Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Poet by jeffreytiverson

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, POET

The Second World War left of German, neatly chalked in large quietly supplied by brothers Edouard its traces behind, including Gothic letters, the chosen script and Louis Miailhe. Yet after learning at Château Palmer, whose of Hitler’s Third Reich: of the round-up in Paris of more walls carry the Gothic-lettered than 13,000 Jews in July 1942, 1 graffiti of a German soldier. the Miailhes realized that their friends In that era, communicating had to escape. Thus, one dark night, in secret tongues was a matter “Far from the fighting, now in the the brothers led the families out of of life and death – as we learn garrison, the soldier wants his reward: the château, past the German sentries from the life of the late Leo Marks, peace and quiet! The Vth.” Upon being and through the vineyards to a pair Britain’s deeply imaginative read, the lines blossom with meaning. of parked cars. With forged papers they grand master of cryptography. Suddenly our minds begin to picture drove for hours towards the Spanish events that seem unfathomable border, finally reaching the port of Words by Jeffrey T. Iverson today – a world war, Germany’s Bayonne, where the families boarded occupation of France, troops marching the final boat to Argentina, safe at last. With its slender, fairy-tale turrets, into Bordeaux, the requisitioning The Second World War was a vast Château Palmer has always emanated of Château Palmer… we imagine the and terrible tapestry, yet it was woven a timeless aura. Yet this grand-cru soldiers’ voices echoing through these from strands of human tales like estate has a distinct and tumultuous halls, the smell of the grease they used these, stories that reveal our potential history all of its own whose memory, to polish their jackboots, the looming for both astounding courage and though known by few, is inscribed threat of violence. A menace then unthinkable savagery. Alas, those who in its very walls. all too real for the owners of Château recount them best – the men and Inside, if you leave the luxurious Palmer, for at the same moment as women who lived through them – are rooms of the ground floor and ascend a German soldier chalked these lines, disappearing. History books meant the marble staircase, the steps soon behind another wall downstairs were to preserve such stories can render give way to further flights, creaking hidden two families of Italian Jews. them too dry and distant for readers and wooden, leading to the château’s Since early in the war, the Miailhe – those who never knew a world war – uppermost storey. There, the light family, co-owners of Château Palmer, to truly grasp, a tragedy of which streaming though the small windows had sheltered their exiled Italian the poet George Santayana warned reveals nothing at first but wooden friends here, sharing candlelit evenings us: “Those who cannot remember beams and a few empty barrels. of chamber music together. Then, the past are condemned to repeat it.” But then something catches your in 1941, as German officers moved To really know the past we can’t eye on the wall across the room. into the château, the four adults rely on history books alone. As Ralph Walking over, you find yourself and three children were rushed into Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Poetry faced with the most startling, almost a secret annex behind the kitchen comes nearer to vital truth than anachronistic image: five lines wall. For months they waited in fear, history.” Words written in the heart

Fern vom Kampf doch jetzt in der Garnison wünscht der Landser seinen Lohn!: Ruhe!! Die V!ten 1

A graffiti by a German soldier, in the attic of Château Palmer.

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TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, POET

