The Secrets of Rue St. Roch

[healdav]

On 5 August there will be a great event taking place.

A new book will be launched which will change everyone's ideas about the conduct of the secret war during WW1.

The book is called THE SECRETS OF RUE ST. ROCHE and is BY JANET MORGAN (of Crossman Diaries fame).

The story behind it is this. In 1983 when I was writing a weekly article about Luxembourg history for a magazine here, I came across a story written in 1947 about an intelligence network that had operated in the country during WW1. It was quite obvious that the author had only scratched the surface. By 1995! I had got as far as finding the name of the man who was the officer in charge in Paris and was able to contact the family (they were in Who's Who). To my amazement I discovered that they had only just opened a chest of paper that this man had left behind and in it was a complete archive relating to this network - and when I say complete, I mean complete; everything, photos, letters, newspapers; you name it.

I would have been delighted to get a copy of the citations for the Mentions in Dispatches and to know exactly which Medal the French had awarded this officer.

Anyway, it has taken Janet from 1995 until now to write up the story and get it published.

It comes out on 5 August. I am told that there will probably be a spot about it on BBC TV Breakfast programme on 3 August and there may be something as well on 5 August (interviews are due to be recorded today).

I am still reading my copy of the book, but it will make your hair stand on end. James Bond is anodyne. A Belgian officer flew in by balloon to do the enciphering. A Luxembourg woman ran the network, her husband as the railway doctor collected information from his railway patients! The info was enciphered into a newspaper and sent on subscription to an exiled Luxembourg priest in Switzerland - and sent quickly so that the news would not be stale! It took on average only five days for the news to get from Luxembourg to Paris.

The info from the network was crucial in giving advance warning of the Ludendorff offensive.

This is the only archive to have survived. At the end of the war intelligence officers were ordered to burn all their files. This one was taken home!

One ironic point (not in the book) is that the nephew of the woman who ran the ring married a French woman, daughter of a General. She told me that when she announced this to the family, her father solemnly warned her against it (this was in the early 1930s) as, 'all Luxembourgers are traitors to the allies'. She still laughs about it.

I am still living on a diet of neat gin. 20 years, and at long last!!!!!

The book is published by Penguin's hardback imprint and will be available from all outlets.

[salientpoints]

ISBN is 0713997656

Not sure if the jacket has changed?

Ryan

[healdav]

Yes, it is now a blue colour, showing Bruce and madame Rischrd and the street itself.

[Guest thedoc]

So glad you like Janet's book. Thank you for your nice review. I am Lise Rischard's nephew's grandson.

Did you like the rest of the book? I thought it felt a bit superficial at times. Janet had to cut a lot, her original work was twice that big. She had even more interesting details about the whole story. She's been working on this meticulously, for years, moving every comma, checking every detail. She's still correcting small mistakes - whose car blocked the road when the Germans invaded for example. I might try to talk to her about making the full text available on archive.org some day.

What my great-granddad actually told my grandmother when she told her parents about her new boyfriend in 1946 was "Luxembourgers? Do you know what they are? They're all spies and traitors!" . She eventually married him, and got slapped by her dad because she was hesitating at the last moment on the day of the wedding

I have links to a couple of newspaper reviews over at my site.

Greetings from Luxembourg,

Guillaume

[Christina Holstein]

Hi Guillaume,

I'm going to be picking up my copy today! Thanks for the extra info. Where are you in Luxembourg? It's nice to know there are other people interested in WWI in the G. Duchy and that David and I aren't the only ones.

Christina

[Guest thedoc]

Hi Christina,

We were a bit worried about the books not arriving in the shops after getting our friends excited about the release. I'm glad to know it's arrived. How are you coping with it? I know my dad took a couple of weeks to read it, I read it in a couple of nights, and Janet suspects many people will open the book, read a couple of pages and be put off by the amount of information .

I'm from Luxembourg-city but study in Lancaster during the year. Where are you and David from?

[IanA]

No apologies for pushing this one up to the top again. I have just finished reading a second-hand copy which I found and can recommend it wholeheartedly. As an account of actions far removed from the hurly-burly of the Western Front, it is a captivating story of incredible courage and painstaking attention to the minutest detail. The name of the dashing Belgian, Albert-Ernest Baschwitz Meau, deserves to be more widely known.

[Robert Dunlop]

It is a great read. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

Robert

[Martin Bennitt]

I finished this quite recently, and thought it a brilliant yarn, though the intricacies of the code used left my head in a bit of a spin. Noted Healdav's name in the acknowledgements.

cheers Martin B

[John(txic)]

I had the pleasure of seeing the author give a talk about this subject at our Wolverhampton WFA last year.

She is an energetic and informative speaker, well worth seeing.

[green_acorn]

I had the pleasure of seeing the author give a talk about this subject at our Wolverhampton WFA last year.

She is an energetic and informative speaker, well worth seeing.

It is a great book and prompted me to extend my post discharge holiday to Europe from Australia, to walk some of the ground in the story.

I am going to be exceptionally fortunate in November/December to meet both the author and her husband the sone of Goerge Bruce MC here in Australia.

cheers,

Hendo

[healdav]

She is an energetic and informative speaker, well worth seeing.

That is the understatement of the year. When she first came to my home, at 10 a.m. she hit us like the white tornado.

She and Robert left at 11 a.m. and my wife and I had very stiff gins to get our strength back.

Robert is the exact opposite of Janet. Very quiet and barely says a word.

I'm not sure whether the book has been revised and reprinted, but I did send her three errors that I found (don't worry, I'm the only person in the world probably who would notice them or know anything about them).