The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  For the Zimmermann solution Dilly felt professional admiration, but also some professional jealousy. “Can’t we buy something from the post office?” became his plaintive murmur in all kinds of situations, even quite inappropriate ones, as for instance when things were left behind at a picnic. He had no such good fortune, in 1917, with his own assignment. He had been detailed to work exclusively on the special flag-code, that is, the code used by the German Commander-in-Chief. All the energies of the German admirals, with their High Sea Fleet still confined to port, were concentrated on unrestricted submarine warfare. Breaking the flag-code would mean intercepting the operational orders of the U-boat campaign at the highest possible level, and discovering at the earliest stage what information the enemy had about our sailings. The U-boats, which could not communicate at all in deep water, chatted to each other freely in low-grade cipher when they surfaced, but this was a routine matter for Room 40. The flag-code was quite unknown and did not correspond with any system the Room had met. The only certainty was that it consisted of three-letter groups, some corresponding to words and names, and some to syllables.

  James remembered, as one of the “astonishing sights” of his department, the little room where Dilly sat “labouring” over the apparently insoluble. But “nothing is impossible”. No worksheets, of course, were ever kept, and of the steps he took towards the solution there is a record of only one, but it is very characteristic both of Room 40 and of himself.

  One afternoon Dilly (who by now ignored the correct watches and was living in the office) sorted through a heap of signals which had just come up the tube. They were a practice session by a German naval radio operator, sending in the flag-code. Some of the three-letter groups he was pretty sure he could recognize. They were the equivalents of en, the commonest bigram in the German language. But even so, it struck him that there was an unusually high proportion of ens for a short message:

  As Dilly looked at the lines, they took on the appearance of poetry, or at least of metre, since metre, as he strangely declared, is “the raw material of poetry”. What metre? He suspected dactyls, and if both lines ended in en, there was probably also a rhyme. The kind of radio operator who would choose a lyric for his practice signals must be sentimental, a sentimental German, and the poetry might be romantic. Could one of the en words be Rosen? The German experts, who were also professors of literature, were housed in a drafty room along the passage; they identified the poem, and the roses, almost at once; they were two lines of Schiller’s:

  Ehret die Frauen; sie flechten und weben

  Himmliche Rosen im erdliche Leben.

  [Give reverence to women; they plait and weave

  Heavenly roses in this earthly life.]

  This gave Dilly nine or ten new groups, including the useful leband erd-, and even such tiny beginnings can constitute a “way in”. The rest was hard work, perhaps inspiration in the bath, and the help of his three clerical staff; there were now four people in the tiny room, referred to as “one for each letter and one for the pot”. The three-letter flag-code was broken in the summer of 1917, and so many convoys were saved that in October James was made a captain.

  Room 40 had recovered totally from its disgrace after Jutland. “Blinker” Hall, who had piloted the department through with such success, had great ambitions for it, particularly on the diplomatic side. As a result, there was another expansion (the staff numbered a hundred by the end of the war), and this had far-reaching effects on the life of Dilly. More stenographers were needed, their discretion must be absolute, and it was thought best to turn to ladies of county and service families. At the end of 1917 Dilly was allocated a new secretary. She was Miss Olive Roddam, the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Roddam, of the ancient and distinguished Northumberland family the Roddams of Roddam.

  The first embarrassment was the bath. Miss Roddam worked office hours, not the naval watches, so that it was a matter of finishing one’s bath and getting dressed correctly in uniform before she arrived. This was a serious alteration of routine. Then there was the problem of working at such close quarters with a young lady in a room as cramped as No. 53. Eddie had always said that in spite of Dilly’s intellect, and in spite of, or because of, his uncertain contact with daily life, he would be quite powerless if he was thrown together for any length of time with a normal, pretty young woman. Eddie was right. Himmliche Rosen im erdliche Leben! Dilly did become powerless, and before many weeks had passed he fell in love with Miss Roddam.