of a distant era can retain an enduring maverick. When the rest of his intake potency. Sometimes, just a few lines were sent to Bletchley Park, Britain’s of old writing – a newspaper clipping, main code-breaking centre, Marks a soldier’s love letter, some graffiti was dispatched to a place his sergeant inside a Bordeaux château – can termed “an open house for misfits” – suddenly open a technicolour window the newly formed Special Operations to another time. But no form of writing Executive (SOE). can infuse words with such spirit The secret organisation was and pathos, and remain so fresh unproven, but Winston Churchill had and resonant through time, as poetry. given it a crucial mission: to infiltrate There are many brilliant Second agents into German-occupied World War poets, but there’s one countries to help Resistance groups whose writing not only captured the “set Europe ablaze”. While Alan Turing human spirit of the war – it helped cracked the German Enigma code win the war. For Leo Marks was not at Bletchley Park, at SOE Leo Marks just the era’s most unlikely poet, he revealed his genius for inventing codes was also its most gifted cryptographer. to thwart the enemy. The brilliant Leo Marks was born in 1920, the son twenty-two-year-old was rapidly of Benjamin Marks, co-owner of promoted to head of cryptography Marks & Co., a renowned antiquarian and cryptanalysis. bookstore in London. There, at the SOE had agents on intel-gathering age of eight, Leo met his destiny and sabotage missions across Europe. the day his father showed him a first To communicate with HQ in London, edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold they sent SOE coded messages Bug. Benjamin had intended to instruct via wireless radio. Conditions were his son in resale values; instead, Poe’s perilous. Agents sometimes had 1843 mystery, about a hidden treasure to disguise themselves as cows in order whose whereabouts is concealed to transmit messages from an open by a cypher, introduced Marks to the pasture at night, with the Germans power of words and the fascination forever trying to pinpoint the source of cryptography. Poe’s descriptions of transmissions using radio detection of decoding techniques such as letterequipment. To make matters worse, frequency analysis riveted Marks, Marks, whose job was to “keep and he hastened to try them – on his an eye on the security of the agents’ father’s own secret pricing code. Each traffic”, soon realized that security book in the shop had a series of letters was in serious doubt. pencilled inside the cover. In minutes, SOE used an old coding system Marks found the key: the ten letters based on poems. Every agent of MARKS COHEN, the two business was assigned a poem to memorize. partners, each corresponded To encode a radio message, the agent to a number. “From that moment first chose several words from onwards, I had two ambitions,” Marks his or her poem at random. These recalled in his memoir Between Silk were used to create a transposition and Cyanide: “to know as much about key – a series of numbers based codes as Edgar Allen Poe, and one day on the alphabetical order of the to become a writer.” chosen words’ letters – which in turn By January 1942, when Marks was was used to permute or rearrange called up, he was crafting homemade the letters of the actual message codes and working part-time for the he or she wanted to send. The message notorious Times crossword division. was thus incomprehensible to all but A godfather in Scotland Yard gained those who knew the code technique, him entry to the government code the poem used by the agent, and and cypher school. Yet after cracking, the chosen keywords. *(See page 47) by himself, a code intended as a class One of the poem code’s advantages exercise he was labelled a disobedient was that it didn’t require an agent

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to carry a codebook. But since agents needed to memorize their poems, they chose common ones they had learned in school – those of Shakespeare, Keats or Molière. Marks was shocked to find one agent even using the national anthem, once coding a message with the words: GOD SAVE - OUR - GRACIOUS - KING. “God save that agent,” recalled Marks. “If one message was broken – just one – the enemy cryptographers could mathematically reconstruct those five words and would at once try to identify their source.” And the German cryptologic units had become highly skilled at searching through poetry collections to do just that. Once they guessed the poem, they held the keys to freely read that agent’s traffic – with grave consequences. When Marks arrived at SOE, the average lifespan of a WT operator was about three weeks. The solution, though unorthodox, was clear. “I decided agents must have original compositions for their poems. So that if the enemy break one message, at least they won’t be able to guess the rest of the poem, and we buy a little more time for our agents.” The poem would be known by no one apart from the agent and his handlers, while the only existing copy remained at SOE. Thus, ignoring rumours of an “outbreak of insanity” at SOE, Marks began writing poetry for his agents. Initially, Marks simply wanted his poems to be “easy to memorize, less easy to anticipate”. That meant using an imperfect rhyming scheme, and avoiding those elements that made codes easier to decipher (words with double letters, high-value Scrabble letters like z and x). But Marks soon realized that, for many agents, their poems meant more to them than just coding tools. Surely, agent “Paul” hadn’t chosen Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” simply for its rhyming scheme (Be near me when my light is low,/When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick/ And tingle; and the heart is sick… Be near me when my faith is dry… ).

Agents were being dropped On D-Day, a team of SOE agents behind enemy lines with nothing but parachuted into France armed with their wits, a cyanide pill and a poem, these words: “conditions of difficulty and danger 2 which were unique in the history of coding,” Marks wrote. So, if at first he penned light-hearted ditties, like SOE agents, Marks once said, the one for agent “Boni” (I sometimes “set a standard of courage, endurance, wish/I was a fish/A-swimming ingenuity and integrity which was not in the sea/A starling on a chimney matched in peacetime”. One, Forest pot/A blackbird on a tree/Or anyone Yeo-Thomas, codenamed “The White but me), by the war’s end Marks was Rabbit”, who worked undercover with writing words as shields – mantras for the Free French Resistance movement, agents to carry into the horrors of war. literally inspired Ian Fleming’s 007.

