I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles, page 1
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For Clover
‘I am going to show you Germans that a Belgian woman knows how to die’
GABRIELLE PETIT
FOREWORD
This is not a history of the First World War. It is the story of the women of the resistance in Belgium and occupied northern France during that conflict. There are too many of them to tell all their stories, so I have used eight main characters as a lens through which to describe the work of all the others. In 1914, before the Germans invaded, they were ordinary people: some were poor, some were rich, some were low-born and others were from the top echelons of society. At the beginning of the war they were drawn together against an invader who had stormed in on false pretences and enslaved their country. One of the first underground networks was formed on an ad hoc basis by women trying to repatriate Allied soldiers marooned behind enemy lines. The work was dangerous and the penalties severe – life imprisonment or death. As the war went on the Allies recruited Belgian civilians as spies. One of their main activities was to monitor the movements of German troops by train. Their work was not glamorous, it was often boring and always essential. By 1918 the invading force that had marched in with such arrogance was too exhausted to go on; lacking manpower, resources and money, it threw in the towel and left the Belgians in peace. The people I have written about 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.
PROLOGUE
On the evening of 31 March 1916 a 23-year-old woman stood in her cell in the prison of Saint-Lazare in occupied Brussels as a German military translator read an official letter from Berlin. Next to him stood the officer who had brought the letter to the prison. It informed her that the application to commute her death sentence had been refused and that she was to be executed at dawn the following morning. The translator stood in silence while the young woman absorbed the news. Then the officer told her to make arrangements for the disposal of her possessions and money. She was then allowed out of her cell to take her final exercise in a small caged outdoor area; as she passed through the door she wrote on the jamb: ‘They consent to shoot me tomorrow. Farewell to all my unknown and much-tried friends.’
At five the next morning, 1 April, the prison chaplain came to hear her confession. As she was led from her cell, Belgian warders lined the corridor, a sign of respect in defiance of the German occupying forces. One of the guards reported that the young woman walked through the dark prison corridors ‘like a soldier’. Wearing a long blue coat, she stepped into the pre-dawn gloom of the outside world where a motorised carriage awaited her. Next to it stood the prison chaplain with a rosary and a prayer book in his hands. As they set off, he asked whether, when the time came, she would like a blindfold. ‘I am not afraid of looking into the rifles,’ she replied calmly. ‘I have been expecting this for a long time.’
Dawn broke as the car was driven through the sleeping suburbs of the city. The young woman began to recite the rosary: ‘Hail Mary full of grace, pray for us sinners…’ After twenty minutes they reached the entrance to the execution ground, a grim building with a massive stone tower looming over its centre. Four soldiers swung open a red and white security barrier. The woman finished her rosary: ‘Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.’ Then she kissed the crucifix hanging from the beads.
The carriage drove into the grounds and the road became a bumpy, unmade track. After a few hundred yards it stopped. The door was opened and the woman stepped out. Waiting for her were 250 armed and uniformed men. Next to them was a bank of earth in front of which a heavy post had been hammered in. In front of the stake stood twelve men, their rifles ready, their faces anonymous under their helmets. Their commander was a young officer. A bugle sounded. The woman stood still.
A voice boomed: ‘By the order of the Third War Council…’ The assembled party listened as the woman’s crimes were listed. Finally, the sentence: ‘… has been condemned to death for espionage’.
She handed her rosary and prayer book to the chaplain, her coat bright against the morning gloom.
The officer drew his sabre and commanded the soldiers to fix bayonets. The woman was led to the execution stake. A soldier tied her hands, then passed a rope round her waist, fastening it behind the post. As he tried to blindfold her she twisted her head away. The clergyman whispered to her: ‘Let nothing disturb your thoughts of heaven.’ She paused, nodded and allowed her eyes to be bandaged.
‘Firing party – present,’ ordered the young officer in command.
The men brought their rifles to their shoulders. The officer raised his sabre.
‘Firing party – load.’
Each man chambered the one round that was in his magazine. The metallic clinking of the bolts sliding backwards and forwards echoed around the yard. The woman stood alone, her back straight.
‘Firing party – aim.’
Each member of the squad squinted down the barrel of his rifle, breathed in, bringing the sights up to the woman’s heart, then held his breath and his aim, his right index finger tensed on the trigger.
With one move the officer swung the sabre tip in an arc to the ground.
‘Fire.’
Shots echoed. The young woman died instantly. Shattered by bullets, her upper body slumping forward, held back by the rope, her head dangling lifelessly.
Smoke from the rifles drifted across the scene. A doctor stepped forwards, towards what was now a mass of crumpled blue. He examined the corpse and declared that the prisoner’s execution had been determined ‘by a bullet to the heart’.
One of the Allies’ most important spies was dead.
