Born Ludovica D’havé on 13 July 1894 in Ghent, but known as Louisa d’Havé. The daughter of the textile manufacturer Théophile d’Havé, his factory was in the Grondwetlaan in St. Amandsberg.
she was just 20 when the First World War broke out in 1914. In November ,she offered her services as a spy for the Belgian army. The Ministry of War in Le Havre considered her too young and inexperienced, but Major Mage of the Belgian Military Intelligence in the English port of Folkestone was impressed by her drive. The young woman also had the advantage that she could easily travel to the neutral Netherlands. From the Dutch port of Vlessingen, information from spies was forwarded to Folkestone. Under the pretext that she was going to buy fabrics for her family’s textile factory in neutral Holland, Louisa was given permission by the German occupying forces to cross the border. This allowed her to travel to France and England in November. Major Mage hired Louisa as a spy, from that day on she went through life as ‘agent 40B’. Back in Ghent, the young woman informed her father, and Théophile also decided to offer his services. He became ‘agent 45B’. Father and daughter were instructed by the Belgian Military Intelligence to try to gain the trust of the Germans and to get hold of military secrets. They also received permission to produce textiles for the Germans if they were asked to. Théophile d’Havé now began to invite German officers to his home, quite openly. Many inhabitants of Gent started to see him as a traitor. But the d’Havé’s soon got hold of useful information. Between January 1915 and February 1916, Louisa d’Havé would smuggle a total of forty to fifty times military sensitive information into the Netherlands. From Vlissingen, this information was sent to Folkestone, which forwarded it to the Belgian army headquarters in Houtem (Veurne). In February the German army placed an order with the d’Havé’s. 5,000 bags had to be made, in ‘feldgrau’ same as the German uniforms. The bags had to be made watertight with rubber. The Germans only rented the machines in the factory. Because the order was so secret, German soldiers would do the work, even though thousands of experienced workers were unemployed in Ghent. The message reached Belgian headquarters on 24 February 1915. Later Louisa reported that the inexperienced soldier-workers were making slow progress, to the anger of the German headquarters. On 19 March, news arrived from Gent that 7,000 more had been ordered. The German soldiers now had to work 24 hours a day if necessary to get the order done in time. Louisa tried in vain to find out what the bags were for, none of the Germans seemed to know or wanted to say anything. On 13 April, a message from Louisa reached the Belgian headquarters clarifying matters. The German army had placed another order, this time for 20,000 textile masks to cover mouth and nose. The masks were to be kept moist in the bags that the Germans had already had made. And a German officer had told Louisa that the masks were needed ‘to protect the soldiers from suffocating gas that the British would use at the front’. Earlier, Louisa had smuggled a model of the mouth mask to Vlissingen in January. Because they did not understand its importance at first, her intermediaries had not forwarded it to Folkestone, but now they did. With this information, the puzzle fell completely together. A German prisoner of war and a Belgian spy near Roeselare had provided other information in the same days, about the specially trained troops and the digging of gas cylinders in the trenches. The Belgian Military Intelligence was now fairly certain from Louisa’s information that a major German attack was imminent. It is not certain whether the Belgian headquarters were entirely convinced, but they were concerned enough to send the warning to the troops at the front on 16 April. However, the Belgian army did not launch a preventive counterattack, because they did not have the means for it and because, compared to the French army, they had clearly less strategic interest in it. The warning of 16 April 1915 also reached the military headquarters of the French, the British and the Canadians, but they did not take any preventive measures either. On 14 April, the French army had already received detailed information about a possible gas attack via the German August Jäger, but the French did not trust this information. Most of the Germans taken prisoner in those days wore a bag of masks made in Ghent, about which Louisa had passed on the information. The first gas mask produced by the Belgian army from 25 April onwards was a copy of the German one. Shortly after the first gas attack, the Germans in Gent started to distrust Louisa and Théophile d’Havé. Some Allied soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the gas attacks carried a mouth mask of the type that the Germans had made in the textile factory of Théophile d’Havé. Therefore, Captain Otto Rau, the German officer in charge of the Gent garrison of the German Fourth Army, the section of the German army present in Belgium and Northern France, accused Louisa and her father of treason. Rau did not take into account that the Allies had also taken prisoners of war in possession of a mouth mask made in Louisa’s father’s textile factory. Louisa and her father managed to calm Rau down, but lost the Germans’ trust. From now on, Louisa was no longer allowed to go to the Netherlands to buy fabrics. However, this did not prevent her from crossing the border clandestinely several times, often through the clusters of electric wires that the Germans had begun installing on the Belgian-Dutch border in the spring of 1915, the so-called Dodendraad (Death Wire). A ‘passeur’ helped her each time to get under the electric ‘death-wire’ at the border. At the end of February 1916 her father died in Gent. After her father’s death, Louisa remained in Middelburg ( the Netherlands) until the end of the war.
In March 1919, an article about the family’s spying appeared in the French-language newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, but its impact was limited. The text of this article was printed on the back of the textile factory’s business correspondence, in order to convince customers that the d’Havé family had not collaborated. But the customers stayed away, so a capital injection was needed for survival. The entrepreneurial family De Gryse from Tielt injected capital in 1919, and took over the factory completely a few years later. By that time, all members of the d’Havé family had left Gent. Louisa and her husband Alphonse Clément settled in Brussels in 1919 and started their own textile wholesale business.
In February 1920, Louisa was appointed Knight in the Order of Leopold. She was also awarded an Honourable Mention of the Nation and the Civil Cross first class 1914-1918, with silver crown. As a result of these acknowledgements, the war story of Louisa and her father appeared in, ‘ Het Volk’, the first time the story appeared in a Dutch-language newspaper. But even that article did not make the people of Gent embrace the d’Havé family. By chance, her story made the national media again in 1934. The tense atmosphere of the post-war years had subsided somewhat by then. However, until her death in July 1966, Louisa felt that she did not receive sufficient recognition for what she had done during the First World War.
Images Louisa, factory images from Paul Hermans