Book Review

Spies with attitude

Janet Morgan tells how a chocolate-loving housewife, an eccentric Belgian and an uptight British officer helped the Allies win the first world war in The Secrets of Rue St Roch

Jane Stevenson

The Secrets of Rue St Roch: Intelligence Operations Behind Enemy Lines in the First World War

by Janet Morgan
Allen Lane
£18.99, pp416

Though Janet Morgan's book tells a true story, it reads like the plot of an inter-war British film. A handsome, aristocratic young intelligence officer, Captain Bruce, sets up a shoestring espionage operation in Paris; the secretary he hires is both a patriotic English beauty and a sophisticated and glamorous socialite; at the end of the war, romance blossoms, and they marry. So much for the romantic sub-plot. The thrills and spills come from the principal active agents in the operation: a stout, wealthy and respectable bourgeoise from Luxembourg and a Belgian adventurer of infinite resourcefulness.

The housewife, Mme Rischard, turns out to be a woman of extraordinary intelligence and courage, capable of memorising a code of Byzantine complexity and using it to send detailed messages about troop movements from the heart of enemy territory. Her immense strength as an agent derived, paradoxically, from the fact that she continued to think of herself as a housewife.

Having finally reached the Luxembourg frontier, after a risky journey home from Paris which took nearly a year, she initially refused to enter the country because the German police wanted to confiscate the Swiss chocolate she had acquired. No spy in their right mind would have behaved like that; if the authorities had any doubts about her, these must surely have evaporated.

Her main preoccupation at home was the state of the stair carpet and the way the maid had let things slide, beside which organising an espionage network to report on the movement of German troop trains through Luxembourg central station was a mere bagatelle.

Education went both ways. Poor Rischard was required to memorise thousands of details about the German army, but she refused to be overawed by the lectures on weaponry and the minutiae of German uniforms. Instead, she insisted on educating the tight-lipped Bruce into how to behave like a human being. A touching aspect of the book is that she succeeded. The last letters he wrote to her show a man far more capable of acknowledging emotions.

Madame's usefulness was greatly enhanced by Baschwitz Meau, a Belgian of Polish extraction, and a Great Escaper of extraordinary courage and inventiveness. Imprisoned in an apparently impregnable German fortress, Baschwitz and a British officer fled all the way to the Baltic before being recaptured. His second incarceration did not last long either. He bobbed up in Belgium, offering his services to the British on the grounds that since his personality and skills were best suited to unorthodox enterprises of extreme danger, ordinary soldiering was a waste of his talents.

Danger the British were ready, willing and able to supply. Enter Bruce, supported by a collection of English eccentrics, including Commander 'Pink Tights' Pollock, of the Naval Ballooning School, with a proposal to fly Baschwitz into Luxembourg by balloon. This scheme was totally dependent on the wind, which left the balloonist at the mercy of hostile fire. The ballooning side of the narrative introduces a welcome element of surreal comedy. With their skills honed on the creation of mini-balloons powered by alarm clocks for taking carrier pigeons into enemy territory, the balloon enthusiasts (aka, for obvious reasons, the Suicide Club) launched Baschwitz into the air under cover of darkness. Almost unbelievably, he arrived safely in Luxembourg, discreetly adding himself to Rischard's household.

Morgan's book is mutedly effective in striking a balance between the Professor Branestawm dottiness of clockwork pigeon balloons and the appalling realities of the context: the thousands on thousands of men who were dying every month, the fact that the war hung in the balance, and that the information supplied by Baschwitz and Madame was of real importance.

As 1918 crept on, the question of where along the immense Western Front the Germans were concentrating their resources became crucial: were there weak points and, if so, where? The Luxembourg information was vital. A German offensive necessitated moving thousands of troops by train, and the Luxembourg reports gave the essential information of where these trains were going.

Even for readers uninterested in military history, the book offers considerable entertainment; it explores the most human and unorthodox side of war. It is written as a story about personalities, with the exposition of the actual code tactfully moved to an appendix. It is good to know that this all actually happened, but someone really ought to make a film.

Source: The Guardian