1914
CHAPTER ONE DEATH COMES TO SARAJEVO
On Sunday, 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, descended from a train in Sarajevo and were shown to an open-top car. Sophie, being of lower status, was not usually allowed to accompany her husband on ceremonial visits. This time, however, the archduke had been invited to inspect the troops in his capacity as inspector general of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces and, since it was a military rather than a royal engagement, protocol permitted his beloved wife to sit beside him. They set off, their vehicle in the middle of a six-car convoy, heading for the town hall, where Franz Ferdinand was to give a speech. A band played, the weather was sunny and crowds lined the streets cheering the royal couple. Among the throng were Gavrilo Princip and five other men, all conspirators with orders to kill the archduke. The first assassin lost his nerve, another felt sorry for the duchess and went home. A third threw a hand grenade which bounced off the royal car, rolled under the car behind and exploded. The car was wrecked and the passengers seriously injured. The drivers of the surviving cars accelerated away from the chaos. The remaining conspirators ran for it.
Later that day, Franz Ferdinand gave instructions that he was to be taken to the hospital to visit the passengers injured in the attack. On the way his driver got lost and turned down a side road. Ahead of him was a delicatessen outside of which, by complete coincidence, stood Gavrilo Princip. In his pocket he carried a Browning pistol loaded with six .380 calibre rimless bullets. The driver, realising his mistake, stopped, put his car into reverse and stalled it. Gavrilo stepped forward, pulled out the pistol and fired at point-blank range, hitting the archduke in the throat. Policemen wearing white gloves and carrying ceremonial swords clattered towards the gunman as he fired again, aiming for the archduke but hitting the duchess in the abdomen. Before he could let off a third shot Princip was knocked to the ground and arrested. A few hours later the archduke – heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary – and his wife were dead. The assassination was the catalyst that, within four weeks, would plunge Europe into war.
* * *
Unaware of the events in Sarajevo, the 44-year-old nurse Edith Cavell was staying with her arthritic mother in Norwich, in the county of Norfolk. She was on a short holiday from her work as the matron of an important teaching hospital in Belgium. Her father had been the vicar of Swardeston, a Norfolk parish, and his rectory was where she had spent her childhood. Every day at 8am her father led them in prayer to a God that demanded sacrifice, devotion and service to the poor. Every Sunday was spent in more prayer and listening to one of her father’s long and dull sermons. That Sunday, as Franz Ferdinand and his wife lay dying, Edith accompanied her mother to church and took communion. As she prepared to take the sacrament she listened to the words that had been the bedrock of her life. ‘Godliness is great riches, if a man be content with that he hath for we brought nothing into the world neither may we carry anything out… we are not worth so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table… this is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for you and for many in the remission of sins…’
The service over, she held her mother’s arm as they walked slowly into the hot Norfolk sunshine. One familiar phrase stuck in her mind: ‘Who goeth a warfare at any time of his own cost?’
The following day Edith
Then, a month later, on Monday, 27 July, the newspaper’s leading article carried the headline ‘The Brink of War’ and told readers that ‘It seems as though the continental war… may be precipitated.’ But it concluded that, while it was a perilous time, ‘all that can be said is that war has not yet broken out’.
* * *
In Devon, the 39-year-old Princess Marie de Croÿ was also on holiday, with some aristocratic English friends. The princess lived in a chateau in the small village of Bellignies, on the Franco-Belgian border. A telegram arrived which read: ‘If you are going home, go at once.’ Her hostess tried to reassure her that there was no problem and that Prime Minister Lloyd George would act to prevent any war, soon everything would be back to normal. Nevertheless, the princess, a small and determined woman with a passion for photography, ordered her bags to be packed and caught the next train to London. By the next day she was in Valenciennes in the Hauts-de-France region, where she was met by her brother Reginald with his motor car and chauffeur. On the 15-mile drive to their chateau at Bellignies her brother told her that villagers in the reserve had already received orders to report to their regiments. That evening after dinner the family sat talking about the future, wondering what they should do. Her younger brother Leopold had arrived from a holiday in Russia and said that he and several friends were going to volunteer the next day. The princess announced that she was going to offer the chateau to the Red Cross as an ambulance station or a field hospital. The holder of a diploma in nursing, she knew that she could quickly convert the house into a medical establishment of some sort. She persuaded Reginald to help her. Listening to all this was her frail grandmother. The family worried that the outbreak of war might kill the old lady. The following morning Leopold left to join up.
* * *
By 31 July the front page of the Eastern Daily Press announced: ‘OMINOUS NEWS FROM BERLIN’. The next day, Saturday, 1 August, Edith received a telegram from the teaching hospital in Belgium. It wondered how she was going to get back. Train and telephone links between Belgium and Germany had been cut. The Eastern Daily Press headline for that day read: ‘DAY OF GLOOM’. In England most of the ferry links to the continent had been cancelled. Edith realised that she had to return to the school immediately or wait until the war ended. On Sunday, 2 August, Edith was on a train as it pulled out of Norwich station heading for Dover, where she hoped to catch a late ferry to Ostend.
