(continued from Vol. V.)

“To Nancy!” said Graeme to his companion, and they clinked what would turn out to be the first of many, many gin and tonics.  He pulled out his camera and took pictures of the woman, whose name was Barbara, as she sat on the stool at the far end of the bar raising her glass.  It was a dark corner, but I could just make out the brass plaque on the wall.  It said “Nancy’s Corner.”

Barbara toasting Nancy.

I had been observing them for a few minutes when I decided to interrupt the photo shoot.  “Hello,” I said, sauntering up to the bar with all the swagger and brio of a Genuine Internet Blogger.  “Excuse me, but, um, I’ve been watching people come over to this corner all afternoon.  Can I ask you why?”

“Nancy Wake!” Barbara gushed.  “She’s a World War II hero from our town in New Zealand.  We were here in England for a wedding, and when we heard the news that she had passed away we just had to come by and have a gin and tonic in her honor.  She was such an incredible lady!”

“Wow.  Mind if I join you at the bar?”

“Sure!”

I asked the bartender if I could transfer my check from the green sofa to the bar. “Of course, Madame,” he replied, for at least the tenth time that day.  I ordered another drink.  “Of course, Madame.”  (Eleven.)

Barbara, Graeme, and the bartender soon regaled me with incredible stories about Nancy Wake, all of which sounded like just so much bullshit.  But every word turned out to be true.

“That’s her picture right there,” Barbara pointed.  “She was beautiful.”

Indeed she was.

Staring out in her bomber jacket, Nancy Wake was stunning in her portrait, and not simply because she was pretty and young.  She was as gorgeous as a Hollywood star, a rival to any of the legendary screen sirens who were her contemporaries — but it was not because an army of photographers and makeup artists and stylists and Photoshop retouchers created her “look.” No, it was something in the eyes.  They were a little sad and unmistakably world-weary, yet full of fire, hard-won wisdom and mirth.  The lights were on.

Barbara and Graeme ordered another round of gin and tonics, and I ordered another drink and looked up Nancy Wake on my iPhone.  I could not believe what I was reading, and wondered why I had never heard of this woman before.*  These are just some of the highlights:

• After the fall of France in 1940, she became a courier for the French Resistance. By 1943, she was the Gestapo’s most-wanted person, with a 5 million-franc bounty on her head.  Because of her uncanny ability to evade capture, the Gestapo dubbed her “The White Mouse.”
• She has said she was moved by scenes of Jewish persecution in Europe in the 1930s and would have felt ashamed if she had not acted against such evil.
• She shot her way out of roadblocks and sabotaged German installations.
• She threw a grenade into a crowded Nazi cafe.
• She led attacks on the local Gestapo headquarters in Montluçon.
• She honed her own information-gathering strategy: flirting.
• She killed an SS sentry with her bare hands to prevent him from setting off an alarm during a raid.  (When asked in a 1990s television interview what had happened to the sentry who spotted her, she simply drew her finger across her throat.)
• To replace codes that her wireless operator had been forced to destroy in a German raid, she rode a bicycle for more than 500 miles through several German checkpoints.
• She parachuted back into France in 1944, to be trained in sabotage and killing.  Upon discovering her tangled in a tree, the Captain greeted her, remarking “I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.” To which she replied: “Don’t give me that French shit.”
• From April 1944 to the liberation of France, her 7,000 Special Ops forces took on 22,000 SS soldiers, causing 1,400 casualties, while taking only 100 themselves.
• During a German attack on another Special Ops group, Wake, along with two American officers, took command of a section whose leader had been killed.  She directed the covering fire with exceptional coolness, facilitating the group’s withdrawal without a single further casualty.
• Her husband was tortured and killed in 1943 for not giving her up.  Until the war was over she was unaware of her husband’s death and the circumstances surrounding it, and she subsequently blamed herself for it.
• She did not, however, cook eggs and bacon for her troops, as depicted in a 1987 mini-series. For one thing, there were no eggs.  And as she explained, she “had men to do that sort of thing.”
• Wake was feted in Europe after the war, as she would be almost six decades later when she returned to London and relied on friends and admirers to get by.
• In 1985, Wake published her autobiography, entitled The White Mouse. The book became a best seller, and has been reprinted many times.
• Nancy lived at The Stafford Hotel for some of her later years, downing her beloved gin & tonics at her favorite seat at The American Bar every day.  (She said she had been introduced to her first “bloody good drink” there by the general manager at the time, Louis Burdet, who had also worked for the Resistance in Marseilles.)
• Rumor has it that The Stafford Hotel, with an assist from Prince Charles and other benefactors, quietly paid her bills.
• She was long disillusioned with Australia. Wake noted, after being denied medals many felt she was owed, that she carried a passport of her country of birth, New Zealand.  She would much later accept a Companion of the Order of Australia, but only after she suggested that such belated offers belonged where a “monkey sticks his nuts.”
• In 2003 she chose to move to the Royal Star and Garter Home for Disabled Ex-Service Men and Women in Richmond, London, where she remained until her death.
• Nancy Wake was told to give up her gin and tonics when she had a heart attack at 90.  Until her death last Sunday, however, Wake alwayswelcomed the gift of a bottle of gin.
• Her motto was simple: “Have fun.”
• She had no children.

Barbara kept calling her a lady.  I kept insisting that no, Nancy Wake was most certainly not a lady, but a broad.  More rounds and toasts and tales and general merriment ensued.

And so, my dear readers, it turns out that the interesting story is not about Rupert Murdoch, who is really, really boring when he’s not getting pied in the face, but Nancy Wake, The White Mouse, who died on August 7, 2011 at the age of 98, and was never, ever boring.

Nancy Wake “The White Mouse” 1912 – 2011 R.I.P.

*I suspect the reason I have never heard of Nancy Wake before in a history class has something to do with American exceptionalism, for sure.  But I also detect the foul stench of Conservative Personality Disorder, which rears its ugly little head in the long history of wingnuts going absolutely apeshit over the very idea of women in combat.  See, e.g.:

• Women Don’t Belong in Ground Combat, Schlafly, P., Eagle Forum (Jun. 2005).
• Women Soldiers at Greater Risk under New Army Structure, Kleder, M., and Maginnis, R., Concerned Women For America (archived radio broadcast) (Apr. 2005).
• 2008 Republican Platform: National Security.

Hell, a prominent conservative was musing just the other day whether women belong in politics.  And who can forget Ann Coulter pointing out how much better the country would be if only women could not vote.

The existence of people like Nancy Wake puts the lie to conservatives’ deranged view of women, and of history.  Conservatives routinely rewrite reality to align it with their worldview, instead of the other way around.  They just did it in Texas, completely fucking up textbooks and school curricula in order to indoctrinate children with their warped view of reality.  Given all the time that has passed and the blind determination of conservatives to ignore any fact that illustrates how wrong they are, it does not seem much of a stretch to think that they would purposefully neglect to mention a White Mouse — and probably many more like her.