Louise de Bettignies, French secret agent who spied under the name of Alice Dubois for...

Louise de Bettignies (1880-1918) was based in Lille, Northern France; with her assistant Léonie Vanhoutte gave significant help to the British Army by collecting information on German troop movements; arrested by the Germans in 1915, she was condemned to death but reprieved from execution following the international outcry over the shooting of Edith Cavell; imprisoned at Siegburg, she died of ill health and privation in 1918; the success of her intelligence network is thought to have helped save the lives of over a 1000 British soldiers and enabled the British to conduct the first aerial bombing of a train containing Kaiser Wilhelm II on a visit to the front at Lille; both aircraft were not however equipped with suitable viewfinders and so the airstrike narrowly missed its target; illustration from 'La Guerre des Femmes' ('The War of the Women'), published in 'La Revue Francaise', 8 October, 1923;