In practice, this meant that Baker operated at the highest level of personal risk that intelligence work could involve. An officer of the French military captured by German forces would be treated, in principle at least, as a prisoner of war — subject to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and entitled to protections that occupation law provided. A civilian operative captured while engaged in intelligence activities against the occupying power was subject to execution without the procedural protections that military status would have provided.
She knew this. The accounts that document her conversations with Abtey about the nature of her work consistently indicate that she understood the specific character of the risk she was accepting. Her response — the “France made me what I am” formulation, the commitment to give her life for the country — was not rhetorical; it was a statement of a decision she had already made.
The specific courage this required was not the courage of a moment — the kind of bravery that adrenaline and urgency can produce even in people who would not describe themselves as brave. It was the courage of sustained commitment: the decision to continue operating under the conditions of occupied Europe, to continue crossing borders with hidden materials, to continue meeting intelligence contacts in hotel rooms and hospital wards, in the full knowledge that any one of these activities could result in arrest and execution.
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## The Woman Who Sang to Soldiers
The touring that Baker did among Allied military camps after her recovery from peritonitis in 1943 — the jeep travel across North Africa, the sleeping on the ground beside the vehicle, the performances in the conditions of wartime — was a form of service that existed in a different register from the intelligence work but was part of the same fundamental commitment.