Female Tommies by Elisabeth Shipton

Author:Elisabeth Shipton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750957489
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

… I felt like screaming, like beating myself against the wall with agonised suspense. I was in a terrible quandary; against my will I had become a spy for friend and foe. But I must bring forward some information for the Germans which would not hurt my friends of the Allies, but which nevertheless seem of value to Otto.60

Cnockaert came up with an idea to play for time. One way in which the Allies had tried to communicate with those in the occupied zone was with carrier pigeons. In response the Germans ordered a cull of pigeons and that anyone found rearing pigeons, let alone using them, would face imprisonment at the very least. Allied planes would drop baskets of pigeons tied to a small parachute enabling them to smoothly float to the ground. If a pigeon was found with a message tied to it, the message was immediately taken away for analysis in case it incriminated the sender or recipient. Sometimes the Germans returned pigeons with messages in an effort to pass on false information or find out who in the area was using them.61 Cnockaert was reminded of this when she saw a German soldier shooting at a pigeon, and so she immediately made up a fake message with a combination of numbers that could be a code. She smeared it with raw meat to stain it red and then presented it to Otto, saying that she had retrieved it from a dead pigeon. However Otto soon returned saying that no one could break the code and it may be a decoy. Despairing, Cnockaert shared her predicament with another agent who evidently passed the information further up the network as several days later Otto was conveniently found murdered and Cnockaert was safe once more.

Cnockaert’s final mission in October 1916 was a plan that she and a fellow agent, Alphonse, had concocted to destroy an ammunition dump in Roulers. Alphonse had discovered that the old sewers ran from under the town through which they could reach the dump. They successfully identified the section of the sewer under the dump and managed to plant the dynamite, which they set off using a long fuse, allowing them time to return underground and conceal the entrance to the sewers. Afterwards, Cnockaert realised that she had lost her gold watch which was engraved with her initials. She was concerned that she had lost it during the mission, but she couldn’t be sure. Then a short while later, she saw a notice proclaiming that a soldier had been caught stealing and a list of various items to be reclaimed by their owners, including Cnockaert’s watch. Wanting it back for sentimental reasons, Cnockaert went to collect it, only to realise that it was a trap. The Germans had discovered the entrance to the sewers and when they traced their route back towards the hospital they discovered the watch. The Germans immediately searched the Cnockaert family home and found two messages that she had been preparing to send that day, signed ‘L’ for Laura.

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