The Spy Net by Henry Landau

happy days which I myself had hoped to provide you. God has not permitted me to do this – let us incline ourselves before His wishes. If He causes us to suffer now, it is but to reward us better later on, when we are near Him.
    Think of my life as having been given up for my country – it will make my death seem less painful to you. After my faith, my country is what I hold most dear; in sacrificing my life for it, I am only doing what so many have done before me, and will do again.
    Life passes so quickly here below – it lasts but a moment. We will meet in a better world. It is in moments such as these, through which I have just passed, that one appreciates the inestimable good that parents do their children in giving them a Christian education, and faith in God.
    Console my poor parents for whom the blow is going to be terrible. Draw from your love for me, the necessary force to show them an example of courage.
    Take refuge in prayer, my beloved. I will leave you, as a last souvenir of me, the cross you sent me, and I will place on it kisses for you, Riette, and my parents. I will join to it my wedding ring.
    Jeanne, in heaven we will meet again. For our darling little daughter, for my parents, and for you, receive on this letter, the last affectionate kisses of he who was.
     
    Your Donné
    Lambrecht was shot 18 April 1916.
    After the Armistice, Lambrecht was posthumously decorated with the OBE by the British, and was mentioned in dispatches by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. King Albert bestowed on him the Chevalier of the Order of Leopold, with lisérés d’or ; he was also mentioned in the order of the day of the nation, and was accorded the Civic Cross, first class.
    Valuable as his work had been during the eighteen months he had faithfully served the Allies, it was in death that he exerted his greatest force. His example was an inspiration to others to carry on his work; his friends swore to avenge him, and out of the scattered remnants of his espionage service emerged the ‘White Lady’, the greatest spy organisation of the war.

CHAPTER 6
MILITARISATION OF THE ‘WHITE LADY’
    T HE ‘WHITE LADY ’ now entered upon a new phase of its activity. Permission to militarise the service gave fresh life to Dewé and Chauvin, the chief organisers; abandoned projects were resuscitated, and the militarisation was immediately put into effect. When the service was first founded, they had tried to organise the different sections, or sectors, as separate and independent nests, with centres at Liège, Brussels, Namur, and Charleroi; they had even intended to create individual ‘letter boxes’ for each section, to enable their reports to be picked up by independent couriers from Holland, and passed through four distinct passages at the frontier. They soonrealised, however, that a single frontier passage was all Liévin could manage; in addition, lack of experience kept the heads of sections continually in consultation with headquarters in Liège. The result was that though certain individual agents, more exposed than others, were isolated, yet as a whole the service had remained closely knitted together. The militarisation and increased experience gained by the heads of sections during the past year, at last gave Dewé and Chauvin an opportunity to attain, in a slightly modified form, what they had been striving for from the beginning.
    Three battalions were created with centres at Liège, Namur, and Charleroi. Each battalion was divided into companies, each company into platoons. Thus the Namur sector became Battalion II, with companies at Marche, Namur, and Chimay; and the Marche company had its platoons at Marche, Arlon, and Luxembourg; the Namur and Chimay companies were similarly divided up into platoons. Each unit covered the area designated by its name.
    Each fourth platoon in a company occupied itself exclusively with collecting the reports from the three other platoons, and