  At the end of February 1917 the 2/4th Lincolnshires were stationed at Havant, ready to go. Eddie had at least been spared the miserable Christmas of 1916 at Bishopscourt, when Ronnie and his father had scarcely been on speaking terms, and had been reduced to leaving notes for each other on the hall table. Christina came down from Lincoln to Havant to say good-bye. Afterwards Eddie wrote to her, in the words of hundreds of thousands of young officers, that it was a pity that she hadn’t come to the station because they hadn’t entrained until 1:53 after all, and they could have had another hour and a half together. The battalion was pretty well supplied with everything, including a pierrot troupe which had unfortunately tried to imitate Pelissier’s Follies. “I’m afraid most of it is rather above the men’s heads.” He expected to go with the advance party, and she was the dearest wife a man ever had. When he got back, he would draw some more pictures for his four-year-old son.

  The Lincolns were brigaded with the Leicesters to go out as the 177th Brigade in the 59th Division. In the first week of March they went up the line to positions south of the Amiens-Villers-Carbonnel road. Amiens was a staging post; the brigade was a routine draft, already almost unidentifiable in the mud, of another vast offensive which was to end the war, as before, in a few weeks. “The trenches are in very bad condition,” reads the Regimental Diary. “It has been necessary to dig men out.” The first casualties were from trench fever, and among them was Christina’s elder brother Edwin. Bishop Hicks, who was at Lincoln, in the grip of his last illness, asked that nothing about “victory” should be put on the grave of his dead son.

  Ludendorff had withdrawn to the prepared forts of the Hindenburg Line, and what was termed the Allied advance was, as the old sweats hastened to point out, nothing but a trudge forward over a few miles the Germans hadn’t wanted. The Lincolns crossed the river Somme at Brie, and in April made their first set-piece attack on the Hindenburg Line “on a position reported to be evacuated, which turned out to be very much not so.” There were heavy losses. “Teddie writes that he hopes they’re going in the right direction; they all look the same,” Mrs K. wrote to Winnie. His only request had been for candles, and if possible a few onions. The battalion settled down to trench warfare for the summer of 1917.

  During the immobile three months, Eddie became expert at shooting rats with a revolver as they came over the top of the dugout, and he got to know the men very well. The Lincolnshires had a curious double reputation, on which they prided themselves. On the one hand, they were considered ludicrously rustic; they were said to clean their teeth with soot, and to be permanently sleepy from eating the poppies in the flower-growing districts. On the other hand, they were known as preternaturally “fly”. Guy Lawrence had written back from Gallipoli that the Lincolns had delayed just long enough at the embarkation point to get the deck cabins. And they had no rivals in getting themselves dug in comfortably.

  Eddie was a poet in the front line, yet he did not feel able to do what Owen Seaman had asked him, and contribute to Punch from the trenches. He knew that Seaman expected something light, and as he explained many years later: “I found that humour in the camp and at the front was so much more technical and so much less refined than it seemed to be in the papers, that I contributed nothing during most of those four years. But to their great credit the artists at home produced a continuous spectacle of surrendering Germans and happy good-humoured British riflemen.”

  The inhibiting factor was not resentment, but affection.

  En
glish humour is distinguished by cheerful endurance [he said]. I saw that in the trenches; I don’t mean behaviour in action or under heavy fire, when, whatever you say about it, people are not amused, but ordinary behaviour under terrible conditions. I mean the men who sang doleful marching songs saying that they didn’t want to fight and wished they could go home, which other nations would have sung if they were about to mutiny or run away, or songs about Tipperary, where they had never been and didn’t want to go.

  Why did we join the army, boys,

  Why did we join the army?

  Why did we come to France to fight—

  We must have been bloody well barmy.

  It did not seem to Eddie that the feeling of 1917 could be put better than that. But his failure to write anything was not intended as a criticism of Seaman’s Punch, which came punctually up the line, once a week, with the mail.

