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Women Heroes of World War I

16 Remarkable Resisters, Soldiers, Spies, and Medics

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

PART I

RESISTERS AND SPIES

"From the day when our King, voicing the mind of his whole people, showed us that our duty lay in resistance to an unjust aggression, I think a burning desire to help in the cause of right possessed us all."

— Princess Marie de Croÿ, Belgian resister

World War I, unlike World War II, did not begin with a clear-cut sense of good versus evil. During World War II, both Germany and Japan were run by governments that were convinced it was their right to take possession of the nations around them and then use — and abuse — the people who lived there.

The motivations that started World War I were similar except that there were not just two nations who felt they had a right to more land. The majority of the nations who became involved in the war did so for just that reason. However, most of them wanted to obtain only certain sections of territory, not entire countries, and in a surprising number of cases, the people living in these areas wanted these border alterations to occur.

Many 19th-century European battles had been fought over borders that constantly shifted with the outcome of each new conflict. This often resulted in people of one ethnic group living on the "wrong" side of a border, separated from others of their ethnicity. These shifting boundaries caused great resentment, both among populations who felt cut off from the rest of their particular nations and from governments who had lost land they felt belonged to them, regardless of who lived there.

When World War I was on the horizon, many governments saw it as a way to permanently remedy these situations. But when the conflict began and armies crossed borders, the reactions were vastly different depending on the relationship between the invaded populations and the invaders. For instance, when Romanian soldiers entered Transylvania — part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that was inhabited by many ethnic Romanians — they were welcomed as liberators. However, soldiers entering foreign territory were generally not greeted with similar enthusiasm. And when invasion forces perceived these populations to be hostile, the soldiers sometimes perpetrated abuses. This was especially true when Germany invaded Belgium.

Germany requested permission for its armies to march peacefully through neutral Belgium on their way to Paris. The Belgian government refused and instead sent out its small army to defend its border against the invading Germans.

The Belgian defenses marred the precise timetable that German military commanders had been counting on. Passing quickly through Belgium was the first part of the strategy called the Schlieffen Plan — named after the German officer who had created it years before — that would enable German forces to reach Paris within six weeks. Once there, they had planned to force a French surrender before turning around and focusing their strength on fighting the slow-to-mobilize Russians on Germany's eastern border.

The delay caused by Belgium's armies helped give France — and its ally, Great Britain — a bit of extra time in which to mobilize their troops more effectively. The Germans never reached Paris.

The idea of "Brave Little Belgium" — one of the terms immediately used worldwide to refer to that nation — standing up to one of Europe's largest armies was enough to begin to tip world opinion against Germany. And when reports of the German army's willfully destructive behavior during the invasion began to leak out, Germany's international reputation was ruined. The war suddenly had its good (Belgium) and its evil (Germany).

Unmoved by world opinion (and justifying its army's behavior by claiming that Belgian civilians had, against the rules of warfare, fired on them first), the Germans remained in Belgium, occupying all but the far western tip, which they had been unable to take. They also remained in the northeastern section of French territory that they had overrun.

Because they considered the stalemate temporary, the Germans dug trenches on the edges of these occupied territories that would enable them to keep the land they had won and from which they could initiate battles.

Behind the trenches, the Germans ruled the Belgian and French civilians with an iron fist, killing thousands, sending thousands more into Germany for forced labor, and putting a myriad of occupation laws into place for those who remained. Although the brutality of the German occupation of Belgium and France during the First World War pales in comparison with that of the second, the first German occupation was shocking at the time. Outside of the occupied lands, few people fully understood or even believed the extent of what was happening behind the German trenches on the western front.

But for many of those who were experiencing it, the occupation provoked a determination to fight the Germans in some way: thousands of men and women in occupied nations became involved in some sort of resistance work. Many created and distributed secret underground newspapers designed to combat German propaganda. One such publication, La Libre Belgique ("Free Belgium"), was also published during the Second World War.

Many resisters working in Belgium, such as Louise Thuliez and Edith Cavell, were also committed to helping Allied servicemen who had been separated from the rest of their companies, becoming trapped behind enemy lines during the initial battles with the Germans, escape the country. Others, such as Louise de Bettignies and Marthe Cnockaert, worked as spies, gathering information (intelligence) that could be useful to the Allies.

