Micheline DumontUgeux, 96; Belgian resistance fighter during World War II

Micheline Dumont-Ugeux, a major figure in the Belgian underground resistance during World War II who helped hundreds of Allied troops evade capture by Nazi forces as they sneaked across mountaintops and international borders, died Nov. 16 at her home in Saint-Siffret, France. She was 96.

Her death was announced by a funeral home in Uzes, France. The cause was not disclosed.

Dumont-Ugeux joined the Belgian resistance in 1942, the same year her parents and sister were arrested by the German Gestapo for their underground work against Nazi occupiers of their homeland.

Known by her code name of Lily, she spent three years, often at great risk, as a leader of a secret organization known as the Comet Line. The clandestine escape network rescued at least 750 Allied airmen whose planes had been shot down over Europe and enabled the men to escape across Belgium, France and Spain.

Dumont-Ugeux personally helped at least 250 of them, including many Americans, reach freedom, often outwitting Nazi agents at every step of the way. The Comet Line was one of the most successful resistance efforts of the war. Many of the group's leaders were women.

In her early 20s at the time, Dumont-Ugeux was barely five feet tall and carried false identity papers, shaving six years off her age.

"Her face was round and artless," British intelligence officer Airey Neave later wrote in a book about her. "She looked no more than 15, an advantage that she used to the full."

Soon after she joined the Comet Line, Dumont-Ugeux was partly in charge of logistics in Brussels, "organizing safe houses, working with photographers to produce identity cards and, most important, leading airmen on the way from the countryside to the French border," former Washington Post journalist Peter Eisner wrote in his 2004 book, "The Freedom Line."

Trained as a nurse, she helped airmen recover from their wounds, and also taught them French phrases and European manners.

"Keep your hands out of your pockets," she advised, after seeing Americans casually jangle their pocket change as they walked along. "No European does that."

She told Americans how to smoke cigarettes in the European style, to avoid being detected, and how to wear a beret. She warned them never to switch their knife and fork from one hand to the other while eating.

At times, if Gestapo agents were lurking nearby, she would embrace an airman she barely knew and appear to be locked in a passionate kiss.

In 1943, Dumont-Ugeux spent six weeks helping Robert Grimes of Portsmouth, Virginia, a B-17 pilot, recover from a leg wound after he was shot down over rural Belgium. She found a doctor who extracted a two-inch piece of shrapnel without anesthesia.