SPY PARDONED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 July 1938, Page 6

SPY PARDONED

ECHO OF THE GREAT WAR. FROM PRISON TO CONVENT. A woman who twenty years ago was condemned to die before a firing squad as a spy, has left prison to become a nun. For a few • hours, on her way from prison cell to convent cell, she was at liberty in a world she had not seen since 1918. A pale, white-haired figure in black, she passed through the gates of Rennes Prison in Brittany. She stopped and blinked at the summer sunshine. There was fear and bewilderment in her eyes as she looked' at the bustle and listened to the noise around her. It was a very different world from that which Marie Ducret last saw when, at the age of twenty-two, she was sent to prison. She had been well known to British soldiers in the camps near Abbeville and Amiens. SAVED BY ARMISTICE. In 1918 she was arrested on the Somme front and brought before an Allies’ court-martial, accused of spying. She had given the Germans secret information about French and British troop movements. She had mingled freely with the soldiers near the front line, picking up information. She was caught red-handed by a French officer. She, was condemned to be shot. But it was then October, 1918, and in the excitement of the last offensive she was forgotten. This saved her life. After the armistice her death sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life. . In prison she was consumed with remorse for what she had done. She sought peace and solace in religion. She was a perfect prisoner, quiet, diligent, pious. She hardly ever spoke. Her leisure time was spent in her cell reading the Bible. HER ONLY WISH. the prison chaplain was touched by her penitence. The nuns who visited the prison took a special interest in her. Efforts were begun to try to secure a pardon for her. She declared that if she were released sfte wanted nothing of life but to enter a conyent. When she left prison a few weeks ago she looked very thin, but younger than her forty-two years. She went straight to the secluded Convent of Ecommoy, where she is to become a sister of the nuns of Bethanie. Grasping the arm of her son, who took her out of prison, she arrived on the verge of collapse at the gates of the cloisters and had to be helped in by two nuns.