  In August his week’s leave came up. He arrived in Lincoln to find that the Bishop had given up the Palace completely, turning it over to a Red Cross hospital, while he and Mrs Hicks, Christina and the babies were managing in the lodge. Rationing was very strict. What was margarine? Punch had given the answer to this: “I take thee, dearest margarine, for butter or for worse.” Christina said that she did not trust it, and would prefer to bring up the children on dripping.

  On the way back to the front, with a single evening to spend in London, he managed to assemble his three brothers for a dinner at Gatti’s. It was the first time they had all been together since his marriage. Dilly, towering over them in the glasses and improbable uniform, was, at first, abstracted, Wilfred and Ronald miserable. Eddie relied on champagne—the price did not matter that evening—to work its magical effect, and for a few hours, among the flashing gilt and the long mirrors of Gatti’s, they were back at St Philip’s Rectory, accusing each other of every possible crime and incompetence. Then they were happy. The next day Eddie found the 59th Division preparing to move from the Somme to the Ypres sector, in time for the battle of Passchendaele.

  The brigade was on the north side of the salient, ready to advance in yet another of the “waves”, which, this time, were to break through to the U-boat bases on the coast. The weather was fine, which was as well, since all the ditching and drainage system in the area had been destroyed in the preliminary barrage. The ruined land sank under mud and water which had been carefully held back for centuries.

  On 26 September the division were to attack from the Menin Road and push eastward to consolidate the old enemy positions. It was taken for granted that there would be no opposition. Indeed the official account was “successful advance with little resistance”. But the reality failed to live up to the report. The Germans counter-attacked and shelled heavily, and the 2/4th Lincolns held on, for two days, with great difficulty. On the first day, a sniper, left behind in a farmhouse to pick off the British officers, shot Eddie through the back. The bullet lodged somewhere in the left shoulder, and ended his usefulness in the Third Battle of Ypres.

  Bishop Knox had determined not to communicate with Ronnie again for at least a year, but when the news came that Eddie was a casualty, he sent it on at once to all the family. Eddie had first been reported missing, then been picked up out of a pool of blood in a shell-hole and shipped back to England. “You will be glad to be out of the fray for a while,” Aunt Fanny wrote from Edmundthorpe.

  In a series of hospitals, he experienced a black nostalgia for his own men, still bogged down at Passchendaele, and the usual longing to get back to the only place where the disillusionment and loyalty of war could be understood. “This time last year the frost broke in the trenches,” he entered in his notebook:

  I knew what fear was and I lived with fear

  Now there are only comfortable things,

  Oh, God, to be again where I was then This time last year.

  The hospitals, in fact, scarcely qualified as comfortable things, and, as a patient, his satirical spirit returned. His shoulder had to be re-broken twice. In the morning there were remedial exercises, and in the afternoon he was supposed to take a walk with his left arm in a splint, “a cross between a strait waistcoat and a portion of the dentist’s chair where the glass of hot water ought to be.” The streets were full of soldiers and once he had to salute two hundred and fifty times on one walk. Why not, he asked the doctors, let him salute with the left arm to give it exercise, and put the right arm in a sling “to gain sympathy”? His superiors called a special committee to decide whether a wounded officer might be permitted to salute with his left hand, but they decided against it.

  Ronnie’s hours at M.I.D. ended at three-thirty; he was living with friends in Kensington, and he went home every afternoon to write the history of his conversion, A Spiritual Aeneid. As soon as possible, he took the first steps towards his new priesthood. Once again, in his brothers’ view, he was somewhat indulged. He did not have to go to a seminary, and in the words of Father Corbishley, S.J. (in Ronald Knox the Priest), “few outside the ranks of the clergy will appreciate the remarkable liberality of such an arrangement.” Cardinal Bourne recommended him to live at the Oratory, “as a mixture of paying guest and theological student,” he told Winnie. He had his own quiet room, overlooking the carriages and treetops of the Brompton Road, where he could study and put his thoughts in order, and wait, under God, for the return of Guy Lawrence.

