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 and transmitting information on German troop movements; arrested by the Germans in 1915, she was condemned to death but, following the international outcry over the shooting of Edith Cavell, was reprieved from execution, dying of ill health and privation in prison in 1918 at Siegburg; this illustration depicts her on one of her weekly trips through the barbed wire at the frontier between the Belgian and Dutch borders to deliver intelligence; the success of her 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;