suggest that she did not undertake this highly skilled digging work, but was at liberty and working within the trenches. Historian Simon Jones, an expert on the Somme tunnels, believes that Dorothy was not actually tunnelling under the front line but thinks there is no doubt that she was in the trenches disguised as a man. Due to the stress of the situation, Lawrence developed constant chills and rheumatism, then fainting fits. After 10 days of service, to protect the men who had helped her, she revealed herself to be female and the commanding sergeant promptly placed her under military arrest. Return to England Taken to the BEF headquarters and interrogated as a spy by a colonel, she was declared a prisoner of war. From there she was taken cross country by horse to Third Army headquarters in Calais, where she was interrogated by six generals and approximately twenty other officers. She was ignorant of the term camp follower (one meaning of which is "prostitute") and she later recalled "We talked steadily at cross purposes. On my side I had not been informed what the term meant, and on their side they continued unaware that I remained ignorant! So I often appeared to be telling lies." From Calais she was taken to Saint-Omer and further interrogated. The Army was embarrassed that a woman had breached security and was fearful of more women taking on male roles during the war if her story got out. Fearing that she might divulge sensitive intelligence, a judge ordered that she remain in France until after the Battle of Loos. Held within the Convent de Bon Pasteur, she was also made to swear not to write about her experiences and signed an affidavit to that effect to keep from being sent to jail. Sent back to London, she travelled across the English Channel on the same ferry as activist Emmeline Pankhurst, who asked her to speak at a suffragette meeting. Once in London, she tried to write about her experiences for The Wide World Magazine, but had to scrap her first book on the instructions of the War Office, which invoked the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act to silence her. She later commented: The National Archives have two medal index cards for Lawrence confirming her participation in the war: one showing her rank of Sapper with the Royal Engineers and another showing her as