The End of the Line
Marthe feared for her life. She knew it was only a matter of time before Prompt discovered that she was actually the spy who was responsible for the death of those men. Desperate for help, she found one of the safety pin men that she recognized in town, pulled them to the side, and told him exactly what was happening. The next day, Otto von Prompt was assassinated in his apartment.
Unfortunately, the relief was short-lived, because when the Germans conducted a search of her apartment above the cafe. They found some of her real coded messages, and arrested her. She fully expected to be executed that day, but instead, they kept her in jail for several weeks before being put on trial.
When she sat before the court of German officials, she told them that she saw herself as a Belgian soldier, and it was her duty to her country to do whatever she could to defend it against invaders. She did not incriminate herself unnecessarily, of course. If they knew the extent of the damage she had done to the German army, they truly would have killed her. She did not admit to leaking the information about the brewery, or her connection with the assassination to Otto von Prompt.
Instead of learning about her super-spy abilities, her friends at the hospital were there to testify for her character, including German doctors. They told the German judge how she spent the majority of her days and nights healing soldier’s wounds from both sides of the war, and that hundreds of men would have died without her. They also brought up the fact that she was awarded the Iron Cross for doing so. Based on the testimonies of the court, they must have thought she was harmless. She was found guilty of being a spy, which is normally a death sentence. However, since she had the Iron Cross, she was allowed to live in prison for the next two years, until the end of World War I.
When the war was over, she was released from prison, and the British, Belgian, and French government all gave her rewards for her work. She met a British officer named John McKenna, and they fell in love, and got married. She continued to live in Belgium, where she wrote her autobiography, called, I Was A Spy!
Where Do we get this Stuff? Here are our Sources.
Women Heroes of World War I: 16 Remarkable Resisters, Soldiers, Spies, and Medics. Kathryn Atwood. Chicago Review Press. 2014.