"Most of all, I wanted to be wicked," Susan Travers wrote, looking back at herself at the age of 16. "A wicked lady, flirting with danger and scandal."

The wholeheartedness with which she threw herself into both forms of flirtation today wins her as sure an immortality as English life can offer. It has propelled her into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the first woman to manage to join the French Foreign Legion, and a holder of the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille Militaire, and the Légion d'Honneur. She had the French military medal pinned on her chest by the Gaullist defence minister who had been her general and lover when she earned it.

Travers is one of 200 people who died in 2003 who are added as new names to the ODNB website today. They will eventually appear in any updated print edition of the dictionary, consulted by scholars all over the world. More familiar new names include the worthy, like the former Labour chancellor and SDP founder Roy Jenkins; the famous, including Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, Adam Faith and Thora Hird; the tragic, weapons inspector David Kelly; the comic, such as Bob Monkhouse; and the infamous - Ugandan despot Idi Amin.

But Susan Travers is by far the raciest entry, more so even than Sir Denis Thatcher. Sir Denis is remembered for his self-parodying replies when asked whether he had a drink problem and what he did with Margaret Thatcher at No 10. His answers were: "Yes, madam, I can never get enough" and "Well, when I'm not pissed, I play a lot of golf."

Travers was born into an unhappy English military family. Sent to Miss Penrose's finishing school in Florence, she was seduced aged 17 on a school visit to Rome by a middle-aged hotel manager.

She decided, she wrote in her autobiography, Tomorrow To Be Brave, published in 2000, that "men would become my salvation ... my ticket to travel and wealth and happiness".

She embarked on a decade of "quasi-professional tennis" and transient affairs round Europe. In the second world war she trained as an ambulance driver, joined the Free French as a nurse with the rank of sergeant and served in Dakar, Eritrea, Syria, Egypt and Palestine. She found time for affairs with, among others, a Foreign Legion officer and Russian prince Dmitri Amilakvari. In 1941 she became driver to another lover, Colonel (later General) Pierre Koenig, whose brigade was sent to hold Bir Hakeim, south of Tobruk, against German desert forces.

After withstanding attack for four months, the brigade broke out, with Travers driving Amilakvari and Koenig under fire to British lines in what was hailed as a symbolic victory for the Free French.

When the war ended she did not relish demobilisation, and later served three years in the Foreign Legion in Tunisia and Indo-China. The legion's recruiting officer - who was a friend - did not require her to submit to a medical examination or specify her gender on the application form. She was 94 when she died.