If only... creating suspense out of nothing in Jason Bell, Cracking the Nazi Code
I’m reading Jason Bell’s Cracking the Nazi Code: The untold story of Canada’s greatest spy, about which, well, I have my doubts. So far, though, there have been a couple of interesting observations:
- that the June 28, 2014 (assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) was German’s “last normal morning for decades, [and] the next would not dawn until near the end of the century, after the fall of the Berlin Wall” (10) (a very interesting way of putting it)
- that there was a “university” at the Ruhleben internment camp whose “credits” were “later recognized by” by universities such as Oxford, Edinburgh, and London” (33) (unfortunately, there’s no reference for this, and some of it seems anachronistic enough that there must be more to it).
But as interesting as things seem inherently, there is a kind of looseness to the writing in this book that is extremely annoying: lots of clichés and structural things that don’t seem to quite work the way they are supposed to.
So far, I have two favourites. The first describes the invasion of Luxemburg at the beginning of WWI:
And now in small, quiet peaceful Luxembourg, the last place anybody would have been expected to be invaded by the world’s most powerful army, the birds of war came home to roost…. Finally, the cauldron boiled (18).
(Four-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie of war, I guess)
And then this, describing a letter Winthrop Bell wrote home from Ruhleben internment camp to Canada:
The first day of July 1915 was beautiful and sunny. It was hot on Canada Day, but a pleasant breeze cooled things a bit at Ruhleben. The Canadian Club, around two dozen men, gathered for tea under the shade of a tree. They chose Bell to conduct his first intelligence mission for the Canadian nation. He had the best diplomatic connections (including to the prime minister, Robert Borden) in the group. Bell needed to write and send words of loyalty, without endangering the Canadian prisoners. He wrote: “We Canadians in Ruhleben want to assure our friends at home that our thoughts are with our country and that our deepest regret is that we are unable to help our country actively in this crisis. Our friends are not to worry about us. We are keeping health and courage up, and are trying to maintain the honour of Canada among our fellow Britishers in Ruhleben. We are looking forward eagerly to the time when we shall be back in Canada again, to take our share in the work of building up our country.”
I confess initially, I couldn’t figure out what careful subtle message Bell had managed to sneak past the censors in this passage. On the one hand, if his goal was to disguise the fact that he and his fellow Canadians were rooting for the anti-German forces, I’d have said he failed: that comes out pretty clear in the message and if the German censors missed it, it could only be because they didn’t read English. On the other, well, frankly, I can’t see any intelligence in the piece at all — though of course, I’m only an english professor and not a spy.
Fortunately, Bell-the-author provides an explanation: he was indicating to his compatriots that he and the others felt, well, Canadian.
Bell’s message was subtle enough to make it past the censors, but it said what was necessary. He wrote of an emergent Canadian identity as a worthy loyalty. Before the war, Canadians had not thought of themselves as “Canadian” so much as members of their respective provinces or as “British.” But now it was possible to begin thinking of loyally serving a country that was “our” country, distinct from but connected to Britain. I was the position that Prime Minister Borden advanced at the Paris Peace Conference after the war.
The mind is overwhelmed with questions.
- How might the future have evolved if the German censors had recognised this nascent nationalism? Could we perhaps have avoided all the trouble of 1939-1945?
- How close did the censors come to catching Winthrop in his first intelligence mission? “I don’t know Heinz, I think I’m seeing a nascent Canadian nationalism here; I say vee censor.” “Don’t be silly, Franz: he says ‘our fellow Britishers’; there is no way this is an expression of a vision of Canada as a federate nation distinct from Great Britain; he still sees himself as a Nova Scotian first, and Britisher second. I say vee let it go through”
- What might have happened if Prime Minister Borden had not received this in time for the end of the war? Might the Treaty of Versailles have turned out differently? “Well, you see, I’m not sure we really see ourselves as a nation, Woody. Why don’t you just decide how it should end for us?”
Bell, Jason. 2023. Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Canada’s Greatest Spy. First edition. Toronto, Ontario: HarperCollins Canada Ltd.
