 Virginia Hall's service in the France of summer 1940 was merely an apprenticeship for a near-suicide mission against the tyranny of the Nazis and their puppeteers in France. She helped to pioneer a daredevil role in espionage, sabotage, and subversion behind enemy lines in an era when women barely featured in the prism of heroism, when their part in combat was confined to the supportive and the palliative.