REVIEW BY TAYLOR DOWNING
Helen Fry has specialised in fascinating and revealing histories of wartime intelligence and espionage, especially of the role of women in these activities. Women in Intelligence, The Walls Have Ears, and Spymaster are a few of her recent books, and The White Lady continues this tradition through an examination of two important British secret-service underground networks in Belgium in the world wars in which women played a prominent role. La Dame Blanche (‘The White Lady’) was an operation that smuggled out intelligence about the movement of German troops and supplies across Belgium in the First World War, often warning the British of upcoming offensives, most notably with the gathering of troops in the Verdun area in early 1916. The Clarence Service provided crucial intelligence from occupied Belgium during the Second World War.
Fry writes a clear narrative, but one that is always grounded in a detailed study of the evidence available. Her footnotes and bibliography establish the scholarly nature of her research, although it is always expressed in a lucid and accessible way. In The White Lady, Fry discovers many stories of spying and heroism that have never been told before.
Having said that, the chapters about the various underground networks in Belgium after the German occupation of the country in 1914 are very dense. The cast of characters is so numerous it is difficult to keep up with who is working with whom and to which part of British Intelligence they are reporting. The work of the spies involved observing and counting the numbers of trains containing soldiers, artillery, and other military supplies passing a particular point. The methods of getting this information through to neutral Holland and British agents in Rotterdam were ingenious. As well as invisible ink and messages hidden in buttons and bicycle tyres, they included a form of coded knitting – smuggling out items of clothing that had been knitted with plain knits representing carriages of soldiers and purl knits for wagons with horses and artillery! The coded scarves or jumpers were then thrown over the border to waiting farmers, who would collect them and pass them on.
