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Chapters (46)
  1. The Man Who Loved Mata Hari
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. PART I: The Early Years
  5. Prologue
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. PART II: The Middle Years
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. PART III: The War Years
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-One
  29. Chapter Twenty-Two
  30. PART IV: The Last Year
  31. Chapter Twenty-Three
  32. Chapter Twenty-Four
  33. Chapter Twenty-Five
  34. Chapter Twenty-Six
  35. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-One
  40. Chapter Thirty-Two
  41. Chapter Thirty-Three
  42. Chapter Thirty-Four
  43. Chapter Thirty-Five
  44. Montserrat
  45. Author’s Afterword
  46. Table of Contents

Yet for Margaretha these were still days of faith, faith in herself, but also faith in France, which she did love. In all she spent three weeks preparing for her "mission abroad." She dined with a few old friends from the artistic community. She dined with Jules Cambon. She wired her once and former lover in The Hague, and eventually separated him from another five thousand francs.

Then she was gone, leisurely traipsing back to Spain with a mountain of luggage and a ticket to the Netherlands ... in Madrid they would later say that she sent at least two Allied ships to the bottom, while in Vigo they would say that she had hopelessly compromised the British offensive on the Somme. In truth, she spent her time much as she had always spent it. She dined with available gentlemen. She danced at the home of a Spanish industrialist. She posed for a local photographer, leaving us three more nude studies that show her off as she so badly needed and wanted to be seen: an exquisite, to be adored, desired, and thereby finally accepted.

PART IV: The Last Year

PART IV

The Last Year

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

THE Somme is a quiet river. It winds along ill-defined banks choked with brush and clumps of grass. The valley is shallow and wide among the chalk downs. The soil is soft and uncertain. The pace of life has always been slow here, with routine harvests of sugar beet and potatoes. The countryside is also slow under the gaze of a traveler or soldier who takes the old Roman road above the trench-lines.

There are more than fifty cemeteries here to commemorate the British dead. Most are kept immaculate by the Imperial War Graves Commission, and have been arranged geographically according to where the battalions fell. Opposite Beaumont Hamel, for example, there is a circular garden dedicated to the 1st Newfoundlanders, slaughtered within minutes of leaving the trenches. Above the Ancre Valley there are several commemorative monuments for the Ulster divisions cut down in successive waves along the marshland. Of particular interest is a bronze memorial near La Boiselle, where Nicholas Gray advanced with four battalions of Tyneside Irish into a bizarre and, as it turned out, pointless massacre.