Even the whirlpool of chaos generated by the Enigma machine counts as the echo of language: an impossibly distorted echo, but still there in its essence—letters inscribed on paper.
The letters stand for other letters, and the words and sentences are broken down into clumps of five-letter groups. And you know that when you are looking at messages encrypted by Enigma, those letters chosen to represent the others are not perfectly random. There is a machine setting that will restore their meaning.
Even without that machine, you know that the words and sentences are still in there: the sequences are complete gobbledegook but the meaning is still hidden on that piece of paper.
This is why codebreaking was never solely a proposition for mathematics geniuses. The discipline also needed people who had a profounder feel than most for the internal rhythms and structures of language: not just English, or any of the other common tongues, but all languages. This is also why Bletchley’s recruiters searched a little further afield than students of advanced algebra and geometry. They also hunted out the poets.
The puzzles in this section will test not specific language knowledge—that would be unfair—but instead will pose a deeper challenge to do with one’s general feel for any language: even a nonsense one. Indeed, the invented language was one method later devised for the codebreaking directorate to pull in fresh recruits.
It was slightly more straightforward at the start of the war. One of Bletchley Park’s great finds in 1940 was a young woman called Mavis Lever. She had been studying at the University of London until war came, then her department was evacuated to the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth.
This was, and is, a particularly beautiful and wild spot, especially for the study of wild, soaring romantic German poetry—for German was one of Mavis Lever’s specialities. Away from the soot and fog of London, Mavis was free to walk in the hills that surrounded the coastal town, or to roam for miles on the eerie empty sand dunes of Borth. But she felt there to be something utterly wrong about doing so. For, as she said, there was something awful about studying the most lyrical of the German poets while German pilots were preparing to unleash fiery hell across the cities of Britain.
So she swiftly decided to leave her studies behind and volunteer for war work. First of all, she had been set on training as a nurse but an old friend said, “Oh no you don’t,” and pointed her in the direction of occupations that could best use her powerful intellect. Mavis Lever’s first war job was in Whitehall at the Ministry for Economic Warfare. Her analytic mind was noted, and one of her superiors, who happened to be an old friend of Dilly Knox, wondered whether she might be better serving the nation in an even more challenging role.
It was not long before Mavis Lever got the summons to report to “Station X.” She arrived late one night, was escorted from the railway station to the big house nearby, and was asked instantly to sign the Official Secrets Act. Some in a similar position felt a little ambiguous about being thrown into this new life. But Mavis Lever was intensely glad.
What she and many other linguists brought to Bletchley Park was a flair as indispensable as that contributed by the mathematicians: because as well as every problem having a mathematical solution, Enigma codes always at their heart were language puzzles.
It is for this reason that so many of those who worked at Bletchley loved cryptograms and other word games. They would have loved Scrabble too—except by that stage it had not quite yet been invented. Early versions of the board game were around in America but it only emerged in its modern form after the war.
Nonetheless, what the linguists of Bletchley Park were doing was something not dissimilar: working with scrabbled individual letters.
Mavis Lever was sent to work in the Bletchley department known as “the Cottage,” a red-brick outbuilding just across the courtyard from the main house. This was the operational headquarters of the fearsomely eccentric Dilly Knox, for whom Mavis would find herself working.
Although the work and the discipline was a long way from the mist-enshrouded hills of Wales, Dilly Knox found a way to make the intellectual challenge of Enigma exciting in quite a different way.
Knox had developed a new system of encoded letter rearranging which he called “rodding.” In essence, this was a slide rule that corresponded with encoded letters laid out in an alphabet square. No explanation can convey the initial complexity of the thing (“rodding” also involved “comic strips”—that is, moveable strips of letters). But the idea fundamentally was that one did not need a machine the size of a wardrobe to unlock codes. Indeed, one could do it at one’s dining table, if you were patient enough to write out strips of letters.
Such a technique also conveyed to Mavis Lever that codebreakers did not have to be acquainted with esoteric maths knowledge, such as Bayesian probability theory: that anyone with a love for language and letters could extend that fascination to the encrypted kind.
Mavis Lever swiftly demonstrated her aptness for the work. She set to work on burrowing into the Italian Enigma codes. In September 1940, working deep into the late summer night, she was examining an intercepted message which from earlier attempts to crack it appeared to start with the letters PERX.
This was no known Italian technical term; nor did it seem to be any form of acronym. But using a little guesswork, Mavis Lever wondered if—since this was the start of the message—there had been a little misunderstanding. And whether minus the erroneous X, those first several letters would lengthen out to become the word “personale”—meaning “personal”—as a means of kicking off the communication.
She was quite right; it was a personal message. (On another later occasion, she burrowed into a German coded message with the knowledge that the man who sent it had a girlfriend called Rosa, to whom he referred often.) And in order to test the Italian message theory out, she worked throughout the night unlocking letter after letter. Like the Germans, the Italians changed their Enigma settings every twenty-four hours, but with this discovery, Mavis Lever, applying Knox’s methods, had established a principle that there were linguistic as well as algebraic means of prying open messages.
