Abruptly, the task before Philippe and Violette switched from sabotage to salvage. What had become of the Salesman circuit? Who had been arrested? Were the safe houses still safe? Had their weapons caches been discovered? Could the circuit be revitalized in time to carry out an uprising when D-Day came?
The Salesman territory was now too hot for Philippe. Wanted posters bearing his image and Bob’s were posted in Rouen. F Section decided that Philippe and Violette would go to Paris; Philippe would remain there while Violette traveled on to Rouen, alone, to try to pick up the threads. They would set out as soon as the moon was full again, in April.
In the intervening weeks, Violette was given a refresher course in encryption at Baker Street. Like all agents, she had learned the basics as part of her initial training. Now she was sent for a tutorial with SOE’s head of codes, a young genius named Leo Marks. Their meeting yielded one of the enduring artifacts of the Second World War—a love poem, of all things.
MARKS HAD DEVELOPED a fascination with cryptography as a child, when he broke a code his father invented for noting prices on books in his London bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road. (If the address is familiar, it is likely because a play and movie by that name are set in the shop, Marks & Co.) He was drafted and trained in cryptanalysis with a small group of prodigies. The others were sent to Britain’s main codebreaking center at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing, the father of theoretical computer science, was cracking the German Enigma code. Marks, judged too much a misfit for Bletchley, was assigned to SOE, where he became head of codes at age twenty-two.
Marks made a point of giving agents a final briefing on coding before they were dropped into occupied territory. He was haunted by the knowledge that security lapses could have dreadful consequences. “If you brief an agent on a Monday, and on Thursday you read that he has had his eyes taken out with a fork, you age rapidly,” he once said, recalling the fate of an SOE operative in Yugoslavia.
At the time, SOE used “poem codes” for communications. An agent in the field would use the letters of a memorized verse, usually one learned in school, as the basis for a substitution cypher. A message thus encrypted was radioed in Morse code to Baker Street, where cryptographers using the same poem would unscramble it.
Marks didn’t like poem codes, as he thought them insecure. If an agent used a well-known verse, and the Germans decoded even one of his messages, they might find the underlying text in a book and read all his future traffic. SOE agents were using works by Shakespeare, Keats, Molière, Racine, and Rabelais; one even used the National Anthem, as it was all he could remember.1
Eventually Marks worked out more secure systems, but as a first step toward better safety he began giving agents poems he wrote himself. Most were doggerel, like this:
The boy stood on the burning deck
His feet were full of blisters.
He hadn’t got them from the fire
But from screwing both his sisters.
When Violette presented herself in his briefing room for her refresher course, Marks was smitten. (“A dark-haired slip of mischief rose from behind a desk. . . . held out her hand, and smiled,” Marks wrote in his wartime memoir, Between Silk and Cyanide.2) But he was dismayed to discover that she was incapable of encoding messages using her poem, a French nursery rhyme, without making spelling mistakes. He offered Violette a fresh poem, one he had written himself.
The previous Christmas Eve, Marks had lost the love of his life, a woman named Ruth, who was killed in a plane crash in Canada. On receiving the news, Marks went up to the roof of his building, briefly considered throwing himself off, and instead wrote the following:
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.
Violette took the poem home to memorize. Marks tested her a few days later, and found that with the new verse she could encode a two-hundred-word message in under fifteen minutes, flawlessly. In gratitude, Violette gave Marks a present, a miniature chess set she had won at a shooting gallery.
There the story might have ended; the poem was never intended for publication. But long after the war, in 1958, R. J. Minney’s biography of Violette was made into a movie—also called Carve Her Name with Pride—starring Virginia McKenna and Paul Scofield (with a young Michael Caine in a minor role). The poem was made public in the movie. It caused a mild sensation, and it has since made its way into anthologies. Couples sometimes use it in wedding ceremonies. It is doubtful that many of them are aware of the poem’s actual provenance.
ON THE NIGHT of April 5, 1944, just before the next full moon, Philippe and Violette boarded a Lysander at RAF Tempsford, a secret SOE air base in Bedfordshire. Over their civilian clothing each wore a flight suit with zipped pockets for a revolver, a knife, a flask, maps, and a compass. Violette carried forged papers identifying her as a commercial secretary domiciled in Le Havre, which would allow her entry into the Forbidden Zone.
They flew across the Channel and landed in a farmer’s field somewhere between Chartres and Orleans. The next day they made it to Paris, where Violette boarded a train for Rouen.
Violette then spent three harrowing weeks tracing the remains of the Salesman circuit. She dropped old passwords into conversations with strangers, contacted the wives of resisters, and chased the ghosts of spies in a city crawling with secret police and collaborators. Each meeting carried the danger that someone might betray her, if only to gain lenient treatment for a loved one being held by the Germans. Twice Violette was taken in for questioning by Gestapo agents, but her forged papers and her cover story held up.
What Violette found out was appalling: Nearly a hundred members of the Salesman circuit had been arrested. Philippe’s lieutenant in Le Havre, a schoolmaster named Roger Mayer, had been beaten nearly to death by his captors. He had told them nothing, but one way or another the Germans had learned enough to roll up the entire operation. Claude Malraux, Isidore Newman, and most of the others were on their way to prison camps in Germany. Both Malraux and Newman were eventually executed in captivity.
Violette took a train back to Paris and gave her report to Philippe. He contacted Baker Street and arranged for them to be flown back to London. While they waited, Violette bought a silk dress with tiny pink and blue flowers against a white background for her daughter, Tania, then two years old, at a shop just blocks from Gestapo headquarters in Paris.
On the night of April 30, Violette and Philippe made their way to a small field near Châteauroux, south of Paris. SOE had two Lysanders operating that evening. Philippe boarded one, Violette the other. On the journey home, Violette’s plane flew too close to an airfield at Châteaudun and drew antiaircraft fire, which shredded one of its tires. The pilot made it back to Tempsford and managed a safe, if violent, landing. He jumped out and opened Violette’s door, and was taken aback when she let loose a volley of invective in rapid French. Violette imagined that the plane had crash-landed in enemy terrain, and that he was a German coming to apprehend her. When the pilot clarified matters, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.3