  The end of the war brought the changed light of day into the seclusion of Room 40. The U-boats were handed over at Harwich, the German fleet surrendered at Schillig Reede and the professors of German literature went as interpreters. The Foreign Office was negotiating with the Admiralty to take over the whole department. To many, looking back on it, the strange world of decipherment seemed like a dream. During the past four years they had read over fifteen thousand enemy signals; all waste paper now. The dark linen curtains which had been fixed across the windows during the Zeppelin raids were taken down at last. A ball was given at the Savoy; some of the ladies of Room 40 had their hair cut, and some “shingled”; Miss Roddam was shingled; Dilly, like some great wading bird, attempted the fox-trot. That morning, all of them had received a form to fill up, stating whether they wished to stay in Intelligence after the conclusion of hostilities. Dilly had no two thoughts about it. He was eager to get back to King’s, and the still unfinished Herodas. He was also beginning to wonder in his turn whether, on what he could earn, it would be possible to propose marriage.

  On Armistice Day itself everyone working in Whitehall turned out into the street. The crowds were at first quite silent, then a subaltern going by on an open-topped bus gave a solitary cheer, and suddenly there was a riot of noise from Westminster to Trafalgar Square. Then people went off to get drunk.

  The “last push”, which the young officer on the bus had survived, took only three months from the first breakthrough, but the losses during those three months were surely the hardest of all to bear. On 28 August, during the final advance near Arras, and only a little way short of the Hindenburg Line, Guy Lawrence was killed. He was twenty-five.

  Ronnie wrote to an old friend, Francis Urquhart of Balliol:

  There was a time when I used to dread your handwriting, because it might mean fresh bad news. Well, you’ve got to have it from me this time, if you haven’t heard already—yes, the very worst news … This is only just to tell you. I’m too numbed still to think, far less to write about it.

  The numbness lasted long enough for him to feel, after it wore off, that he had a scar, rather than a wound—that is, a profound sense of what he had lost, rather than the loss itself. But what had been the total effect on the Western world of so many million mourners of so many million dead? “What kind of state of mind are we in?” he wrote to Winnie, after a friend of his, a Magdalen don, had just shot himself dead in his rooms; “What has the war done to us?” Certainly this brilliant and indulged youngest brother, who was now thirty years old, could never again be thought of as spoiled. “One has to grow up some time,” he wrote, at th
e end of his Spiritual Aeneid.

  In his letter to Urquhart, Ronnie did not even mention Guy’s name; he could not bring himself to do so for another two weeks. He had not even heard the news directly, because he had given up reading the casualty lists, and had never been in touch with Guy’s family in Worcestershire. A handful of faded letters are the only record, after half a century, of his dark hour, and they show nothing except how he brought himself to bear it.

  Faith maintained him—not a greater faith than Wilfred’s when he had to face the separation from Ronnie, or the Bishop of Lincoln’s when his son died in the trenches, or Christina’s when she got a telegram to say that Eddie was missing—not greater, but the same. Meanwhile there remained for Ronnie only one certainty in his waste land, the knowledge that he was called to be a priest.

  He was ordained at St Edmund’s Old Hall on 5 October 1919, taking the anti-modernist oath “against all Liberal interpretations whether of scripture or history”. Looking back on the scene, he felt that “it was something of a disappointment that the Vicar-General was not there to witness the fervour I put into it. He had gone out to tea.” On this ordinary enough occasion, Ronnie had taken a step, and received a privilege, greater than he could hope to describe. He had been warned at Farnborough that “one does not become a Catholic in order to be happy”; still less does a man become a priest to forget suffering. But “if happiness means to be fighting under colours of whose ultimate success you are assured, whose temporary reverses provide, nevertheless, the authentic thrill of battle; if, in a word, happiness is to be where you are meant to be—why, yes, I am happy.”