The Page 99 Test: Helen Fry's "The White Lady"

Thursday, December 4, 2025

Helen Fry's "The White Lady"

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.

Fry's new book, The White Lady: The Story of Two Key British Secret Service Networks Behind German Lines, provides a comprehensive history of two of the most important British secret service networks in Belgium in two world wars.

Fry applied the “Page 99 Test” to The White Lady, and shared the following:

From page 99:
‘With my pillow I fixed up a dummy to make the bed appear occupied. I placed some of my clothes on the chair, as if I had just taken them off. At eight o’clock, Maryan, the insider who agreed to help us, opened the cell.’ (Fauquenot).

Creusen was already waiting for Fauquenot and hiding in a store cupboard, having been smuggled out of his cell by Maryan. Maryan gave them a small hammer and an iron spike, then wished them luck and disappeared. Fauquenot and Creusen made their way to the chapel, climbed a spiral staircase into a loft and then onto the roof of the prison.

At 9pm, Chauvin asked Dewé if he had heard a whistle. Then a silhouette of a figure appeared on the prison roof and promptly disappeared. ‘Did you see him?’ Chauvin asked Dewé, but Dewé had not. A different shadowy figure suddenly emerged from the darkness of the street. It was one of their own agents, Juliette Durieu. She informed them that Maryan had safely reached the safehouse, ahead of Fauquenot and Creusen…

Meanwhile Fauquenot fastened a sheet to the skylight and began to slide down to the gutter, as he recalled: ‘The roof was slippery and much steeper than I had imagined. From the gutter, I let out the sheet. To my horror, it was too short to reach anywhere near the prison wall. I pulled myself back to the skylight, and whispered the tragic news to Creusen, who was still in the loft… Then I heard a hiss from Creusen: “The pile of sheets, I’ll go back and get some.”’

Creusen soon reappeared with a bundle of sheets and tied them into a long rope. Fauquenot slid swiftly down the drain pipe to the ground and ran towards Dewé and Chauvin. He gave the password, Joan of Arc.’ Just as they enquired about the whereabouts of Creusen, his head appeared over the wall.

‘The two Collards?’ asked Dewé and Chauvin asked simultaneously.

‘They are in a different wing in solitary confinement.’
If browsers open the book at page 99 they won’t have a sense of what the White Lady network was about, but they will be curious as to why two agents (Fauquenot and Creusen) were being broken out of jail in the middle of the night. It all feels very cloak and dagger. The double break-out is one of the few known incidents of a planned escape from a Belgian prison in the First World War. The agents were working for ‘The White Lady’ network (‘La Dame Blanche’) and had been arrested at Villa Les Hirondelles on the river Meuse when German field security police in civilian clothes raided the property and arrested them. The villa was a main centre for collecting military intelligence reports from the different sectors of the spy network in the region. Two other pivotal figures in the network, the Collard brothers, were arrested in the villa at the same time. Only in their early twenties, they were shot for espionage by a German firing squad on 18 July 1918.

The reader will be drawn to read more about a world in which heroic Belgian men and women risked their lives to gather intelligence for the Allies from behind enemy lines and smuggle it out of German-occupied Belgium. Couriers took the reports to undercover British intelligence officers in Rotterdam, Holland. The network was so successful that it was described in the official MI6 history as ‘the most successful single British human intelligence operation of the First World War’. What an accolade. It became the model for a successor network in the Second World War called the Clarence Service, led by the same men and women who developed all kinds of fascinating spycraft.