FRENCH HEROINE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3381, 4 July 1927, Page 8

FRENCH HEROINE.

SECRET AGENT FOR BRITAIN

Louise cle Bettignies, a young Frenchwoman, who became one of the most formidable British secret agents during the great war, is to have a memorial unveiled in her honor by Marshal Foch at Lille in the latter part of June. Mile, de Bettignies, under the direction of the British military intelligence service, organised in the Lille district in the early part of 1915 ( a vast network of spies, who furnished a complete report of German troop movements, munition dumps, battery emplacements, and other military information.

She had more than a hundred trustworthy informers, including priests, doctors, policemen, school teachers, and railwaymen, and under the name of Alice Dubois, a pretended lace or cheese merchant, she risked her life day after day in going from one village to another to gather her reports. It was extremely difficult for persons in occupied territory to travel, and she had continually to use forged safe conducts, which might have been discovered at any moment.

She and Mile. Leonie Vanhoutte, her principal lieutenant in spite of the close German surveillance, carried these reports daily for almost a year without being caught. They hid the messages in halls of yarn, umbrella handles, shoe _ laces, corsets, and in lighted candles in cart lanterns. Sometimes the message was rolled into a tiny ball and attached to a black thread. If they became frightened as they approached a German sentry they paid out the thread and then drew it in again after they had safely passed the danger. Sometimes the final message ready for England was photographed on a small transparent film which was pasted on an eyeglass. They could put 3,000 words on a pair of glasses, and ail the British intelligence officers had to do to read them was to throw the messages on a big screen. After walking about all day gathering their reports, the two young women often sat up at night in some hospitable tavern to compile them, and the next night ran the gauntlet of tlie German sentries and the electrical-ly-charged barbed wire along the frontier to deliver them in Holland. The information this organisation supplied was so accurate that the Allies were able to destroy the German batteries in the Lille district three times between May and August 1915, but Mile, de Vanhoutte, who is a native of Boubaix, was finally trapped and arrested in Brussels in September, and Mile, de Bettignies in Tournal a few days dater. They both denied being spies, and the German police kept them in St. Gilles prison until March, 1916, when a court-martial condemned them to death for espoinage. The German authorities, on the intervention of the Spanish Consul in Brussels, commuted Mile, de Bettignies’ sentence to life imprisonment, and Mile. Vanhoutte’s to fifteen years, Mile, de Bettignies dying in a German prison at Cologne in July, 1918, and her companion being released after the armistice.

The British Government decorated Mile, de Bettignies posthumously, and the British Army of Occupation at Cologne rendered full military honors when the body was moved to Lille in 1920.

A few months ago Mme. Weygand, the wife of Marshal Foch’s former chief of staff, formed a committee to erect a monument to this heroine, and chose Maximo Real del Sarte, the French sculptor, to make the design;