In February 1944, just before he was dropped into France on his most dangerous mission – to rescue the captured Resistance leader Pierre Brossolette – Marks gave him a new code poem. The mission was a disaster. Brossolette killed himself before Yeo-Thomas arrived. In March 1944 he too was captured. “I will not tell you what they did to him,” Marks later said, “except that they did not break Yeo-Thomas.” After enduring prolonged torture, he was sent

There is a strength Beyond the one that is failing An added length To the time Now run out There is sight In the eyes now closing A light Which none others can see And it guides unbelievers And other self-deceivers To a place Where they had never thought to be. 43 2

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, POET

to the Buchenwald concentration Only in 1998, when he published husband Etienne, a French officer, camp. Somehow Yeo-Thomas his memoir, was Leo Marks revealed and the birth of their daughter Tania. escaped, but was recaptured and sent as its author. In truth, the poem wasn’t Soon, she’d parachute into France to another camp. He escaped again… written for Szabo, but for Marks’s herself. Marks admired her fiery and again. Finally, in April 1945, girlfriend Ruth Hambro, the woman passion. After seeing Szabo struggling he reached Allied lines. Through he intended to marry. Yet on Christmas with her French poem code, he asked it all, he’d carried Marks’s poem – Eve 1943 Marks learned that Ruth if she’d like to try another. He handed a testament, like Yeo-Thomas himself, had died in a plane crash. That her Ruth’s poem. Szabo loved it. to the strength of the human spirit. night, staring into the sky on the roof “Who wrote this?” she asked. “I’ll check of SOE HQ, he composed the poem up, and let you know when you come 3 as “a message to Ruth, which I failed back,” he replied. Months later, to deliver when I had had the chance”. in France, Szabo ran into a Panzer One of the Second World War’s The following spring Violette division. Fleeing, she sprained her best-known poems, “The Life That Szabo, a beautiful twenty-two-yearankle, but held off the Germans with I Have”, was first popularized by the old Franco-British agent, walked into a submachine gun until her Resistance 1958 movie Carve Her Name with Pride, Marks’s office. She’d joined the secret leader comrade escaped. Szabo about the SOE agent Violette Szabo. service following the death of her was captured and sent to Ravensbrück

Yeo-Thomas, aka The White Rabbit, and Violette Szabo. Both agents were dropped into France in 1944 on perilous missions, carrying with them poem codes by Leo Marks.

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They cannot know What makes you as you are Nor can they hear Those voices from afar Which whisper to you You are not alone… They cannot reach That inner core of you The long before of you The child inside Deep deep inside Which gives the man his pride… What you are They can never be And what they are Will soon be history. 3

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, POET

concentration camp. She was executed by firing squad in February 1945. For her bravery, beauty and her tragic end, Violette Szabo became perhaps the most famous SOE agent of all. But the connection we feel to her story might not be as strong had she not carried the poem by Leo Marks – ten lines imbued with love and loss, courage and sacrifice, written in the heart of a world war, yet continuing to resonate long after: 4

Today, the poem is carved in marble at the Tempsford Royal Air Field,

in memory of Szabo and all the women agents who flew out to aid Resistance movements in occupied Europe, 1941–5. Marks once quipped: “I hadn’t thought that writing poetry would be my contribution to Hitler’s downfall.” In truth, Marks’s work at SOE went far beyond poems. He revolutionized code security, notably with the one-off cypher: easy-to-hide squares of silk imprinted with rows of unique codes which the agent used once, then cut away to burn. Yet after the war, Marks put cloaks and daggers behind him, becoming a rather successful writer

for stage and screen. But never did he reach the heights of brilliance he had done at the age of only twentytwo. After he died in 2002, the Telegraph wrote: “Between 1942, when he joined SOE, and 1946, when he rejected an offer of employment from MI6, Marks proved himself a codemaker and breaker of rare genius… [his work] eventually influenced code systems used by secret services the world over.” But, for the rest of us, his lasting influence resides in the enduring potency of his words – poems which illuminate our history, revealing vital truths we won’t soon forget.

The life that I have is all that I have And the life that I have is yours The love that I have of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours. 46

As a simplified example of a SOE poem code, an agent might choose from his or her poem the key word “valour”. A transposition key is created by numbering the letters in the key word or words by alphabetical order. In this case, the order would be “6 1 2 3 5 4”. Next, the agent writes his or her message into a grid with rows the length of the key word or words. If the agent’s message was

The agent then simply rearranges the columns into numerical order, and extracts the text from each column to yield the coded message.

WILL BOMB GESTAPO HQ ELEVEN TONIGHT

IBPEN LGOVI LEHEG OTETT BSQNH WMALO

he or she would write it into a grid as follows, with rows that are six characters long, like the word “valour”, and the transposition key written across the top.

For added security, the message could be coded twice. The final message is preceded by an indicator group to communicate what words of the poem were used to create the key: for example, V for ‘valour’:

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6 W M A L O

1 I B P E N

2 L G O V I

3 L E H E G

5 B S Q N H

4 O T E T T

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, POET

1 I B P E N

2 L G O V I

3 L E H E G

4 O T E T T

5 B S Q N H

6 W M A L O

VIBPENLGOVILEHEGOTETT BSQNHWMALO