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The Petit Network

August 16, 2024 | Wehner, Elle | European History, Excerpts, History, Politics

Helen Fry—

Twenty-two-year-old Gabrielle Petit was formally recruited by an officer of the British Service in the summer of 1915 while crossing the Channel by boat to England.1 The Belgian had told the British officer that she aspired to help the war effort and wanted to volunteer for medical work. Her bold, fearless character made an impression on him and he asked her to become an agent for the British in Belgium. She was excited by the prospect and accepted

After training with British intelligence in England, she returned to the Tournai region under the alias ‘Mademoiselle Legrand’ and formed a new intelligence organisation called ‘Petit’ that was distinct from other such networks in the country. Petit was delighted to be back in Tournai, the place of her birth in 1893. She came from a middle- class background, but had had a troubled childhood. Rejected by her father after the death of her mother, she was sent to an orphanage and made a failed suicide attempt at the age of fifteen.2 Drifting between jobs and accommodation, she was taken in by a kind Belgian couple, Mr and Mrs Collet-Sauvage. In July 1915, having enlisted into the intelligence services in Belgium, she was sent to England for a period of training by the British Secret Service as a professional spy. She returned to her country and was given a letter box for dropping off intelligence at the home of none other than the now widowed Mrs Collet-Sauvage. 

From the autumn of 1915, under the codename Mrs Legrand, Petit travelled to the Ypres sector in Maubeuge to live and move among enemy troops and take note of the units, their movements, the position of troops, morale, uniforms and weapons. Her mission was complex and dangerous. She adopted a multitude of false identities, including a bakery delivery woman, a nanny, a barmaid, a fisherman and a beggar in order to slip between the German lines, appearing and disappearing under these different disguises. Her observations were written on minuscule, thin sheets of paper using invisible ink and taken to Collet- Sauvage. From there, couriers collected the messages and passed them on to British intelligence. Three other young girls are known to have worked in the Petit network; all were conscious of the perils and the possibility of betrayal.3 They proved very successful in recording the movement of trains and German troops and passing their observations back to British intelligence. 

Petit sent a total of fifty intelligence reports during her relatively short time working for the British. She was ultimately betrayed by a German mole called Wepiar d’Ougrée and, as a result, the Germans placed her under surveillance, recording her visits to the dead letter box.4 She went to the Logemont café on 26 August 1915, 24 January 1916 and 2 February 1916, and on that final visit she was arrested. As she was driven away by her German captors, she shouted, ‘I am Belgian and I am captive of the Boches.’ They threatened her, but she calmly retorted, ‘Just try it . . . I will pierce your hand with the hairpin of my hat!’5 Why did she risk her life? In her own words, it was ‘to do my duty, come what may’.6

Petit was imprisoned in the infamous St Gilles prison in Brussels. An eyewitness account of her treatment at the hands of the Germans and her defiance towards them was provided by a prisoner in the next cell. Petit faced trial and, although there was insufficient evidence of her espionage activities, the Germans sentenced her to death. The prison priest tried to persuade her to send a plea to the German Kaiser for a pardon. She flatly refused, telling him, ‘I will not abase myself before a German, even less for the Kaiser. I want to show them a Belgian woman knows how to die.’ 

On 1 April 1916, at the age of only twenty-three, Petit was shot by the Germans for espionage. She was heroic and defiant even moments before her death, refusing to be blindfolded before the firing squad in Schaerbeek and, as they raised their guns, shouting out, ‘Vive la Belgique! Vive la Belgique!’7

From Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two World Wars by Helen Fry. Published by Yale University Press in 2023. Reproduced with permission.

Historian and biographer Helen Fry is the author of The Walls Have Ears, Spymaster, MI9, and more than twenty books on intelligence, prisoners of war, and the social history of World War II. She appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts and has been involved in numerous documentaries.

  1. See www.1914-1918.be/civil_gabrielle_petit.php, and Kathryn Atwood, Women Heroes of World War I, p. 57. ↩︎
  2. Atwood, Women Heroes of World War I, p. 54.  ↩︎
  3. The young women were Laure Butin, Adèle Collet and Hélène Petit. ↩︎
  4. Report entitled ‘The journeys of Gabrielle Petit at Tournai’, dated 2 July 1920, signed by Henri Philippart and witnessed by L. Tandel (one of the Tandel sisters who worked for La Dame Blanche network). ↩︎
  5. Atwood, Women Heroes of World War I, p. 54. ↩︎
  6. See www.1914-1918.be/civil_gabrielle_petit.php. ↩︎
  7. Atwood, Women Heroes of World War I, p. 60. ↩︎

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