In a war where rushing out of the trenches and straight into machinegun fire was considered ultraheroic, espionage was generally thought to be a shameful but unfortunately necessary wartime activity. Yet during the decades leading up to the war, readers in Great Britain, France, and Germany had become fascinated — and increasingly terrified — by numerous popular novels that featured international spies who were involved with invasion plots geared to bring about a global war. Fact and fiction began to mirror each other as government-sponsored espionage and anti-espionage activities grew increasingly professional throughout Europe, especially in Great Britain and Germany.

The most well-known female spy of World War I was a woman named Mata Hari, but it is doubtful that she provided anyone with any valuable information through her espionage activities.

There were many women, however, who worked very effectively in espionage and anti-espionage activities during the war, both on the home front and behind enemy lines, some for the Central Powers and others for Allied organizations. La Dame Blanche ("The White Lady") was a large and very effective network that gathered information for Great Britain from German-occupied Belgium and France, and it employed women in large numbers, very often in positions of authority.

Many women who spied for the Central Powers gave their lives in the line of duty. Although the exact total numbers are disputed by historians — they range from 9 all the way to 81 — it is clear that many of these women were caught by the French and then shot during the war while others were imprisoned.

World War I had another set of resisters, many who lived in unoccupied countries. These were women who protested their governments' participation in the war. After the initial general enthusiasm began to wane in the face of rising body counts and lowering food supplies, many women throughout the world began war protests. The most dramatic of these protests occurred in Russia on International Women's Day in 1917, when a demonstration of hungry workingwomen in Petrograd became the fuse that helped ignite the Russian Revolution.

But there were a few people — many of them women — who had protested the war from its very beginning. The most famous international gathering of women for the cause of peace during the war took place in the neutral Netherlands for several days in the spring of 1915. This meeting, called the International Congress of Women (also referred to as the Women's Peace Congress) was chaired by American Jane Addams and included more than 1,000 women from many different countries. Some of these women were from combatant countries and had come despite the protests of their governments and, in some cases, their own families. Many of the women who attended the congress resolved to publicly urge world leaders to find a way to end the war, while others returned to lead peace movements in their own countries.

The antiwar speaking and writing activities of peace activists often made them very unpopular with their fellow citizens, especially during the initial burst of patriotic enthusiasm at the start of the war. Their views often set them at odds with their own families as well. For instance, British war protestor Charlotte Despard was the sister of top military leader John French. When Charlotte was arrested for her prewar suffragette activities, John said, "I wish she wouldn't do these things, but I can't prevent her." And when the war began, John, then the leader of the British Expeditionary Force in France, was likewise helpless in preventing his older sister from protesting Britain's involvement in the war.

The Pankhursts were another prominent British family dramatically affected by the war. Along with her mother, Emmeline, and her sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst was prominent in the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose members were the first to be called suffragettes. While Sylvia's concern for the rights of the poor and her questioning of the WSPU's increasingly violent tactics eventually put distance between her and her family — she left their organization in 1913 — the war divided them outright. Emmeline and Christabel loudly urged their followers to delay the fight for women's suffrage in order to wholeheartedly support the war effort. In contrast, Sylvia became one of the war's most outspoken critics, attending the Women's Peace Congress at The Hague and helping organize the British Women's Peace Army in 1915 with Charlotte Despard and others.

Not only were war protestors often divided from their families but, when they openly criticized the war, especially as it dragged on year after year, they became dangerously at odds with their governments, who were determined to stay in the conflict. Many protestors in combatant nations were imprisoned.

This type of governmental activity eventually found its way to the United States. Shortly after the United States entered the war in 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and then the Sedition Act in 1918 (the latter greatly expanded the possibilities for arrest from the Espionage Act). Both laws severely limited free speech related to war protesting. Probably the most famous case involving a violation of the Espionage Act was that of wife, mother, and peace activist Kate Richards O'Hare, who was sentenced to five years in a federal prison (but served less than one) for suggesting in a public speech that "war corrupted motherhood."

EDITH CAVELL

"Patriotism Is Not Enough"

"There are two sides to war — the glory and the misery."

— Edith Cavell, August 1914

On October 7, 1915, German officers crowded into the magnificent Belgian senate chamber in Brussels. The ceiling was decorated with gold. The walls were covered with rich wood paneling. Although the red velvet seats were embroidered with the Lion of Belgium, few Belgians were allowed to attend this event, except those the German officers had come to see. Thirty-five prisoners — most of them Belgian and many of whom had never seen each other before — filed into the room under guard. Six of them were given seats that faced the judges. Between each of these six stood a soldier with a fixed bayonet.

