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When Michael Collins, the leader of the Irish Republican Army's guerrilla war and the future Prime Minister of the provisional Irish Free State, met with Churchill as War Minister to discuss the conditions of Ireland's new status, he reminded him that Churchill had hunted him night and day and put a price on his head. ''You are not the only one,'' Churchill replied, taking down the framed copy of the reward offered for his recapture by the Boers. ''At any rate it was a good price -- £5,000. Look at me -- 25 dead or alive.'' Churchill's dealings with Collins reinforced the lessons learned in Cuba and South Africa. It was the image of Boer resistance that lay behind the creation in 1940 of the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.), intended to set Nazi-occupied Europe alight.

Denise returned to work in France on the night of 2-3 March 1944 with Captain Robert Benoist (code name 'Lionel'), landed by an RAF Westland Lysander at Soucelles, ten kilometres south of Vatun and two-and-a-half west of Villeneuve, near Nantes. The secret drop was code-named 'Laburnum' (32). Her circuit (or Reseaux) , called 'Clergyman', was a large one consisting of two thousand armed members of the F.F.I (Forces Francaises de L'Interieur) which had to be re-established after its collapse the year before. One source (33) alleges that the plane was met by Resistance leader and former pilot Clement Remy, code name 'Marc'. Denise had returned to France now running the double risk of being both an official SOE agent AND Jewish (34).