Marthe Becomes a Double-Agent
At the hospital, Marthe Cnockaert would sometimes have to work 20 hours straight, because they were such a small town, and there were not enough trained nurses and doctors available. This meant that all of the German soldiers who were recovering from their wounds knew who she was, and really liked her. Two of the high-ranking Germans also saw her working as a waitress at her father’s new cafe. They noticed how devout she was to healing wounded men, so she was awarded with The Iron Cross, which is one of the highest German medals of honor. The ironic part was that one of these men, Otto von Prompt, was actually visiting Rousseliere to find and extract Belgian spies, but she managed to slip right under his nose.
During this time that she was making so many German soldier friends, Martha learned that over 1,000 enemy troops were staying inside of the brewery in Rousseliere. She was walking home at night, and mentally preparing what her note to the “safety pin man” should say. A strange man with two safety pins on his collar was approaching a house in front of Marthe, and she stayed back. She had never seen this man before, but that was to be expected, since new spies were being recruited all the time. But she had a strong feeling in the pit of her stomach to stand back.
She figured that it would be safer to wait in the shadows, as another woman slipped her own message to the fellow spy. After knocking on the window, the “safety pin man” pulled out a gun, and shot the woman who was passing the note.
The Germans had infiltrated the spy ring. They knew about the safety pins, the secret knock, and the coded messages. Espionage was no longer safe, now that Otto von Prompt was out for blood. Since sending messages through the “safety pin man” was no longer safe, Marthe gave a note to her mother, who was able to smuggle the information across the border, and hand it off to her friend Lucelle. The message was given to the British Intelligence, and they prepared to bomb the brewery.
The next day, Otto Von Prompt grabbed Marthe by the arm while she was in her father’s cafe, and told her to come up to his apartment, because he wanted to speak privately. She was shaking, believing that she figured out she was part of the Belgian spy ring. To her surprise, he truly did think she was loyal to the Germans, so he asked her to become a spy for him, in order to wipe out the Belgian resistance.
Marthe agreed to think it over, because she had no choice but to become a double agent. That same night, bombs were dropped on the brewery where the German troops were sleeping. Marthe had to go to the hospital to treat the survivors, staying silent about the fact she was the spy who was responsible for the attack. Otto von Prompt was furious, so he urged Marthe to use her connections in town to figure out who had leaked the information. She didn’t want to falsely accuse someone else in the village, so she wrote up a piece of paper with random numbers and letters, claiming that it was some sort of secret code she found on the leg of a carrier pigeon. At first, Prompt was very happy to get this secret code and it distracted him for a short period of time, until he realized it was a total fake.