Some months later, after working on ever more codes, her ultimate triumph came: having deduced that an Italian naval message emanating from the Mediterranean read “X minus three days,” Mavis Lever correctly divined that something big was afoot. The Admiralty was alerted. That “something big” was to blow up into the Battle of Cape Matapan and thanks to Mavis Lever’s timely warning, the Royal Navy won the battle. She was thanked personally by Admiral Cunningham. She was still only twenty years old.
A little later, a young mathematician who was working in Hut 6 with Gordon Welchman caught Mavis’s eye. Keith Batey, who had been lured to Bletchley from Oxford, was instantly taken with this brilliantly self-assured young lady. Romance blossomed, though the pair of them were forbidden from ever discussing what happened in their respective codebreaking departments. That was how tight security was: you could not even confide in colleagues or indeed in romantic partners.
Yet despite all the security concerns, the authorities generally were keen to encourage relationships; the work after all was so intense and the codebreakers needed to feel human. Mavis Lever and Keith Batey at first assumed that their relationship was itself top secret, but when they found places specially prepared for them side by side in the Bletchley Park canteen, they knew that nothing got past the Park’s directorate.
In wider terms, Bletchley Park was lucky in its linguists: from novelist-to-be Angus Wilson (who found the work so stressful that he once threw an ink bottle at a Wren) to the poet F. T. Prince. There were also some impressive intellects attached to Bletchley’s sister department, the Radio Security Service, which was aiming to monitor communications from the Abwehr, the German secret service. Notable among them was a young don from Cambridge with a vitriolic sense of humour. Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) was based in a special office in the evacuated west London prison of Wormwood Scrubs. He found himself facing all sorts of German hand-ciphers (those not generated by Enigma).
Trevor-Roper was a polymath: a historian of academic leaning, but also a mathematician of sorts. On top of this, he had a very fine working knowledge of the German language. Even though he wasn’t supposed to, Trevor-Roper would take German ciphers back to his digs in the west London suburb of Ealing: as he listened to bombers flying overhead, he would concentrate hard on cracking the codes. His biographer Adam Sisman noted that these German ciphers provided a welcome alternative to The Times crossword: puzzle addiction taken to its ultimate extreme.
There were other figures too who had been codebreakers rather longer, and who were soon to help shape the future of Britain’s secret relations with America. One such was a formidable eccentric called Hugh Foss: six foot five inches tall, reddish of hair, chaotic in domestic terms, but blessed with a pulsating intellect combined with raw curiosity.
Foss had been born in Kobe, Japan, to missionary parents; this was his first head start. He was at ease with Japanese at a time when there was barely a handful of people in Britain who could make such a claim. By the end of 1941, as the Japanese attack on the US naval base Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, this rare skill became vital to the codebreakers. The complexities of Enigma were one thing: the challenge posed by codes in Japanese were quite another.
Hugh Foss, who rose to become Bletchley’s head of Japanese Section, was a man of unusual passions. He was obsessed with Highland dancing and was frequently to be seen wearing a kilt—despite the fact he was not actually, strictly speaking, Scottish. As we shall see in more detail later, before the war, Foss had brought the craze for Scottish reels to the smarter streets of Chelsea, forming a club for the pursuit and persuading fellow senior codebreaker Alastair Denniston and his wife to take part.
Foss also founded a magazine called The Reel. In this he wrote articles, devised new Highland reels (with dance-move diagrams that looked like codes), and also set logic and cryptogram puzzles.
For Foss, symbols created action: just as Highland dance diagrams translated into group spectacles of breathtaking elegance and speed, so the codes employed by the Japanese military mapped directly onto a world of kinetic violence.
His deepening knowledge of the Japanese language was a means of approaching military conundrums from another angle: to be fluent in a language is to see deeply into the heart of a culture, and the thinking that informs it. Different cultures have different approaches to such notions as the enemy, or even reasonable force. The way language is deployed can heighten aggression. For Hugh Foss to penetrate Japanese codes, he wanted to penetrate the Japanese military mind.
Elsewhere at Bletchley Park, senior codebreaker Colonel (later Brigadier) John Tiltman had impressively taught himself Japanese. He then set about ensuring that new recruits were taught the fundamental basics themselves; one Commander Tuck was put in charge.
Everything to do with Bletchley was top secret at all times, naturally: so the townsfolk of nearby Bedford could only speculate about the commander who had taken over rooms above the local gas showroom in the high street, and about the young men, some in uniform, some not, who were trooping in and out. This was the codebreakers’ school of Japanese, and those recruited specifically for this area, such as Oxford undergraduate linguist Michael Cohen, found that it was the gateway into a new realm.
Not that the eleven-week course was in any way easy. Part of the tuition involved listening to gramophone records of simple Japanese conversation, running slowly and then at ever greater speed, and at some volume. It was said that either the intensive method worked brilliantly, or the students were carried out screaming.
Codebreaker Alan Stripp, another undergraduate, found that the confidence that came with mastering codes and languages of the Far East could then be applied elsewhere: he became an expert in Farsi, the language of Iran, and later in the war, he sailed to the Indian Ocean and travelled deep into the foothills of the northwest frontier to a secret listening station. From there he intercepted messages from Iran, Azerbaijan and Soviet forces in central Asia.