She watched as the county of her childhood slid by the windows. It was a landscape that she had drawn and painted since she was very young. She had once described her upbringing as ‘fresh and beautiful’. Along with drawing and painting she had enjoyed learning languages and the company of her brother and sisters in what had been a happy family.
Now she wondered whether she would ever again see the flat Norfolk landscape dotted with churches and villages made up of clusters of small orange-brick houses faced in black and white knapped flint. She remembered something she had written to her brother years before, when she was twenty-eight and working as a governess in Belgium. She told him that her work was temporary, saying that ‘someday, somehow, I am going to do something useful… [for people who are]… so helpless so hurt and unhappy’.
* * *
As Edith Cavell made her way back to Brussels, a young woman living in the same city, Gabrielle Petit, wrote to her fiancé, the cavalry sergeant Maurice Gobert, who she knew would soon be sent to the front. She began:
My very dear boyfriend, I am so very afraid that you will have to depart suddenly. I love you so much!… Say my little Maurice if ever danger arrived, I would try to enlist in your regiment’s Red Cross unit. It is your good and sublime behaviour towards others that makes me love you so passionately. Sometimes I dream that I sit next to you. I have a heart attack and I die. Then I would ask God – since I am becoming pious again – to take you as well, and all those I love. Aren’t I bad to talk like this? I can’t help it, it’s stronger than me.
Gobert was a young man who had risen fast through the ranks and was studying to become an officer. He was the same age as the 21-year-old Gabrielle and had met her earlier in the year, when she was working as a waitress in a café near the Gare du Nord in Brussels. He was attracted to her air of authority, which marked her out from her fellow workers. He thought she was too good for waitressing and urged her to leave the job.
Over the next few weeks they got to know each other and found that they came from the same area. He thought she was an intelligent, educated girl and persuaded her to quit the café and become his girlfriend. He was only vaguely aware that she came from a broken home. Her mother had died when in her early thirties and her father was a ne’er-do-well spendthrift who had abandoned his family. Then her mother died and Gabrielle was placed in an orphanage. After this her education had taken place in an institution run by nuns where she was very lonely and ignored by her father and family, her eyes often red from weeping in the night.
After leaving the nuns at fifteen she had worked as a governess but gave it up because she was treated like a skivvy. She then worked in a fashion store where she claimed to be happy. However, her employer thought she was slovenly and complained that she never changed or mended her underclothes. She moved on and had various other jobs, including working as an assistant in a pastry shop. Before she was twenty she had an affair with a divorced man which lasted for more than a year. Her moods changed rapidly and sometimes she became depressed and bitter about the way she had been treated by her relatives. In 1912 she tried to commit suicide by drinking oxalic acid. Her one real friend during this time was a woman called Marie Collet, with whom she lived for a while. Marie was sixty years old, with white wavy hair and a kind face. She lived with her husband above a baker’s shop and Gabrielle moved into the little garret on the top floor of the building. The old couple provided her with what was described as a ‘hive of happiness, where everything breathed valiance and honesty… from that moment onwards [Gabrielle] had a father and a mother’. It was Marie Collet who rescued Gabrielle when she took the oxalic acid.
Soon Gabrielle followed Maurice Gobert’s advice and left the café. She had her photograph taken, looking happy and smart, wearing a simple long black skirt and a white blouse, her head erect, her hand on her hip, and staring with a confident challenge at the camera. She was pleased with the result and sent the picture to a friend writing, ‘As for me you can see from this card, I look pretty much the same as always.’ She and Maurice became engaged. She finished her letter to him by saying, ‘I am so afraid that my baby, the fiancé I respect and love with all my soul, will be taken from me…’
She signed it:
Your loving and faithful little fiancée
GABY.
1st August 1914.
The same day as Gabrielle was writing to Maurice, the Germans declared war on Russia and began to implement their plans to invade Russia’s ally, France. Belgium and Luxembourg, both neutral states, were caught between Germany and France. The City of Luxembourg was the site of one of the most important railway junctions in Europe. The station in the capital held a huge marshalling yard through which German troops could pass, heading for both the eastern and the western fronts. Tens of thousands of German troops poured into the tiny, landlocked country and quickly reached the capital. Among the many citizens watching the arrival of the unwelcome army were a well-to-do couple, Camille Rischard and his wife Lise. A rumour began to circulate that the president of the Council of Ministers had blocked the road in front of the invaders and presented them with a document guaranteeing his country’s neutrality. He had been ignored and the Germans marched on, vastly outnumbering Luxembourg’s own troops – a contingent of four hundred men, most of whom were part-time.
