Did U know these details about Mata Hari? Part I

[Loralee Reach 245]

Mata Hari was only interested in one thing - and it wasn't espionage

 

by TONY RENNELL

 

She stood alone in the sodden field on the outskirts of Paris, her fashionable ankle boots firmly planted in the mud churned up by the cavalry who drilled there.

 

 

No, she would not be tied to the stake, she told her executioners politely. And nor would she allow them to blindfold her. She faced the barrels of the firing squad without flinching.

Earlier, at 5am, they had woken her in her filthy cell in the Prison de Saint-Lazare to tell her this was the day she would die. She dressed in her best - stockings, a low-cut blouse under a dove-grey, two-piece suit.

 

On her head she perched a three-cornered hat at a jaunty angle, hiding her greying hair, unkempt and unwashed through nine months of incarceration. Over her shoulders she slung a vivid blue coat like a cloak to keep out the cold October air.

In a black car with its window blinds down, Margaretha Zelle, convicted of espionage, was then driven at speed through the still streets of the capital - a place she loved with a passion, though she was Dutch not French - to this damp and drear spot.

The 12 soldiers in their khaki uniforms and red fezzes raised their rifles. She waved to the two weeping nuns who had been her comfort in prison and on her last journey. She blew a kiss to the priest and another to her lawyer, an ex-lover.

Zelle slumped to the ground. The officer in charge marched forward and fired a single bullet into her brain, the coup de grace.

An extraordinary life was over. The woman who was executed that day in 1917 was better known as Mata Hari, the name Zelle had chosen for herself when she became Europe's queen of unbridled eroticism, an exotic dancer, courtesan, harlot, great lover, spendthrift, liar, deceiver and thief.

And German spy? That is what - in the fevered atmosphere of France in World War I, with the Kaiser's troops encamped within its borders - she had been shot for. She caused the deaths of tens of thousands of French soldiers, it was said, a crime that would ever after make her synonymous with seduction and treachery, the ultimate femme fatale.

Except that she may not have been guilty at all.

In a new and fascinating biography, American academic Pat Shipman makes the case that, far from being the betrayer, she was the one betrayed, and by that breed she loved all her life - men.

It was men who, like witchhunters, built the case against her, driven by prejudice not fact. And with France gripped by anti-German spy mania, few would stick their heads above the parapet to defend her. Britain's fledgling intelligence service, MO5 (soon to change its name to MI5) also helped dig her grave with, as we will see, the dodgiest of dossiers.

But in the story of Mata Hari, there was one thing that needed no sexing-up Sex was the driving force of her life.

In the little Dutch town where she grew up, her shopkeeper father lavished extremes of affection on his "little princess". It made her vain, self-centred and spoilt, and with an insatiable longing for male attention.

At school, the 16-year-old bedded the headmaster. Was he the seducer or her? No one knows, but this was 1893 and it was the girl who was sent home in shame.

The restless teenager now set about finding a man to take her away from the stuffiness of Dutch society. When, through a Lonely Hearts ad, she met Captain Rudof MacLeod, a hard-living, hard-drinking officer home on leave from Holland's vicious colonial wars in the East Indies, she didn't care that he was 22 years older than her.

He was handsome, with a splendid moustache. She was tall (5ft 10in) and elegant, with flirty dark eyes and a dark olive complexion. The attraction was immediate, sexual and very strong. She told him she longed to do "crazy things" and they were engaged within six days.

They married three months later, she in a bright yellow gown rather than the traditional white.

She couldn't keep her eyes off the other officers and, as she was the first to admit, did not have it within her to be "a good housewife".

"I was not content at home," she later confessed. "I wanted to live like a colourful butterfly in the sun."

He was jealous, though saw no reason why he should forego the womanising, drinking and coarseness of his bachelor days. He was constantly in debt; she was extravagant, always spending. As for his syphilis, caught overseas, he neglected to tell her.

Nonetheless, she bore him two children, and they returned as a family to his new posting in the colonies. There, in the exotic surroundings of Indonesia, their marital problems multiplied.

She did not fit the mould of the officer's wife, not least because her dark skin made the snobbier women suggest she had native blood in her. To the men, however, that look was seductive, and she made the most of it.

"Her languid, graceful style of moving, her dark eyes and luxurious hair, telegraphed her sexuality to any male in her presence," writes Shipman. "She drew every man's lustful admiration and every woman's envy. She was seen as morally dangerous, selfish and frivolous."

The marriage deteriorated into sharp quarrels, too much drinking, rows about money and accusations of infidelity. But what destroyed the union was tragedy. Their son, Norman, was struck by serious illness and died at the age of two. His sister, one-year-old Nonnie, nearly died, too, but pulled through.

The relationship sank into hatred. His wife was "scum of the lowest kind" MacLeod told his family back in Holland, "a woman without heart, who cares nothing for anything".