KAVITA PURI on the First World War resistance movement
HIDDEN HISTORIES
EVERY OCTOBER AT LIFE’S GREEN, OUTSIDE THE south transept of Norwich Cathedral, a graveside service is held. It remembers a remarkable British nurse, who treated wounded soldiers – on both sides – in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. Edith Cavell had been working in Belgium since 1907. During the war, she helped Allied soldiers and civilians of military age escape to neutral Netherlands. This was an offence under German military law, and carried the death penalty.
Cavell was one of many women in Belgium and France involved in the resistance movement during the First World War. In a fascinating new book, I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles: Women of the Resistance in World War One (Simon & Schuster), Rick Stroud weaves together the stories of some of these brave women for the first time. He believes their experiences have been largely lost amid the sheer number of histories dedicated to the carnage of the western front (tens of thousands of men died on the first day of the battle of the Somme alone). In contrast, Stroud says the work of the women of the resistance could appear unglamorous, and at times boring. Yet it was crucial, and the consequences for them could be fatal.
Resistance involved not only spiriting soldiers into safe territory but also monitoring the movement of German troops by train, so giving Allied forces a priceless insight into enemy strategy and tactics. Stroud documents how, across France and Belgium, women watched railway lines and junctions at all hours of the day. One such woman lived in a house that overlooked the train station at Lille. She had German soldiers billeted with her, yet they did not suspect her as she sat quietly knitting in her chair by the window. She devised a code for troops, their movements and equipment by changing her stitching, which would later be written down for transmission to the Allies.
The peril at which these women placed themselves is demonstrated by the fate of Gabrielle Petit, who was in Brussels when war broke out. Petit’s first act of defiance against the Germans was helping her wounded soldier-fiancé across the border to the Netherlands to reunite with his regiment. Approached by British intelligence on her way to reunite with her fiancé, she was soon working as a spy, c
