Rick Stroud's book showcases eight women's World War I resistance roles

I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles: Women of the Resistance in World War One

Author: Rick Stroud

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 699   
Pages: 306

In the 21st century, many countries have started admitting women into the military in combat roles as fighter pilots and frontline soldiers in grudging recognition of their capabilities and courage. Before that, women in modern wartime played supporting roles as nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers and secretarial services at command headquarters on the battlefield and in keeping factories and the home front running behind it (guerrilla movements were, of course, the exception). In the two world wars of the 20th century, for instance, their sterling contributions eventually created the glacial move towards women’s suffrage in Europe and the US, and a recognition of women’s rights as a legitimate aspiration. I am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles celebrates that spirit by portraying eight women who ran resistance networks in German-occupied Belgium and France during World War I.

These women came from widely differing backgrounds – the Belgian aristocracy, nurses, governesses, housewives and shop girls. From sheltering Allied soldiers and helping them to safety, to creating networks to provide invaluable intelligence on logistics and troop movements by the German military and much more, they played often unsung roles in the horrific battles on the Western Front.

They were not heroes in the conventional understanding of the term. In portraying them, Rick Stroud writes, he wants “to show what the individual can do when faced with apparently overwhelming odds. In so doing, they set a very high moral standard for us all to live up to”. Certainly, all of these women knew the risks of the path they chose, foreshadowing their sisters in another great war a quarter-century later. Several were treated brutally by the Germans when they were caught and jailed, and some were executed.

The title of the book is taken from the almost-last words of the humblest and most maverick of these women, Gabrielle Petit, who became one of Allies’ most important agents. A former shop assistant and waitress, she used her work as a Red Cross volunteer in occupied Belgium to spy for the Allies, who recruited and trained her in 1915 in the art of gathering military intelligence. Apart from this clandestine work, at which she proved surprisingly adept, she helped an organisation that liaised between Belgians fighting on the Allied side of the front line get in touch with their families, and helped distribute La Libre Belgique, a satirical underground newspaper that drove the occupation forces to distraction.

Betrayed and captured in 1916, she was sentenced to death by a kangaroo court and proved a lively and troublesome prisoner, refusing to name fellow travellers or sign a petition of mercy for herself. Her statement, “I am not afraid of looking into the rifles”, was in response to a priest asking her if she wanted a blindfold at the time of her execution by firing squad. In the end, she accepted one, because the priest said her last thoughts should be of heaven. After the war, Gabrielle received a state funeral and monuments were erected in her memory, though few modern Belgians remember her.

Edith Cavell, an English nurse, was memorialised in a statue in central London and a service in Westminster abbey. In her fifties when war broke out, she was holidaying in England. Nevertheless, she chose to return to the teaching hospital in Brussels where she had played the lead role in turning a ramshackle institution into a “benchmark for nursing standards” in Belgium. As the “German steamroller” overran Belgium, she was inevitably involved in helping Allied soldiers caught behind the frontlines to recover from their wounds and escaping to Holland. Arrested by the Germans, she declined her comrades’ advice to wear her nurse’s uniform at her show trial to get the Germans to respect her.

Her execution in 1915, however, became a propaganda disaster for the Germans, with negative publicity spreading across the Atlantic to the then neutral US. Thereafter, the Kaiser ordered that no more women would be executed without his permission. This decision undoubtedly saved the lives of several others who were captured around the same time. Their death sentences were commuted to life sentences with hard labour in a prison in Germany. There, Louise de Bettignies, who had run a train-watching network in northern Belgium, died from a botched surgery.

De Bettignies, an aristocrat who could trace her lineage back to Charlemagne, suffered the fate of many spies in having her intelligence ignored; she reported the massive troop movements that presaged the start of the Germans’ fateful Verdun campaign. Marthe Cnockaert, employed by the Germans as a nurse, gathered much useful intelligence from wounded Germans on military morale and capabilities. Her reports of the Germans unloading gas masks and heavy black iron cylinders near Ypres were disregarded until unsuspecting Allied troops ran into chlorine gas, the first deployment of chemical warfare on the Western Front.    

At the centre of much of this activity was the Princess Marie de Croy whose chateau was requisitioned as a command headquarters for a German army division. She showed exemplary courage by using a secret room in a tower of her medieval chateau to shelter escaping Allied soldiers before they could be escorted to the Dutch border. Her cover was blown a year later and she was imprisoned. With her was Countess Jeanne de Belleville, who played a sterling role in helping allied prisoners escape, an especially hazardous undertaking after the Germans built an electrified fence on the length of the Dutch border.  

Rick Stroud follows the heroic mould of narrative history. Two of his earlier books are Kidnap in Crete and Lonely Courage that trace, respectively, an (ultimately pointless) operation by the British Special Operations Executive to capture the German general commanding in Crete, and the story of female SOE agents operating in occupied Europe. This book is less exuberant in style and would have benefitted from the inclusion of a map to delineate the area in which these spies operated. He nevertheless manages to recreate a useful account of the German occupation of Belgium in World War I, and invokes the ambience of the resistance against the killing fields of trench warfare in Europe. There were people like “Canteen Ma”, a 70-year-old vegetable seller who became a conduit for the transmission of handwritten intelligence, and the network codenamed La Dame Blanche or White Lady. This network was presciently named: La Dame Blanche was the name for the mythical figure whose appearance would herald the fall of the House of Hohenzollern.