by John Buchan
‘Well, the war dragged on, and 1918 came and the March retreat, and Channell was a miserable being. The way he behaved he might have been Commander-in-Chief with the whole responsibility on his shoulders. He did his work as well as ever, but he grew as thin as a cock-sparrow and his eyes looked as if he slept badly. All the summer when we were being hammered on the Aisne and the Marne he moved about like a ghost, growing leaner every day, till he was only skin and bone and a pair of owlish eyes. But he perked up after the 18th of July, and when Haig started his advance in August he became a new man. He had read so much and thought so much about military affairs that his judgment was surprisingly sound - a good deal sounder than that of some of my War Office colleagues. He saw that victory before the end of the year was necessary if the world was not to be bankrupted, and he knew about the end of August that, if the game was rightly played, victory was mathematically certain.
‘I never saw anybody in such a continuous state of excitement. Our departmental work had rather slacked off, especially the codes, for German diplomatic activity was ebbing, so he had more leisure to think about what was happening in the field. I could see that behind all his keenness there was disappointment; the war was ending and he had never had a chance of the coup of which he had dreamed. He was only a spectator now, and he would have given his right hand to be a participant.
‘Nevertheless in the last lap his chance came.
‘There was one cypher which had always defeated us — the one used in the wireless messages between the German General Staff and Liman in the East. It was a locked cypher, and I fancy that Channell had given more time to it than to any dozen of the others, for it put him on his mettle. But he confessed himself absolutely beaten. He wouldn’t admit that it was insoluble, but he declared that he would need a bit of real luck to solve it. I asked what kind of luck, and he said a mistake and a repetition. That, he said, might give him a chance of establishing equations.
‘Now about the beginning of September things began to be hectic in the Near East. The great attack of the EEF was fixed for the 19th, and if it succeeded Turkey would be out of the war and the reaction in Europe would be tremendous. To succeed we had to go all out, and to go all out we wanted to be perfectly sure of our ground. The great question was just how much Germany’s difficulties in France had already affected Liman’s command. We knew that German troops were being brought back, and we had heard of guns on their way home, but we could get no certain information about the latter. Obviously it was of the utmost importance to be sure, for if we knew that the German batteries were no longer against us we could behave like Wellington at Waterloo - send everything in and not worry about reserves. To bring off the coup on the grand scale on which it had been conceived needed every atom of strength we possessed, and unless we won on the grand scale victory wouldn’t affect the main issue.
‘So I was prodded by my chiefs and in turn I prodded Channell. I explained the situation to him, and he saw its gravity. I thought I would cheer him by telling him that now at last he and his cyphers were in the centre of the picture. I didn’t cheer him — I only solemnised him.
‘I remember that he got as white as a sheet, and sat down plump in a chair. ‘P.Y.’ he groaned — that was the pet name he had for the Liman cypher. ‘It must be all in that damned P.Y. How long have I got?’
‘“A week,” I said.
‘“A week,” he cried. “And in eighteen months I’ve made nothing of it. It’s hopeless, I tell you.”
‘“We must pray for a bit of luck. The Boche is getting pretty well rattled now and may make the mistake you hoped for.”
‘“Things don’t happen that way,” he lamented. “Only in books — not in real life.”
‘“Well, we can only do our best,” I said. “Chuck everything but P.Y., for at this moment it’s the most important gibberish in the world.”
‘I looked in on him next day, and found him sitting with a pile of intercepted wireless, and sheets of foolscap covered with figures. His face was puckered in concentration, but when he lifted his eyes they were as plaintive as a sick dog’s. I saw that he was not getting on, and I forebore to pass on to him the goading I had had that day from M.I. He didn’t need any spur.
‘The following afternoon I looked in on him again. There were the same piles of wireless and scribbled foolscap, and a tray with about fifty cigarette ends. He must have broken the record these days for the consumption of gaspers. He simply shook his head and did not look at me. I remember casting my eyes round the little cubby-hole - the air acrid with cheap tobacco, dust on the shelves and floor, for no one was allowed to clean it, a photograph of Foch tacked on the wall, large-scale maps of the Western Front stuck on a frame, the plaster dropping from the dingy ceiling, and the September sun struggling through the dirty window — and thinking that it was an odd place for important things to happen in. Yet on that table was information worth a king’s ransom, if the head that bent over it could find the key. I was stale as ditch-water myself and badly needed a holiday, but Channell was simply grizzled and shrunken with fatigue.
‘I took him out to dinner that night, but it was like entertaining a mummy. He ate scarcely anything, and was too limp for conversation, and sometimes his eyes would become vacant as his mind went off on some private inquiry. I didn’t think that anything would happen about P.Y. but I feared that something serious would happen to Channell’s brain, and that presently he would be a casualty. These days both he and I had beds in the office, and before I turned in I tried to make him take a sleeping draught. He refused, for the previous day’s wireless was usually delivered about 5 A.M. and he said he couldn’t afford to have a muzzy head then, for first impressions were often valuable.
‘Next morning I was awoke by a weird figure in a yellow dressing-gown at my bedside. It was Channell, and his scanty hair seemed to be all on end.