Edith Cavell.

St. Mary's Church, Swardeston, Norfolk, United Kingdom

The first prisoner called to testify at this trial was not Belgian but British. Her name was Edith Cavell.

The daughter of a vicar, she had been born in Norfolk, England, in 1865. As a young woman, her command of French was so excellent that she was recommended for a governess job in Brussels, Belgium. In 1896, when the children under her charge were grown, she decided to return to London for nurse's training.

In 1907, after working as a nurse for a decade, Edith received a request that was to change her life in ways she could not have imagined. One of Europe's leading surgeons, Dr. Antoine Depage, was seeking to raise the professional standards of Belgian nursing. British nurse training at the time had an excellent reputation, and Dr. Depage was acquainted with the family for whom Edith had worked as a governess. He invited her to become the director of Belgium's first training school for nurses in Brussels.

Edith accepted his offer, and by 1912 her school and clinic, located at 149 rue de la Culture, was providing nurses for three hospitals, three private nursing homes, 24 communal schools, and 13 kindergartens. She was also giving four lectures a week to both doctors and nurses.

Then, in August 1914, Germany invaded Belgium. Great Britain, bound by a treaty made in 1839 to protect Belgian neutrality in case of invasion, declared war on Germany.

The Belgian army was greatly outnumbered by the German one, but many Belgians were still optimistic about victory since Britain had promised to honor their treaty of protection — "We wait for England" was on everyone's lips. But the British troops didn't come as soon as expected. They finally arrived in Belgium around the same time that the Germans entered Brussels, Belgium's capital city.

At 12:40 PM on August 23, 1914, British and German troops clashed for a short time in a small Belgian town called Mons, located 30 miles southwest of Brussels. On August 24, the British Expeditionary Force received orders for a total retreat from Belgium because of superior German numbers and the inability of the French to send reinforcements.

During the retreat many British soldiers were cut off from their regiments and stranded, often because of wounds received during the Battle of Mons. If these soldiers managed to reach a Belgian hospital and were discovered by the Germans, they were ordered out of their beds immediately — no matter their physical condition — and sent to German prison camps.

Warnings against "crimes" — new ones were added daily — were posted on city walls all over Brussels. Hiding Allied soldiers was punishable by death.

Edith responded naturally to authority figures. She ran her own nursing school with fairly strict rules. But her conscience forbade her to obey the German occupiers when it came to turning in Allied soldiers. So when two British men appeared on her doorstep on November 1, 1914, escorted by a Belgian mining official named Herman Capiau, she took them inside without question and hid them for two weeks before plans could be made to take them across the border into the neutral Netherlands.

These two men were the first of many who would pass through her doors. Wounded escapees were given medical care, and those who were healthy were given a hiding place. Then a guide would escort the men across the border into the Netherlands. Edith would often personally escort the men from the clinic to one of six transfer points in Brussels. She would pretend to be merely taking her dog for a walk, using various routes, while the soldiers — disguised as Belgian farmers or miners — followed her from a distance until they made contact with the waiting guide.

Edith also made sure that before leaving the clinic, each soldier had at least 25 francs for the journey. To accomplish this (and also to pay the guides, some of whom wanted money for their efforts), she gave of her own salary and did quiet fund-raising as well.

The Germans, always on the lookout for hidden Allied soldiers, would sometimes conduct routine searches at the clinic. On one such occasion, Edith took a British soldier who had just arrived, Lance Corporal J. Doman, put him in a bed, tucking the blankets high above his clothing and fluffing the blankets around the bulge created by his boots, and told the Germans that the "Belgian" in the bed had a serious case of rheumatic fever. The frightened Germans believed her and quickly left the ward. On another occasion, Edith managed to get advance notice of a search just minutes before it happened. She took a wounded British soldier, Charlie Scott, outside and placed him in an apple barrel and covered him with apples. Charlie could hear German boots clicking very close to the apple barrel. But they didn't find him, and several days later Edith hired guides to take him safely to the Dutch border and back to England.

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Excerpted from Women Heroes of World War I by Kathryn J. Atwood. Copyright © 2014 Kathryn J. Atwood. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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