The White Lady: The Story of Two Key British Secret Service Networks Behind German Lines, Helen Fry, Yale University Press, £20

If history is both storytelling and memorialising, Helen Fry achieves both in this welcome update to the literature on British Intelligence operations in the two world wars. The White Lady tells the story of the two principal networks of clandestine reporters operating behind enemy lines: the White Lady (La Dame Blanche) in the First World War, and the Clarence Network in the Second. There was a bloodline: the Clarence network descended directly from the White Lady, and included some of the original cast. This allows Fry to tell the story chronologically, although the structure of her work is dominated by the series of vivid portraits of the women and men who, often at great personal cost, made the networks work. Her storytelling is enriched by access to new sources from Belgian archives, which include details of the actors and operations, as well as the atmospheric reports themselves. Her canvas is crowded with heroes.

Although her subject matter is firmly and nostalgically pre-digital, the challenge her heroes faced is a persistent one for intelligence services: how to recruit, run, and renew reliable sources in a hostile environment.

Presiding over the story of both networks is the remarkable Thérèse de Radiguès, who, along with her peer, Baroness Gabrielle de Monge, established an escape line for Allied servicemen, which evolved into the White Lady network. While hosting German officers in her chateau, she coolly continued to play a pivotal role in the network, which was working directly against them. Not content with her contribution to the First World War, she answered the patriotic call in 1940 and helped found its Second World War derivative, the Women’s Land Army. Her son and grandson were taken into German concentration camps. She was taken into custody by the Gestapo at the age of 79. She had the chutzpah to feign dementia and, with it, gain her release.

Foregrounding the role of women, Fry is sincere and gracious in her memorialising. She gives due prominence to Radiguès’ professional partner and childhood friend, and arguably father of the network concept: Walthère Dewé. Too little known in the UK, where he served faithfully in both wars, Dewé’s operational career is a study in calm professionalism and courage. His life had a heroic curve, which Fry captures well, not least in her dramatic account of Dewé’s final moments, gunned down while attempting to escape from the Gestapo.

While these two Titans dominate the canvas, Fry ensures that we also see clearly the faces of the characters who made the network work: couriers, desk officers, spotters, pilots, facilitators and radio operators. She celebrates, too, the agent-handlers based in London, particularly Ruth Clement Stowell, a born adventurer,  who prepared Clarence network agents for despatch into Belgium and Luxembourg (a jump she herself had made) and at the end of the war moved forward to search for Nazi collaborators.

The networks were large, if not sprawling, and their output both voluminous and highly valued. Fry includes validating quotes from grateful intelligence customers. The sample of agents she presents is limited to those about whom sufficient information survives or has been released, but it speaks of an effort that transcended class and other barriers: on both sides of the Channel, those involved ranged from aristocrats, professionals and artisans to petty criminals.

Their motivation was patriotic, particularly for the Belgians under occupation, but Fry also notes the role of Catholicism. Ordained priests actively supported the network and Fry repeatedly refers to the Catholicism of leading figures, including Dewé, in motivating their struggle against German domination and sustaining them when in captivity. It also provided a ready recruitment network. Whether that was in the interests of higher ideals, or had a more sectarian edge against the predominantly Protestant Wermacht, she does not explore.

Many of the agents were honoured for their work. In an important concession at the time, the British government also agreed to consider the members of the network as serving military, delivering on a promise made when they were recruited. They also decorated prominent members of the network. The Belgian government in particular honoured Dewé. He was laid to rest in a private, Catholic chapel over which stands a specially commissioned statue of a white lady holding a finger to her lips – one of the book’s many helpful, high-quality photographs.

A monument to discretion is particularly apt for Dewé and a caution to future generations of spies. The story of the White Lady was too good not to be told and, regrettably, Captain Henry Landau – the highly controversial MI6 officer who had coordinated the White Lady network from London – published his memoirs in 1934, despite the opposition of his service. Dewé was named throughout, which made his volunteering for his second network all the more courageous. He had to operate from the start as a hunted man. It was a tribute to his tradecraft and the support of his family and network that he survived so long.

Combining the two networks in one narrative helps illuminate how quickly the operating environment and techniques changed. By 1939, couriers and pigeons were replaced by radios, the German secret police by the vicious Gestapo, trench warfare by air power and, by 1944, in the network’s last hurrah, trainspotting gave way to searching for the pilotless planes: the V1 and the V2. Over the course of two decades, technical obsolescence, a collective loss of memory, and a comfort with the status quo set in. The embryonic Clarence Network warned despairingly of German intent to re-invade but was ignored.

The last word should go to one of Fry’s ‘invisible spies’, the women, without whom, she convincingly shows, the networks could not have operated. Importantly, they were recruited as soldiers and, for the first time in British military history, placed on an equal footing with men. But they were leaders, too, and recognised as such. In 1918, as the German army retreated, there were worrying reports that it would deport entire male populations from strategically important towns. Dewé and his deputy took the extraordinary, and sensible, step of appointing a reserve board of women, a ‘female council’, which would carry on the network should they be taken. It was endorsed by London, which urged the network to ‘surround themselves with female agents’.

The Council was stellar.  It was to be chaired by Juliette Durie, who personally sprang two network members from German custody, and Thérèse de Radiguès was to be her deputy. The credentials of the other members, heroes all, are now happily celebrated alongside those of Fry and are alone reason enough to read her work.