ESCAPES FROM FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 October 1941, Page 6

ESCAPES FROM FRANCE

MANY MEN AND WOMEN REACH BRITAIN.

GIRL’S ADVENTUROUS TRIP.

Escapes from France are growing more numerous, and more and more Frenchmen, and French women, are reaching England to serve in the ranks of General de Gaulle.

Escape is sometimes rapid, but more often it is a long ordeal. The stories of these escapes would already make a thrilling volume. Among the latest to reach London is a young girl of 19. She started to journey in the wrong direction, clambering into a goods train that took her into the “forbidden zone” near the coast. Discovery might well have meant as a spy. She jumped from the train in the dead of night and made her way across country, hiding at one time in a cemetery when she heard German soldiers on the road. Then she managed to get into another train, and at last she crossed the demarkation line into “free” France, eventually reaching Toulouse. Here she was arrested for being without visible means of support, and after spending a month in jail was handed over to the care of a convent, where she was employed as a kitchen maid. When surveillance relaxed, she slipped out of a side door while the nuns were in the chapel and made for the Pyrenees. She hid in barns during the day and walked by night, and when questioned she put on an English accent and said she was trying to get back to her family in England. This twice saved her from re-arrest. It took her several terrible days to cross the Pyrenees by a smugglers’ path into Spain, where she was again put into prison. Eventually she reached Gibraltar, where she was very well treated, and passage to England was arranged for her. She enrolled for service with the de Gaulle’s women’s corps exactly three months after she started her escape.