‘This seems to be in your rough area. I mean, it contains wooden legs and everything…’ my commissioning editor at The Spectator emailed. He was requesting a review of Sonia Purnell’s excellent A Woman of No Importance, a biography of the remarkable Virginia Hall, the only second world war agent to serve not only with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) and its later American counterpart, the OSS, but eventually also with the CIA.
It is perhaps unsurprising that war histories contain a high number of people with missing or prosthetic limbs. Many of those who served parted with their extremities during action, such as the would-be Hitler-assassin Claus von Stauffenberg (who lost one arm, one eye and many fingers), and the extraordinary Sir Adrian Canton de Wiart (who lost one leg, one eye, and tore off two of his own fingers when the surgeon wouldn’t amputate). Others, such as the Anglo-Polish special agent Andrew Kowerski-Kennedy and the American-born Hall, lost their limbs (a leg each) before the war, but never considered letting that impede them.
Hall shot a round into her foot from a 12-gauge shotgun at point-blank range in 1933. Snipe-shooting with friends in the marshes of what was then Smyrna in Turkey (she had already disappointed her mother by choosing a diplomatic career, that enabled her to travel, over ‘domestic bliss’ at home), she caught the barrel of her gun in her coat as she climbed a fence, only to discover she had not applied the safety catch. Later, Hall would develop ambivalent feelings towards her wooden and aluminium prosthetic, ‘held in place by leather straps and corsetry round her waist’. Instead of letting it define her, she externalised it to the point of naming it Cuthbert.
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