The peace of my years

Prior to 20 January 2017, when most people heard the word “resistance”, they probably thought “Résistance”—as in Victor Laszlo, le Maquis, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the like. So let’s have a poem today that harkens back to the big-R Resistance. The repressive regime this time around is no less dangerous than the last bout of Nazis, so seems appropriate.

When you wage war, uniformed armies with big guns are only one of your strategic components. Gathering intelligence and committing acts of sabotage are both necessary and dangerous activities, and communicating securely with your agents behind enemy lines is critical to success in both these endeavors. It’s kind of a given that if you can encrypt something, someone else can decrypt it, particularly if the cipher key you use is based on a work that’s public knowledge. Viz.: a Shakespearean sonnet or the second paragraph of page 47 of Newton’s Principia.

Leo Marks ran the cryptographer unit for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the organization that was created at the behest of Winston Churchill for the express purpose to “set Europe ablaze”. SOE's work was vital to winning the war; there were staggering blunders, but on the whole their agents gathered valuable information that helped shape (amongst others) Operation Overlord, the invasion of France that began with D-Day.  

(BTW, as it happens, Heydrich's assassination was carried out by SOE-trained Czechs and Slovaks, in May 1942, four months after the Wannsee Conference at which the plan for the destruction of all European Jews was laid out. There's no telling how many lives that one act saved, but it did not come without cost. In addition to the assassins, more than 1300 men, women and children were murdered in reprisals.) 

Marks was the son of the co-owner of the Marks & Co. antiquarian bookshop that was featured in 84 Charing Cross Road. His interest in cryptography came at an early age when he read Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Gold Bug”. Upon being conscripted in 1942, Marks’ deciphering abilities caused him to be diverted from Bletchley Park; instead he was sent to SOE headquarters in Baker Street to devise ciphers, build out teams of cryptanalysts and train field agents. His innate curiosity and creativity, combined with a certain amount of smart-assery, led him to a number of innovations. Among them was the insight around the insecurity of any cipher based on a “public” key, so he wrote poems for his agents to memorize as keys for encrypting and decrypting messages. “The Life that I Have” was one such, actually written at Christmas 1943 about his girlfriend, who had recently died. He gave this one to Violet Szabo, the Franco-British woman who was captured on her second mission to Occupied France, tortured and executed at Ravensbrück in 1945.

(It’s interesting to note that—being enemies not only of science but also of the humanities, the RWNJ crowd are somewhat hampered in things of this nature. Oh, yeah—the techbros of Thiel, Musk et al. can run algorithms, and blah, blah, blah. But anything their AI can cook up, our AI can uncook.)

This poem reminds us of the cost of redeeming nations from oppression.

“The Life that I Have”

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.

©2025 Bas Bleu