safe houses and potential recruits. On one occasion when she was struggling to carry a heavy wireless set in a suitcase, a chivalrous German officer carried it for her onto a train. During her travels, Herbert became friends with de Baissac's sister Lise who was an SOE agent in Poitiers. In June 1943, the Germans penetrated the Prosper network in Paris and arrested many SOE agents and hundreds of their French contacts. As Scientist had links with Prosper, the Germans also dismantled Scientist, and the SOE agents, including Herbert, went into hiding. De Baissac requested or was ordered to return to England to avoid arrest and he and his sister, Lise, flew back on a Westland Lysander from a clandestine airfield on the night of 16/17 August. Herbert was pregnant by this time and Roger Landes, the Scientist network's efficient wireless operator, was furious that de Baissac had taken his sister with him to England and left Mary Herbert behind. Herbert had hidden her pregnancy until she learned that de Baissac was not coming back to Bordeaux. She told Landes who ordered her to cease all clandestine activities and installed her in a nursing home in the suburbs of Bordeaux where she had a daughter she named Claudine in early December 1943. With her daughter she left the nursing home and moved into an apartment in Poitiers that Lise de Baissac had rented. Arrest On 18 February 1944, Herbert was arrested in her apartment in Poitiers. The German Gestapo had found out that Lise de Baissac was an SOE agent and that the apartment had been rented to her. The Germans initially thought that Herbert was de Baissac. The Germans imprisoned Herbert, leaving the baby with her maid. French Social Services put the child in an orphanage. Under interrogation, Herbert kept to her cover story and denied that she knew de Baissac. Her accented French, she said, was because she had lived in Egypt and spoke Arabic. She protested her innocence saying she knew nothing of the woman who had rented the apartment before her, that she had only been there a few weeks, and it was hardly likely that an SOE agent would have just given birth to a baby. In prison, Herbert was put into solitary confinement for 24 hours, but otherwise was not badly treated. The prison was "very clean and the inmates had a bath every