Her death, of undisclosed causes, was announced by the municipal authorities in Nivelles.

Monique Hanotte circa 1944. Courtesy of Rumes Municipal Council Handout

The unarmed Belgian resistance – two-thirds of them women of all ages – hid, clothed, fed and created false documents for downed airmen, and then guided more than 800 of them on a long, dangerous trail through France, over the rugged Pyrenees to Spain, and finally into the British territory of Gibraltar, from which they would be flown to England.

Hanotte was one of the last handful of surviving members of the Belgian “Comet Line,” a resistance network dedicated to saving Allied airmen from capture, torture and likely execution by the Nazis.

The network’s motto was “Pugna Quin Percutias” (fight without arms), as it never undertook armed or violent attacks during the German occupation, unlike the neighboring French resistance. Around 160 members of the network, including many women, were captured by the Gestapo, often tortured, executed or sent to German concentration or extermination camps.

Hanotte’s resistance “career” began in May 1940, when she was 19, after two ragged British army officers showed up at the Hanotte family’s small hotel in the Belgian village of Rumes, just over a mile from the French border, soon after Hitler’s forces had invaded Belgium on their way to France.

The men had become separated from their units and were trying to get to the French port of Dunkirk to join the British mass evacuation in the face of the German onslaught. The United States had not yet entered the war.

Hanotte – then known by her birth name, Henriette – and her younger brother, Georges, helped feed and clothe the officers and removed anything easily identifiable as English (such as shirt labels). The Hanotte matriarch, Georgette, then dressed the men as coal merchants and guided them across the border into the hands of the local French maquis (resistance), who would get the officers to Dunkirk.

Soon after the massive Dunkirk evacuation that May and June, another British officer knocked at the Hanottes’ door. He was an agent of Britain’s military intelligence section MI9, set up to rescue Allied airmen shot down over Germany or German-occupied France or Belgium.

Having heard of the family’s anti-Nazi activity, he asked her parents if he could enlist Henriette in the endeavor as part of the Comet Line. She and her parents did not hesitate, and so began her new life with the code name Monique, a name she would retain for the rest of her life.

Mostly, she guided Allied airmen around German lines into France, then accompanied them by train to Lille or Paris, where the French resistance would take over and get them to Gibraltar. According to the Times of London, she would buy rail tickets from different booths to ensure they did not have consecutive numbers. “I always had an old loaf of stale bread in my bag,” she recalled. “If we were checked, I would say, ‘I went to get bread from the country.’ It was easier to get through as a woman.”

In late 1942, her clandestine family operation was “bursting at the seams,” the Times of London quoted her saying. “We didn’t know where to put them (the airmen, whom she always referred to in English as ‘my boys’) any more, and my mother said to me, ‘Hurry up.’ There were two of them who were leaving and two who were arriving.”

Having grown up, played along and crossed the Belgian-French border as a child and up to the May 1940 German invasion of both countries, Hanotte knew every ditch or secret path through the hedgerows. She also knew the French and Belgian border police and customs officers by name, and they would later advise her of German troops’ whereabouts.

Among the 135 Allied airmen Hanotte personally tended and helped to freedom during the war was U.S. Army Air Forces Lt. Charles V. Carlson, a badly wounded bombardier whose B-17 Flying Fortress had been shot down over Stambruges, Belgium, in October 1943.

After the 25-year-old Minnesotan had been guided by patriotic farmers to the Hanottes’ home, Monique looked after him but realized he was too badly hurt to attempt the odyssey behind German lines in France and over the Pyrenees. Instead, she escorted him, on foot or by bicycle, between safe houses in France and Belgium until both nations were liberated by the Allies in 1944.

Carlson’s daughter and members of his extended family visited Hanotte in Belgium several times in recent years to thank her and the entire Comet Line network. The town of Bachy, France, close to her childhood home in Rumes, features a statue showing Hanotte escorting the American airman over the Belgian-French border.

In May 1944, with the Allies preparing the Normandy invasion, Hanotte herself managed to get to England via Gibraltar to train as an intelligence officer to parachute behind German lines after the landings. She never did. A medical report said she was injured during training, although she played down her injury and suspected British Intelligence had decided she’d “already done enough” for the war effort.

And so she spent the day of Germany’s unconditional surrender, in May 1945, celebrating with rapturous crowds, as well as British, American and other Allied servicemen, in the streets of London. One of her great regrets, she said, was not witnessing the liberation of her hometown of Rumes by the U.S. 2nd Armored Division on Sept. 2, 1944, when American soldiers were showered with flowers by her Comet Line comrades.

Henriette Lucie Hanotte was born in Sépeaux, France, on Aug. 10, 1920, to a Belgian veteran of World War I and his French wife. The family moved to Rumes when Henriette was still a baby.

Her father ran the local railway station hotel as well as a customs office and a small livestock farm where she helped tend the animals. She walked or cycled across the French border to her school in the town of Bachy, where she also took violin lessons.

In 1945, she married Jules Thomé, a Belgian police patrolman, and they had two children, Bernadette and Bernard. Her husband predeceased her, and she is survived by her children, six grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.

Over the years, Hanotte received British and American honors for her war work.

One U.S. airman she helped save was 20-year-old Flight Engineer H.C. Johnson of Bemis, Tenn., whose B-17 was shot down by German Luftwaffe fighter planes while bombing the German city of Gelsenkirchen in 1943. Two of the 10-man crew were killed, but Johnson and the others managed to bail out.

When he landed by parachute in a sugar beet field outside Lokeren, Belgium, locals sheltered him and eventually got him to Hanotte in Rumes. She got him false papers, taught him to speak key phrases in French, shepherded him into France on a bicycle and started him off on an arduous 54-day journey through France and Spain.

“The Comet Line included a series of places, but the Comet Line itself was made up of people,” H.C. Johnson’s niece Anita Roark told the Jackson (Tenn.) Sun in 2015. “These were people whose country had been invaded and who wanted freedom and were so grateful to the Allied troops they tried to help. The people of the Comet Line – like ‘Monique’ – were just as heroic as the troops they saved.”