Nancy Wake was born in Wellington, raised in Sydney, and at twenty was a freelance journalist in Paris who had already interviewed Hitler and decided exactly what she thought of him. She married a wealthy Marseille industrialist, Henri Fiocca, and was living a comfortable life on the Riviera when France fell.
She became a courier on the Pat O'Leary escape line, moving downed airmen and escaped prisoners south towards Spain with a rich woman's wardrobe, a rich woman's manners and nerve that never seemed to fail. The Germans knew there was someone; they did not know who, only that she kept slipping through their hands, and so they called her the White Mouse and put five million francs on her head. In 1943, with the line collapsing, she crossed the Pyrenees on foot. Henri stayed. The Gestapo arrested, tortured and shot him for refusing to say where she was; she learned of it only after the war, and blamed herself for the rest of her life.
In Britain the Special Operations Executive trained her and dropped her back into the Auvergne in April 1944 with a radio operator and a mission to arm the Maquis. She ended up running the supply and much of the discipline of some seven thousand fighters — ordering parachute drops, paying men, settling arguments with a pistol on the table — and fighting a full battle against a German division in June.
When a raid cost the group its wireless codes, she rode a bicycle five hundred kilometres through German checkpoints to a set that still worked, and back: seventy-one hours in the saddle. It is the feat she was proudest of, and she said afterwards that she could not sit down for a week.
Some of the more startling scenes — killing a sentry with her bare hands — come only from her own memoir, and the catalogue notes that. What is on the record is the George Medal, the Médaille de la Résistance, three Croix de Guerre and the American Medal of Freedom. She ran unsuccessfully for the Australian parliament, married again, sold her medals to live on, and died in London in 2011 at ninety-eight. Her ashes were scattered in the woods above Verneix, where she had jumped in.
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