Individualism

An image in the book’s Prologue of Virginia Hall driving a jeep against the flow of a constant stream of French refugees trying to escape the Nazis in World War II simultaneously embodies the book’s central theme. Throughout the book, Virginia (and those with whom she works in the French Resistance) continually struggle against the waves of Nazi oppression and violence that swept through France from the earliest days of the war. Initially small in number, isolated from the world and from each other, Virginia and her comrades-in-arms continued to make connections and forge ahead with alliances in the face of intensifying, increasingly violent German efforts to repress and dominate them. This social, cultural, and political spirit and practice of going against the tide of invasion is the primary manifestation of this thematic idea throughout the book.

On another, and more personal, level, this theme also...