‘“Get up,” he croaked. “I believe the miracle has happened.”
‘I was as rattled as he when we stood together in his room. He showed me a long message, which was dated en clair. Then he produced a very short message, and then a third message about as long as the first.
‘“Do you realise what that means?” he cried, his voice cracked with excitement. “They have made a mistake in P.Y. The third message is almost the same as the first. The second can only mean ‘Your message of to-day’s date unintelligible. Please repeat.’ We know the regular German formula for that... Don’t you see what we’ve got? First the translation of a piece of the cypher! Second, an alteration in a message which may help us to an equation!”
‘I dragged him out to breakfast at my club, for I was as much in the air as he was. Indeed I was more, for I knew less about cyphers. “The thing is perfectly simple now,” I told him. But he damped my ardour by reminding me that a locked cypher was a subtler thing than I thought, and that he had still to find the key. The short intermediate message would help, and still more would the small difference between the two long messages. I didn’t follow that, but it had something to do with the position of the numerals in the vertical framework to which they had to be restored. It might help to give him the key-word - or, as he called it, the wave-length. I don’t profess to have understood him, and he was in no mood for long explanations, for he was panting to be back at his desk.
‘All morning, as I worked in my office, I expected every minute to have Channell breaking in on me with the translation in his hand. But he never came, and I had a luncheon engagement and after that a conference, so I didn’t see him till close on dinner-time. I went softly in-to his room, so as not to disturb him, and for a little watched him as he sat with his head on one hand peering at figures and every now and then making a correction. Then he realised my presence, for he pushed the papers away from him, and stood up.
‘“I can’t get it,” he said, his voice flat with weariness. “My God, this is awful! I seem to be trembling on the edge of it, and then something shoves me back... I haven’t enough yet — I w
ant more — just a fraction more... I’m going to be beaten — beaten by a hair’s breadth, but that’s just as bad as if I were beaten by the width of the world.”
‘He refused to come out to dinner, and when I got back about eleven he was drinking strong tea and still at work. I don’t suppose he went to bed, but next morning when I woke I heard him having a bath. I daren’t exercise my authority over him and make him come out to breakfast, for I realised the kind of ordeal he was going through. His chance had come and he couldn’t take it. He was putting every atom of brain power he possessed into the thing, and it kept eluding him. It was like the worst kind of nightmare, when you have only a step to take to reach safety, but your feet are too feeble to take it.
‘That morning I did not expect him to appear in my room with news of success. I had lost hope. I felt that if he couldn’t do the trick at the first go-off he would never do it, that no amount of brain-cudgelling would achieve the impossible. He wanted just a little more help, and I didn’t see where he was to get it from, for P.Y. was not likely to be so accommodating a second time. I was desperately sorry for him, and as the day wore on I began to get alarmed. This kind of strain might put him into brain fever or addle his wits for good.
‘I looked in on him after luncheon and was really scared by what I saw. He was sitting idly at his desk, staring before him. At first he didn’t seem to know I was there, and then he suddenly asked over his shoulder: “How long have I still got?”
‘“Till to-morrow afternoon,” I said.
‘“But you said two days. This must be the last day.”
‘“The orders won’t go out till to-morrow,” I explained. “We should be in time up till the afternoon.”
‘He shook his head dismally. “No good,” he said. “No good. A month would make no difference.”
‘Then he turned on me a face so drawn and tormented and eyes so abysmally hopeless that I decided that something must be done.
‘“This hell is going to stop,” I said briskly. “You’ll be a lunatic if you have another hour of it. You’re going to come straight away with me and sleep to-night in the country. I order you. You’re staler than a ship’s biscuit and no earthly use to anybody at present. You’re coming down with me to Hampshire, and you’re starting in half an hour.” ‘He made objections of course — he had less than a day left — he was bound to work every minute of it — the country air would make him worse. As his superior officer I over-ruled him. I told him that he was stuck in the meshes of his puzzle and needed to get a bit away from it and look round it. But I didn’t believe in my heart that anything mattered about that: all I wanted was to prevent his going crazy. I was assured by the limp resistance he made that he too had lost hope.
‘We went down to a fishing cottage on the Itchen in which I had a share. We had supper in the bare little parlour and then I took him for a walk through a water-meadow and up to the downs, which under a great harvest moon were the colour of ripe barley. I fancy we walked about five miles, and came to anchor in a field of wheat above the valley. The crop had been cut but not yet carried, and we sat and smoked behind a group of sheaves. There was a pleasant chill in the air, and fresh cold little breezes blew up the river. The place was full of good smells — sunburnt grain, sunburnt earth, distant bracken, wafts of mint and water-weeds from the meadows below; owls were hooting in the woods, and a cart rumbled on a farm road, while above was a misty blue sky and the round moon.
