Nurse Edith Cavell, as every British heroine worshipper should know, was a smuggler of men. She was shot for heroically smuggling Allied soldiers out of territory occupied by the Imperial German Armies. Exactly similar was the work of two French heroines, Louise de Bettignies and Marie Léonie van Houtte. Louise died in a German prison. Last week with all possible Paris pomp Marie was married.
Marie van Houtte owes her life to a smart Spanish consul in Brussels who argued the Germans into sentencing her to life imprisonment instead of setting her before a firing squad. When Germany was beaten she went free and France gave her the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. To perform her marriage last week up rose in the gorgeous robes of a Prince of the Church, Jean Cardinal Verdier, Archbishop of Paris.
Witnesses for the bride were the French Army's taut, terrier-like Chief of Staff General Max Weygand and equally intense onetime Premier and present Minister Without Portfolio André Tardieu. About all that gallant Paris correspondents permitted themselves to say of the bridegroom, M. Antoine Rieder, was that he had as his witness the Military Governor of Paris, grim-browed General Henri Gouraud.
Actually the bride would be less than half the heroine she is today had it not been for the bridegroom. A second rate writer, he has made it his career to keep Heroine Marie van Houtte before a grateful public with such books as Meditation in the Trenches and The Women's War.
According to Bridegroom Rieder, his spouse fooled the Germans by means of duplicate carts of hay having horses exactly alike. In the second cart under the hay lay Allied men about to be smuggled out across the lines. After German soldiers had probed the first cart with pitchforks, Heroine van Houtte, then 24 and passing for a buxom peasant lass, contrived that the Germans should not notice while the second cart was driven ahead of the first.