The Alice Network was supplied by Louise’s many sources based in the Lille area, and reported on the local stretch of German front with a speed and accuracy that made British intelligence and military men gush. “The services Louise de Bettignies rendered are inestimable.” “A regular modern day Joan of Arc.” “If anything happened to her, it would be nothing less than a calamity.” The Germans were equally impressed (if incensed) by the uncanny accuracy of the underground information flow, so efficient that new artillery placements were often bombed within days of being set up. Bigger intelligence prizes were unearthed by the Alice Network as well: the Kaiser’s visit where his train narrowly escaped being bombed, and the Verdun objective, which was one of Louise’s last reports (which, tragically, went unbelieved at the command level).
The leader of the Alice Network was constantly on the move between German-occupied France, free France, Belgium, England, and the Netherlands as she passed reports, collected information, and checked on her agents, and her methods of information smuggling (coded messages wrapped around rings or hairpins, tucked below cakes in cake boxes, slipped between the pages of magazines) are all true as recorded here. Her physical courage was remarkable—she routinely sneaked across the hostile border under German searchlights and armed sentries, the ground littered with the bodies of refugees who had been spotted and shot, and she remained undeterred even after seeing a pair of escapees blown up by a mine scant yards ahead. Perhaps even more remarkable was her ability to think on her feet: Louise de Bettignies had an uncanny ability to bluff her way past checkpoints, whether by juggling packages until an exasperated sentry waved her through, or by utilizing local children in a game of tag to smuggle her a pass (both true incidents). Also true is the remarkable occasion when she was recognized on the way to a rendezvous by a German general who knew her from a chess match played during her governess days, and who gallantly put his car at her disposal.
Eve Gardiner is a fictional character, but two things about her are very real. One is her stammer—my husband has struggled with a stutter all his life, and his struggles are Eve’s: the periodic difficulty with ordinary conversation, the moments of anger or high emotion that smooth out speech, the frustration and fury at being interrupted, talked over, or automatically assumed to be less intelligent. It was my husband’s idea to give my young WWI spy a stutter and to see her turn it into an asset, to weaponize a weakness and use it against those who would underestimate her. The other real-life influence on Eve’s character is her code name. When Louise de Bettignies’s luck finally ran out in the autumn of 1915, a young woman named Marguerite Le Fran?ois was arrested with her. In the interrogation that followed over the next few hours, the Germans quickly determined that the terrified young Marguerite was no spy, merely a local girl who had foolishly allowed a friendly stranger to borrow her pass at a checkpoint. She was released, scolded, and told to go home, even as Louise was arrested and transported to prison. The historical Marguerite Le Fran?ois was very probably just an innocent dupe . . . but what if she wasn’t? As I read a historical account of the arrest where the two women were stripped, searched, and terrorized, where young Marguerite moved the Germans to pity by sobbing and fainting, and Louise incensed them by eating a coded message and then asking for a brandy, I couldn’t help but wonder if the two imprisoned women pulled off their last and best bluff while in German handcuffs. Thus was Eve Gardiner born, and I slid her as a mostly fictional third party into the existing historical duology of Louise and her chief lieutenant.
The bespectacled Leonie van Houtte was very real to history, working under the code name of Charlotte Lameron (changed to Violette Lameron, as I already had a Charlotte). Leonie first joined the war effort as a Red Cross nurse, and soon afterward was recruited as Louise de Bettignies’s staunch aide and loyal friend. “I was ready to follow her anywhere,” Leonie later wrote, “for I knew instinctively that she was a girl capable of great things.” Though Leonie was arrested shortly before Louise, the two were tried together, sentenced together, and served their prison time at Siegburg together. Louise died in Siegburg of a pleural abscess, but Leonie survived, a be-medalled veteran spy who married a journalist after the war and managed a china shop in Roubaix. Her husband later wrote La Guerre des Femmes, a memoir of Louise de Bettignies’s war work as related to him by his wife. Leonie’s precise first-hand accounts were invaluable, including detailed descriptions of the network’s operations, Louise’s arrest, the trial, and the years in Siegburg filled with horrendous abuses and rare triumphant moments—like the occasion when Louise incited her fellow inmates to strike rather than make munitions. Many of Louise’s sparkling bon mots are also quoted direct from La Guerre des Femmes.
Another historical figure on the network’s roster is Antoine, briefly mentioned in this book as Lili’s document forger. The real Antoine le Four was a bookseller with the soul of a poet, an expert in forged antiques—and as his modern-day descendants are only now learning from his archived letters, he very possibly turned his skill at forgery detection in the other direction, and made fake papers for the Alice Network. Several of his family may also have been involved in the network, including his young sister Aurélie le Four, who acted as courier escort and was raped and impregnated by German soldiers as described by Violette in chapter 22. Her subsequent abortion, also verified by family archives, was performed by a nurse friend of Louise de Bettignies, though it is not known for certain if that nurse was Violette/Leonie. Both Aurélie and Antoine appear to have continued their resistance work even after Louise’s imprisonment, fortunately escaping arrest themselves. Their letters (one of which is quoted in the P.S. Section by permission of the family descendants) provide a poignant, powerful look into the depth of French suffering, and the power of French patriotism.
English patriotism is no less powerfully represented in the person of real-life historical figure Captain (later Major) Cecil Aylmer Cameron. The man known to his sources as Uncle Edward recruited not only Louise de Bettignies, but Leon Trulin, another French spy who became a martyr after being arrested and shot by the Germans. Cameron’s unusual past—his arrest on charges of insurance fraud, the prison term he served supposedly trying to protect his wife, his reinstatement to intelligence work during the war, and his post-war suicide—is all true, though any speculation on my part about motivations for the fraud, the state of his marriage, or the character of his wife are purely fictionalized for the sake of the story. One of Cameron’s code names during the war, however, was “Evelyn,” and that is the name he gave to his only child.