to be at the parade with wounded German soldiers did not deter her from acting.
The following day, just as the bishop was finishing the morning service, there came the roar of Allied aircraft overhead, dropping their bombs. The battalion, including Commander Fashugel, was virtually wiped out, with just a handful of survivors and deserters. Marthe survived. The German NCOs and officers brought their heavily wounded casualties to one area and awaited the ambulances. One of the officers despatched Marthe with a lorry to attend to the men at the German hospital. The irony for Marthe was not lost – she had been responsible for the intelligence that had led to all this suffering. It was a traumatic experience for her: she coped by refusing to let herself think.36
In the autumn, the German authorities asked her to requisition medical supplies which she was to collect from Rumbelle aerodrome.37 It was the perfect excuse for her to observe the aerodrome to provide intelligence for the Allies without arousing suspicion. For weeks, she had received messages asking for intelligence on the airfield and now was her chance.
The hospital porter who delivered the requisition form commented to her that all gossip in the canteen pointed to a massive raid on England soon that would cripple the country and evoke fear in the British population. This was supported by comments from Sergeant Schweitzer, who had been posted to the aerodrome and already knew Marthe from the hospital. She charmed Schweitzer, and he boasted that a colossal raid on London was planned for 1 October; Heinrich Mathy, commander of Zeppelin air raids on London, was to lead eleven Zeppelins, two from Bruges and the rest from Germany. Schweitzer then started to made advances, grabbing and kissing Marthe. She struggled and screamed. It alerted one of the pilots on duty nearby who rushed to her aid. The pilot recognised her as the nurse who had tended him when he was wounded. Schweitzer was dealt with harshly for his behaviour. The pilot invited her to come back that same evening to dine with him at the aerodrome.
At dusk, as she crossed the complex, she took a mental snapshot of the scene around her. She spied five single-seater biplanes of a type that
she had not seen before. She made an innocent comment to the lieutenant about the planes. He had already consumed a fair amount of alcohol, and he trusted her. He told her the planes were little Albatrosses and were designed for speed. ‘They climb like rockets,’ he said, ‘answer to the slightest touch, and what is better, go a good twenty miles faster than anything the Allies can put in the air.’38
After supper, while the lieutenant left the room to shout to his batman for more brandy, Marthe saw two sets of papers: one was authorisation for the lieutenant’s leave for Germany, and the other was a half-written report on the new biplanes. She swapped the papers inside each envelope, knowing that the report on the biplanes would mistakenly be sent to the brigade major (who was supposed to authorise the form for the lieutenant’s leave). Marthe knew the brigade major’s clerk, Stephan, and, although he was not working for the Allies, he liked her and occasionally passed her useful information. She knew that he would copy the report for her.
The lieutenant drank more brandy and his tongue became looser. He regaled her with tales of his bravery and how that coming Friday he was due to escort some heavy bombers on a night raid against the British line at Poperinghe in the region of West Flanders. Leaving the aerodrome, Marthe went straight to the chemist’s shop to send a coded message about the Zeppelin raid on London and the bombing of Poperinghe. This was not without danger: there was a curfew in place, and she only had a permit to travel in and out of the hospital, not to private houses or shops. There was a tense moment as police detained her outside the chemist, but she made an excuse about needing urgent medicine for her father and the police allowed her to enter.
The following morning, she used a trusted contact called Alphonse to contact the clerk at the aerodrome for a copy of the report on the biplanes. Within hours, Stephan arrived at the shop with the report. But it was too big to pass over the counter without arousing suspicion. Marthe cut the paper sheets into strips and numbered them, then sewed them into the hem of an old skirt. When Canteen Ma arrived the following day with her usual haul of vegetables, the old skirt was handed over to her and onwards to British intelligence. British bombers were duly scrambled and headed for Rumbelle aerodrome to attack the
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biplanes before they could take off. But they arrived too late, and instead met the German bombers already en route for Poperinghe. A furious dogfight took place overhead, with losses on both sides. The German planes continued to Poperinghe, but the town was prepared with its defensive barrage. One German aircraft fell and the others left without inflicting any serious damage. Poperinghe survived.
At 5 p.m. on 1 October Marthe heard the drone of Zeppelin engines overhead. As she stared up into the darkening sky, she prayed that Commander Mathy and his Zeppelins would fail. She did not hear about the result of the raid until years later. Mathy died that night. The defences of London were well prepared and the Zeppelin L31 was shot down over Potters Bar, to the north of London. Through the intelligence she had passed to the British via her channels, Marthe saved London, and Germany lost its foremost air commanders.
The Risks
The extent of Marthe’s work behind the lines was not limited to providing intelligence on German raids. She and her friend Alphonse discovered a series of underground medieval sewers that ran under a German ammunition dump.39 Taking the initiative, she persuaded him to help in a pre-planned operation, descending into the sewers in the middle of the night and surfacing, unnoticed, through a cover near to the ammunition dump. They placed two sticks of dynamite at strategic points and returned to the hospital where they worked. That night the ammunition dump was destroyed. The Germans never worked out who had done it or how.
Marthe could not evade the Germans forever, and in 1916 she was suspected of espionage, arrested and questioned by the police, and detained behind bars. In prison she was threatened with the one fear that had initially prevented her from working as a spy for the British – the firing squad at dawn. She was scared and intimidated, but denied everything and held her nerve. With little food and drink, and desperately cold, she became ill and suffered periods of semi-consciousness. Her mother was permitted to visit her once and brought extra food. She raised Marthe’s spirits by informing her that the German surgeons and staff at the Roulers hospital were going to give her a good character
reference at the court martial. She was transferred to the military hospital in Ghent.
At her trial in November 1916 she was sentenced to be executed at dawn on a day of the court’s choosing. Defiant, she told the court that she did not recognise the German court or its verdict, and ‘If you think the might of Germany can keep down the spirit of the oppressed Belgian nation, you are mistaken. You will have to arrest, imprison and murder every man, woman and child born with the spirit of freedom in Belgium . . . Vive la Belgique! Vive les Allies!’
The months passed in prison and Marthe grew frail, but she was not shot. Because of her dedication to German soldiers in the hospital and her consequent award of an Iron Cross, her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. She spent the remainder of the war in Ghent prison and was liberated by Allied soldiers.
She returned to her former home in Westroosebeke, of which not a single brick was still standing. A kind young British officer came over to her and asked if the rubble had been her home. He was the man she married a short time later and they settled in Belgium.
Defiance and Heroism
Nurses like Marthe Cnockaert and Edith Cavell worked tirelessly to provide medical care and pastoral support to wounded soldiers. They were the maternal figures who comforted the men after the horrors of the battlefields, but these women, already well established and living in German-occupied Belgium, were also in a unique position to help British intelligence behind the lines. Alongside their daily work, they risked their lives to smuggle Allied soldiers and enable their escape back to England or France. Aiding soldiers to escape was dangerous enough, and carried the risk of arrest and imprisonment, even a death sentence, but they were prepared to go yet further and engage in intelligence activities for the British.
Today, Marthe’s legacy is largely unknown by the public in narratives of women’s history, even less so in the wider telling of the First World War. On the other hand, Edith Cavell has become a household name, and it has been possible to say, with certainty, that she was a spy for the British. There is an important, oft unacknowledged, dimension
to her legacy – that her defiance and heroism in 1915 inspired women to take up resistance and intelligence activities for the remainder of the First World War. But her legacy goes further. Cavell could not have anticipated during her lifetime that her spirit of resistance would go on to inspire a new generation of women behind enemy lines two decades later when the world went to war again.