WHEN WAR CAME, THE 'WHITE LADY' SPY NETWORK HELPED WIN... TWICE!

They were ordinary Belgians whose bravery in the face of untold danger helped the Allies liberate their country from the Germans in two world wars. Yet they remain virtually unknown. Now their story, every bit as thrilling as fiction, has finally been told in a gripping new account

- 

BACK in London, British intelligence desperately needed to see behind the German lines to understand enemy troop movements, weaponry and any preparations for an offensive and then pass this to British army headquarters (GHQ) in France.

The eyes and ears on the ground were ordinary Belgian men and women — prepared to risk their lives as agents, couriers, run safehouses and letterboxes.

They worked for a network that came to be known as the White Lady, or La Dame Blanche.

It was under the leadership of Lambrecht’s cousin, Walthère Dewé, who had taken up the mantle after Lambrecht’s execution. The clandestine network was named after an ancient German legend that, if a ghost of a white lady appeared, she would herald the downfall of Imperial Germany.

By choosing this name, the network's leaders believed that its clandestine work would bring an end to the German occupation of Belgium and the downfall of the German royal family.

In the end it proved true because Germany was defeated and the Kaiser’s reign did not survive the war.

By 1916 the White Lady had become a formal network of the British secret service, MI6, whose head was Mansfield Cumming — the man who first signed his letters ‘C’ in green ink. This is something the head of the service still does today. Some 1,084 agents served in the White Lady, more than a third of whom were women.

This was an army in the shadows, an army without uniform or guns, whose members took an oath of allegiance and were given military ranks. The men and the women equally swore an oath of allegiance and were given a military rank and, in some cases, the women outranked the men. They used early spycraft in their operations, including invisible ink, knitting simple codes into scarves and hiding messages in items such as potatoes, broom handles and bicycle valves.