‘It did me good, and I think it soothed Channell too. He slipped down till he was on his back, staring at the sky, so quiet that at one moment I thought he was asleep. I daresay he would have stayed there all night if I had let him, and in the end I had some difficulty in persuading him to get up. I remember that, as he shook the straws out of his clothes, he murmured something which sounded like ‘securus judicat orbis’ — a tag which, as I remembered, meant that nothing would very much matter in a hundred years. That has always seemed to me to be a sound philosophy, and I was cheered by what seemed to be a further statement of it as we entered the garden wicket. “I am a fool,” he said. “So are you — so is all mankind. Lord, what innocent funny fools!” From this I gathered that Channell had accepted defeat and was taking it in the right spirit. He had failed after doing his damnedest, and like a sensible man saw the comedy of it all. I hoped that he might sleep that night.
‘I never dared at that time to be out of reach of the telegraph, and early next morning I got a batch of messages which I had to answer. They were the ordinary routine stuff, for we had people all over the shop, and the replies usually went en clair without a signature. Channell, who looked rather less like a dead fish, took them from me to deal with, and scribbled the answers in the little telegraph office at the wayside station. “Better stick my name at the end of the one to Mavro,” I told him. “That will show that I think it important and want him to hustle.”
‘We got newspapers at the junction, and I flung a couple to Channell. But he didn’t open them, and all the way to town sat in a day-dream. I stole a glance at him now and then and felt greatly relieved by the sight of him. The night in the country seemed to have worked wonders, for his face looked smoothed out in spite of its pallor, and he was actually smiling to himself. There he sat like Buddha, his hands folded on his apron of newspapers, until we reached Vauxhall. Then he suddenly became restless, moved into the corridor and opened the window, and at Waterloo, long before the train had come to a standstill, he was out on the platform and racing for a taxi.
‘This looked unpleasantly like craziness, but I couldn’t follow him, for I had an important appointment to keep. I sent his kit and mine back to the office by my servant, and spent the morning at the War Office where the coming movement in the East was our chief business. I was told that at three o’clock that afternoon I might shut down my efforts; the orders must go out, and after that couldn’t be changed; nothing had come through from spies or air reconnaissance to settle the problem of the batteries, so it was impossible to go forward bald-headed without reserves.
“‘You can get nothing out of the wireless?” one man asked me. “We scarcely thought you would. If you couldn’t hit off the cypher at leisure it wasn’t likely you would do the trick under pressure. You want luck for that, and luck doesn’t come at the eleventh hour.”
‘But it did. I got back to the office before luncheon, and I hadn’t been in my chair five minutes before Channell appeared. He said nothing, just put a paper before me, and I saw that his hand trembled. I looked at him, and his mouth was tight shut, as if to keep back tears or laughter.
‘“What is it?” I asked.
‘“It’s P.Y.,” he stuttered, “the message they asked to have repeated.”
‘“Great God,” I shouted. “You have got it out?”
‘He nodded, and then flopped limply into a chair. I devoured the thing, and saw that it was what we had been hoping for, an order for every German battery to return at once to the West. After that I had no time to consider Channell. I got on the private wire to the War Office, and read the thing to a man who could scarcely take it down from excitement. Then I put the paper in my pocket and five minutes later was presenting it to my chief. It was the most sensational coup my show had ever brought off, and I wasn’t going to miss any of the melodrama. “It has just about cost a good man his reason,” I said. “Channell deserves the Victoria Cross. He risked something quite as important as his life.”
‘When I sent for him that afternoon I was nervous as to the state I should find him in. Success can be as devastating as failure, and I was afraid that something might have given in his strained nerves. To my relief he was perfectly normal and composed; only there was a kind of glow in his eyes, not so much of pride as of peace. Channell had done what he had wanted to do in the war, and his mind was at rest.
‘“I am not going to congratulate you,” I said. “It’s too big for compliments. You have won on the post — absolutely on the post. Do you mind telling me how it happene
d?”
‘“It was the night in the country,” he said. “You were right, sir — I had been living in the undergrowth and needed to take a look round... Well, as soon as I could laugh at myself, I was able to get a longer prospect. When I woke this morning I found that my thoughts were busy not with the message but with its antecedents. I asked myself just how the mistake happened to be made. We never had one before — in codes often, but never in a cypher. The German system is different from ours, as you know. No staff officer encyphers his own messages. They are all sent to a special department, which is so efficient as to be beyond the reach of error — their method of checking makes their work practically fool-proof. So I wondered why in this case it had broken down.”
‘“Yes,” I said, “I never thought of that.”
‘“Then at the station you said something which made me think. You told me to sign the telegram to Mavro with your own name, that he might see that you considered it important. That occupied my mind on the journey up — you may have noticed that I was rather abstracted.”
‘“Go on,” I said, for I began to see light.
‘“Well, it seemed to me that our message might have been encyphered not by the special department but by the staff officer concerned, and that this was the reason for the mistake... That was interesting, and I cast about to see how it could help us... And then I thought that that staff officer might have done as you did, and put his own name to it. That was why I left Waterloo in rather a hurry.” ‘Channell sat blinking happily at me through his double glasses.
‘“We know, of course, the name of the Generalstabsoffizier in charge of this business. If I was right, his name would be the last word in the message when decyphered... Well, my guess worked. It gave me just the little more help I needed, and in two hours I had the thing complete... That is all there is to it.”
