During the Second World War against the Nazis there was an organization based in England called the Special Operations Executive - S.O.E. Its behind the scenes work helped shorten the war and saved many allied lives.
The two main functions were the interception of enemy signals traffic, and the breaking of codes used by the Germans. Another function was the training and infiltration of agents into occupied western Europe.
Head of this organization was one Leo Marks, who's father
kept a bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road in London. (84 Charing
Cross Road had a separate post war story, told as a
book by New Yorker Helene Hanff, and later as a well known film
starring Sir Anthony Hopkins.)
Leo Marks - 1998 | Leo Marks as "Codemaster" had initially to improve the British agents' codes as they were being easily broken by the Germans. Marks came up with the idea of using original poems as cyphers. If agents could memorise verses written specially for the SOE "Ditty Box", and then use them as cyphers, there was less chance of signals being decoded by the enemy. The messages sent back to SOE were based on a code system derived directly from the letters as laid out in the poems. It was one such "ditty" that he handed to a young agent called Violette Szabo, who was later immortalised in the film Carve her Name with Pride. She and the poem were doomed to become legends, although you cannot toture and kill a poem as the Nazis did Violette, who was executed at Ravensbruck |
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
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
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
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.
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
It has long been presumed that Marks wrote The Life that
I Have specially for Violette because he was in love
with the brave, beautiful spy. But, in fact it was written
for a girl called Ruth, whom died in an air crash in Canada.
When Marks heard the news on Christmas eve 1943,
he went out on to the roof to be "the closest I could
get to her".
He remembers looking up into the sky and "transmitting a
message to Ruth which I failed to deliver when I had the chance".
That message was The Life that I Have.
The truth about Ruth is disclosed in Mark's memoirs, Between Silk and Cyanide published in London in November 1998 *. The book is both a technical cryptography manual and a deft, poem packed-packed portrait of life inside SOE.
Violette Szabo |
Violette was not the only female agent Marks had to brief
and befriend (it was vital that the Codemaster got to know his
agents, painful as that might be when they were killed or captured).
The others included Noor Inyat Khan, the daughter of a
Sufi mystic, who had been taught always to tell the truth. "Brought
up never to tell a lie! What was she doing in flaming SOE?"
Exclaims Marks. No, he emphasises, he did not fall in love with either Noor or Violette: "It was more than that, I feared for them." The one agent he did love, but as a friend and hero, was Tommy Yeo-Thomas, the daring, dashing agent known as the White Rabbit. Marks gave him the following poem to use if he were ever captured and interrogated: |
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
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.
They can never be
And what they are
Will soon be history.
Yeo-Thomas was indeed caught - and sent to Buchenwald. Sixteen of his friends were murdered there, but the White Rabbit escaped and survived the war.
After the war, Marks wrote a sucessful play, The Girl Who Couldn't Quite!, (about a girl who has lost the ability to laugh), and a film Peeping Tom, about a photographer obsessed with watching women on the verge of death. "All cryptographers are voyeurs of one kind or another," says Marks.
The above has been taken from part of an article by Quentin Letts, in the London Daily Telegraph dated October 30th, 1998.
The Daily Telegraph web site is at: http://www.dailytelegraph.com