Meanwhile, among the Americans who were eagerly co-opted into Bletchley Park later in the war—working with some wonder in a realm of tweed and tea-breaks—was a brilliant young man called Arthur Levenson.
Levenson was a polymath, deeply versed in both mathematics and literature. During his time at Bletchley, he had a particular fascination for the works of the novelist James Joyce.
Joyce’s earlier masterpiece Ulysses—700 pages set in the course of a single day in Dublin, 1904—is a book filled with mischievous, quite deliberate codes, notable among which is the recurring enigma of the postcard with the legend “U.P: up,” which has been sent to one of the characters. Entire academic papers have been devoted to the mystery of what it might mean.
Joyce’s later masterwork, Finnegans Wake, is where he sets sail out on to the wider ocean of language: at first glance, all 500 or so pages of the book are impenetrable. Familiar words are conjoined to form new words; sentences drift and trail, changing sense as they go; there are anagrams and riddles and profoundly obscure references, both classical and mythological. Yet in all that rich and colourful chaos there is the maddening sense that a meaning can be divined and unlocked.
Arthur Levenson adored Finnegans Wake and you can see now why a codebreaker might relish the chance to square up to Joyce: the novelist’s linguistic inventiveness and exuberance makes the challenge of unravelling his words so much more rewarding than any common cryptic crossword. For all his daunting reputation, Joyce was also terrifically witty.
A little after the war, when Bletchley Park had regenerated into the new department of GCHQ, the vital importance of linguistic skill was still recognised by senior codebreakers who had learned their trade in the grounds of the Park.
One new recruit in those post-war years recalled that he was set a most striking aptitude test to see if he would be suitable for cryptographic work.
He was sat down with a piece of paper, upon which appeared to be written pure gibberish. There were fragments of recognisable words, but mixed in with a swirl of what looked like random chaos, with a very faint scent of Old English about it.
There was an introductory note. The candidate was informed, in all seriousness, that he was looking at the language of the elves. This was the language that could, if one listened very hard, be heard deep in the forest. It was the candidate’s task to translate what all the elves were saying.
Possibly there was a note of Tolkien in there (a favourite of codebreaking types); importantly, there was also a suggestion of James Joyce, and the multiple languages and references of Finnegans Wake.
The candidate settled down to this unusual and taxing exam. He was told shortly afterwards that he had passed successfully.
The candidate’s name was David Omand. In time he rose to be head of GCHQ. The moral of the story is once again to do with the wide range of intellectual skills the codebreakers were looking for, together with the ability to tackle a seemingly impossible proposition not only with enthusiasm but also with a certain amount of humour.
So the puzzles in this section don’t just have a strongly linguistic flavour: they also revolve around a completely made-up language! You are invited to familiarise yourself with the intriguing vocabulary of Kat and to translate the sentences into English (and English into Kat!). On top of that, in honour of the great James Joyce, there is also a short passage from Finnegans Wake, of the type so relished by Arthur Levenson.
All of the questions below are based on an invented language called Kat. Word order is different from that of English and there is no wrong or right order, so there are multiple solutions (for example, “the mice are watching the cat” or “the cat is watching the mice”). Start by reading the sample sentences in Kat for each section and then answer the following questions.
SAMPLE SENTENCES 1
piacak kitegg tolg—The dog likes cats
kit grih mangak—The cat eats the mouse
persek tolg grih—The dog chases the mouse
woleeg uchakel toleeg—The ladies are walking the dogs
fel kitegg grihegg—The mice watch the cats
casal uchakel toleeg—The dogs are walking home
wolg kitegg persekel—The cats are chasing the lady
und toleeg kitegg wolg piacak—The lady likes the cats and dogs
kit toleeg persek ke—Two dogs chase the cat
uchak wolg mu toleeg—The lady walks three dogs
und wolg jonelegg kit fel—The lady and the children watch the cat
jonelegg fel wolg uchak casal—The lady watches the children walk home
kitegg grih fel fee—The mouse watches the four cats
SAMPLE SENTENCES 3
pun kit mangak—The cat eats meat
persek tolg fu jonelegg kit da—The children chase the dog away from the cat
grih vinkel jonelegg—The children are stealing the mouse
grih uchak ro kit—The mouse walks on the cat
tolg vink pun da wolg—The dog steals meat from the lady
wolg casal piacakel ucha—The lady is liking the walk home
It is not documented how far the gifted American cryptographer Arthur Levenson managed to get in decrypting James Joyce’s famously obscure masterpiece, published in 1939. But since then, countless readers, critics and indeed amateur cryptographers have been diving into Finnegans Wake, finding multiple interpretations of practically every word and phrase in the novel.
Here is the first page of the book. Your challenge: not only to fathom meaning, but also to catch the multiple geographical and literary references.
A few hints: these are (it is widely understood) the tumbling, dreaming thoughts of a sleeping man; and there are nods here to The Book of Genesis, Mark Twain, and the topography of Dublin.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens County’s gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthernuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy.