Part 5

The great thrill of the day came later. Through the woods of a high bank on the left came a tank, looking rather worse for wear, as though battered in battle.

It came forward through the undergrowth and made for the edge of the bank, where there was a machine gun emplacement in a bomb-proof shelter, whose steep bank was almost perpendicular. It seemed impossible that any old tank should entertain a notion of taking that jump, but this tank came steadily on until its snout was well over the bank and steadily on again with that extraordinary method of progression in which the whole body of the beast moves from the nose end upward until it seems to have a giraffe’s neck and very little else. That very little else was sitting on the top of the emplacement while the forward part of the tank was poised in space regarding the setting sun. However, without any hesitation, the whole mass moved on, lurched out, and nose-dived.

Good Lord! it was then that the thrill came. The tank plunged down like a chunk of cliff as it fell, went sideways and lost its balance, and, as near as anything could be, almost turned turtle. It righted itself with a great jerk at the nick of time just before it took the earth below and shaved by a hair’s breadth an ammunition dump at the bottom of the drop.

It was the finest tank trick I ever saw, and it was greeted with laughter and cheers. The King, however, and other spectators were rather worried about the lads inside. They must have taken a mighty toss. No sound came from the inside of the tank, and for a moment some of us had a vision of a number of plucky fellows laid out unconscious within those steel walls. The door opened and we could see their feet standing straight, which was a relief.

“Let them all come out,” said the King, laughing heartily. And out they all tumbled, a row of young fellows as merry and bright as air pilots after a good landing.

THE FEMALE STANDARD OF SIZE

Lady (entering bank, very businesslike)—“I wish to get a Liberty Loan bond for my husband.”

Clerk—“What size, please?”

Lady—“Why, I don’t believe I know, exactly, but he wears a fifteen shirt.”

STORY OF OUR FIRST SHOT

“I PICKED that shell right up as it came out of the gun—I saw it go through the air in its flight, and I saw it strike a foot in front of that periscope!”

That is the way Lieut. Bruce R. Ware, Jr., U. S. N., who commanded the gun crew of the steamship _Mongolia_, told of the first American shot fired in the war at a German submarine. He related the story at a testimonial dinner given to him and to Capt. Emery Rice, of the _Mongolia_, upon the arrival of the steamship at New York. The dinner was attended by many persons prominent in business, steamship, and naval circles, some having traveled hundreds of miles to be present. As reported by the New York _Times_, Lieutenant Ware told the story as follows:

At 5:21 the chief officer walked out on the port bridge. The captain and myself were on our heels looking out through the port. I saw the chief officer turn around, and you could have seen the whole ocean written in his face, and his mouth that wide (indicating), and he could not get it out. He finally said: “My God, look at that submarine!”

The captain gripped my arm and said: “What is that?” I said: “It is a submarine, and he has got up.”

I followed the captain out on the bridge and I looked at my gun crews. They were all agape. The lookout was all agape. I threw in my starboard control and I said: “Captain, zigzag.” I did not tell him which way to go. We had that all doped out. The captain starboarded his helm and the ship turned to port and we charged him (the _U_-boat) and made him go under. I went up on top of the chart house with my phones on, and I had a long, powerful glass, ten power. Right underneath it I always lashed my transmitter, so that where I was my transmitter went, and I didn’t have to worry or hunt for it. It was always plugged in, and I said:

“No. 3 gun, after gun, train on the starboard quarter, and when you see a submarine and periscope or conning tower, report.”

The gun crew reported control. “We see it—no, no—it has gone. There it is again.” I picked it up at that moment with my high-powered glass, and I gave them the range—1,000 yards. Scale 50. She was about 800 yards away from us. I gave the order, “No. 3 gun, fire, commence firing.”

I had my glasses on them, gentlemen, and I saw that periscope come up. “No. 3 gun, commence firing, fire, fire, fire.” And they did, and I picked that shell right up as it came out of the gun—a black, six-inch explosive shell. I saw it go through the air in its flight, and I saw it strike the water eight inches—a foot—in front of that periscope and it went into the conning tower. I saw that periscope go end over end, whipping through that water, and I saw plates go off his conning tower, and I saw smoke all over the scene where we had hit the enemy.

When Captain Rice was called upon for a speech he said:

“Gentlemen, I’d much rather take the _Mongolia_ through the war zone than make a speech. All I will say is that I am ready to go again, and I hope I have another chance at a _U_-boat.”

HE KNEW WHAT TO DO

A short time back, while a certain general was inspecting a regiment just about to depart for new quarters, he asked a young subaltern what would be his next order if he was in command of a regiment passing over a plain in a hostile country, and he found his front blocked by artillery, a brigade of cavalry on his right flank, and a morass on his left, while his retreat was cut off by a large body of infantry.

“Halt! Order arms, ground arms, kneel down, say your prayers!” replied the subaltern.

THAT WAS THE HYMN NUMBER

Here is a story which if it is not true ought to be. The soldier in the train was dilating on his changed life.

“They took me from my home,” he said, “and put me in barracks; they took away my clothes and put me in khaki; they took away my name and made me ‘No. 575’; they took me to church, where I’d never been before, and they made me listen to a sermon for forty minutes. Then the parson said, ‘No. 575, Art thou weary, art thou languid?’ And I got seven days’ C.B. for giving him a civil answer.”

STORIES FROM THE FRONT

INTIMATE stories of life in the trenches “somewhere in France” are told in two letters that describe in man-to-man fashion incidents that present an unusual picture of the battle front, full of color as well as of darkening shadows. The letters were written by Mr. Stevenson P. Lewis, serving with the American Ambulance Corps, to his cousin, Mr. W. O. Curtiss, of Toledo, Ohio. They are dated May 21 and 26, and extracts are printed in the Toledo _Blade_. Mr. Lewis has no complaint to make of the food. He finds the horse meat “a little tough,” but seemingly palatable. He writes:

We get good food, but miss the extra dishes. We get the famous army bread, rather sour taste, but am used to it now—no butter, of course; oatmeal without milk or sugar, horse meat, potatoes, and various flavors of jam. The horse meat is usually a little tough, but otherwise pretty good. Have biscuits and chocolate at the canteen. A couple of pieces of hardtack, with water and chocolate, do for a dinner very well when away from camp.

We have considerable time just now, with nothing to fill in, and I can’t quite go it, so I hike out for walks and have picked up quite a few good pictures and souvenirs. Picked up an eagle with spread wings—German silver, a decoration worn on a German officer’s helmet, inscribed “_Mitt Gott für König und Vaterland_.” It is rather a rare find, as the old spiked helmet is not worn any more.

Sunday we had a visit from Germany in the shape of an airplane which dropped five bombs in the next village. Two French machines gave chase and brought him down, but he caused considerable excitement until he reached the ground. They always come over at a high altitude and do not seem in any hurry to leave, regardless of the shrapnel shots placed around the planes. This one, the second we have seen come down, made two complete turns and then dived straight down.

We have had some trouble with some of the men in charge, due to the wandering of one of our men into the first line trenches. The man guilty has acted ever since he arrived as though missing in essential brain cells, but this time he crowned his former efforts—walked up a valley with _Boche_ trenches on one side, French on the other, he down the middle in No Man’s Land. Lucky he came back at all. The French called him over to their trenches, otherwise I suppose he would be walking into Berlin by this time.

We are working with an English ambulance section, taking turns making runs to field stations, where the wounded are sent direct from trenches. We carry them from these first-aid posts back to another post, and the English section, with its large cars, carry them ten or fifteen miles farther back. Then the order is reversed. The English are a mighty interesting lot, and most of them have been in service since 1914, hence have seen action all along this front. The hardest driving is at night running up to the posts just back of the lines, for all the moving is done then. The road is crowded with ammunition trucks, supplies, guns, and troops, and with no lights it is uncertain what is coming or going. Several men have ditched their cars and run by the station, but no serious accidents have occurred. Star shells sent up at intervals give a blinding light and the whole country-side is as light as day for a short time, then suddenly dark. It is this quick change that makes it hard to adjust our vision.

This English section has been through the hottest fighting on this front, having been posted at Verdun last year and running to the most advanced posts, but never lost a man and had only a few slight accidents. A person would think they were playing a safe game, but not so, after hearing of some bombardments they ran through. One man in the British ambulance corps has the Victoria Cross, the hardest war medal of any to get. He drove his car up the lines in plain sight of the Germans. One of the stretcher bearers having been killed, he rushed out on to No Man’s Land with another man and rescued several men, put them into his car, and drove off, all the time being the object of German fire.

The English are world-beaters in the flying game, as I suppose you have heard. The minute a _Boche_ plane appears over their lines, a couple of fast monoplanes are after it and usually bring it down. Heard of one air battle between five English machines and ten Germans; five of the German machines were brought down and the remaining five headed for Berlin with two English planes after them. The English did not lose a machine. Again there were three German “sausages” (observation balloons), and three English aviators, each in a machine, were detailed to bring them down, each aviator to take a balloon. Two of the Englishmen each got their balloon, but the Germans, seeing what had happened, lowered the third balloon. However, the Englishman ordered to get it, being ruffled a bit because he did not get a chance to get his “bag” as the other two did, dived down over the balloon resting in German territory, setting it afire and killing a number of Germans. He was wounded badly, but succeeded in bringing his machine back. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. Many other war medals are given, but a man who gets the Victoria Cross really has done a feat of individual bravery.

FUNNY THEY HADN’T MET

Pretty Lady Visitor (at private hospital)—“Can I see Lieutenant Barker, please?”

Matron—“We do not allow ordinary visiting. May I ask if you’re a relative?”

Visitor (boldly)—“Oh, yes! I’m his sister.”

Matron—“Dear me! I’m very glad to meet you. I’m his mother.”

NO END TO THE GAME

Two American lads were discussing the war.

“It’ll be an awful long job, Sam,” said one.

“It will,” replied the other.

“You see, these Germans is takin’ thousands and thousands of Russian prisoners, and the Russians is takin’ thousands and thousands of German prisoners. If it keeps on, all the Russians will be in Germany and all the Germans in Russia. And then they’ll start all over again, fightin’ to get back their ’omes.”

UNCLE SAM, DETECTIVE

THE detective work accomplished by the United States Government since its entry into the war has been worthy of a Sherlock Holmes, and yet few persons, reading only the results of this remarkably developed system, have realized that a Government heretofore finding it unnecessary to match wits with foreign spy bureaus has suddenly taken a high rank in this unpleasant but absolutely essential branch of war-making—as it has in all others. The public read of the intercepted dispatches from the Argentine to Germany by way of Sweden, and of the Bernstorff messages, but without a realization of the problem that a cipher dispatch presents to one who has not the key. And probably the average reader is unaware that, in both the army and navy, experts have been trained to decipher code messages, with the result that both the making and the reading of such dispatches have been reduced to an almost mathematical science. The Philadelphia _Press_, in outlining the instruction given in this important work at the Army Service schools, says:

What is taught the military will furnish an idea of the task of the code experts in the State Department, and of the basis of the science that has unmasked the German plans with respect to vessels to be _spurlos versenkt_ and of legislators to be influenced through the power of German gold.

“It may as well be stated,” says Capt. Parker Hitt—that is, he was a captain of infantry when he said it—“that no practicable military cipher is mathematically indecipherable if intercepted; the most that can be expected is to delay for a longer or shorter time the deciphering of the message by the interceptor.”

The young officer is warned that one doesn’t have to rely in these times upon capturing messengers as they speed by horse from post to post. All radio messages may be picked up by every operator within the zone, and the interesting information is given that if one can run a fine wire within one hundred feet of a buzzer line or within thirty feet of a telegraph line, whatever tidings may be going over these mediums may be copied by induction.

In order that the student may not lose heart, it is pointed out in the beginning that many European powers use ciphers that vary from extreme simplicity to “a complexity which is more apparent than real.” And as to amateurs, who make up ciphers for some special purpose, it’s dollars to doughnuts that their messages will be read just as easily as though they had printed them in box-car letters.

At every headquarters of an army the intelligence department of the General Staff stands ready to play checkers with any formidable looking document that comes along in cipher, and there is mighty little matter in code that stands a ghost of a chance of getting by.

The scientific dissection of ciphers starts with the examination of the general system of language communication, which, with everybody excepting friend Chinaman, is an alphabet composed of letters that appear in conventional order.

It was early found by the keen-eyed gentlemen who analyzed ciphers that if one took ten thousand words of any language and counted the letters in them the number of times that any one letter would recur would be found practically identical with their recurrence in any other ten thousand words. From this discovery the experts made frequency tables, which show just how many times one may expect to find a letter e or any other letter in a given number of words or letters. These tables were made for ten thousand letters and for two hundred letters, so that one might get an idea how often to expect to find given letters in both long and short messages or documents.

Thus we find the following result:

_Letters_

10000 200 A 778 16 B 141 3 C 296 6 D 402 8 E 1277 26 F 197 4 G 174 3 H 595 12 I 667 13 J 51 1 K 74 2 L 372 7 M 288 6 N 686 14 O 807 16 P 223 4 Q 8 .. R 651 13 S 622 12 T 855 17 U 308 6 V 112 2 W 176 3 X 27 .. Y 196 4 Z 17 ..

It is found that in any text the vowels A E I O U represent 38.37 per cent; that the consonants L N R S T represent 31.86 per cent, and that the consonants J K Q X Z stand for only 1.77 per cent. One doesn’t want to shy away from these figures as being dry and dull, because they form part of a story as interesting as any detective narrative that was ever penned by a Conan Doyle.

For the usual purposes of figuring a cipher the first group is given the value of 40 per cent, the second group 30 per cent, and the last 2 per cent. And then one is introduced to the order of frequency in which letters appear in ordinary text. It is:

E T O A N I R S H D L U C M P F Y W G B V K J X Z Q.

Tables are then made for kinds of matter that is not ordinary, taken from various kinds of telegraphic and other documents, which will alter only slightly the percentage values of the letters as shown in a table from ordinary English.

Having gone along thus far, the expert figures how many times he can expect to find two letters occurring together. These are called digraphs, and one learns that AH will show up once in a thousand letters, while HA will be found twenty-six times. These double-letter combinations form a separate table all of their own, and the common ones are set aside, as TH, ER, ON, OR, etc., so they can be readily guessed or mathematically figured against any text.

Tables of frequency are figured out for the various languages, particularly German, and the ciphers are divided into two chief classes, substitution and transposition. The writer in _The Press_ says:

Now you will remember those percentages of vowels and consonants. Here is where they come in. When a message is picked up the army expert counts the times that the vowels recur, and if they do not check with the 40 per cent for the common vowels, with the consonant figures tallying within 5 per cent of the key, he knows that he is up against a substitution cipher. The transposition kind will check to a gnat’s heel.

When the expert knows exactly what he is up against he is ready to apply the figures and patiently unravel the story. It may take him hours, and maybe days, but sooner or later he will get it to a certainty.

If he has picked up a transposition fellow he proceeds to examine it geometrically, placing the letters so that they form all sorts of squares and rectangles that come under the heads of simple horizontals, simple verticals, alternate horizontals, alternate verticals, simple diagonals, alternate diagonals, spirals reading clockwise, and spirals reading counter-clockwise. Once one gets the arrangement of the letters, the reading is simple.

For instance, ILVGIOIAEITSRNMANHMNG comes along the wire. It doesn’t figure for a substitution cipher and you try the transposition plan. There are twenty-one letters in it, and the number at once suggests seven columns of three letters each. Try it on your piano:

I L V G I O I A E I T S R N M A N H M N G

And reading down each column in succession you get “I am leaving this morning.”

After passing over several simple ciphers as not “classy” enough to engage the reader’s attention, the writer takes up one of a much more complicated nature, which, however, did not get by Uncle Sam’s code wizards. Follow the deciphering of this example by Captain Hitt:

He began with an advertisement which appeared in a London newspaper, which read as follows:

“M. B. Will deposit £27 14_s._ 5_d._ to-morrow.”

The next day this advertisement in cipher appeared:

“M. B. CT OSB UHGI TP IPEWF H CEWIL NSTTLE FJNVX XTYLS FWKKHI BJLSI SQ VOI BKSM XMKUL SK NVPONPN GSW OL IEAG NPSI HYJISFZ CYY NPUXQG TPRJA VXMXI AP EHVPPR TH WPPNEL. UVZUA MMYVSF KNTS ZSZ UAJPQ DLMMJXL JR RA PORTELOGJ CSULTWNI XMKUHW XGLN ELCPOWY OL. ULJTL BVJ TLBWTPZ XLD K ZISZNK OSY DL RYJUAJSSGK. TLFNS UVD W FQGCYL FJHVSI YJL NEXV PO WTOL PYYYHSH GQBOH AGZTIQ EYFAX YPMP SQA CI XEYVXNPPAII UV TLFTWMC FU WBWXGUHIWU. AIIWG HSI YJVTI BJV XMQN SFX DQB LRTY TZ QTXLNISVZ. GIFT AII UQSJGJ OHZ XFOWFV BXAI CTWY DSWTLTTTPKFRHG IVX QCAFV TP DIIS JBF ESF JSC MCCF HNGK ESBP DJPQ NLU CTW ROSB CSM.”

Now just off-hand, the average man would shy away from this combination as a bit of news that he really did not care to read. But to the cipher fiend it was a thing of joy, and it illustrates one of the many cases that they are called upon to read, and the methods by which they work.

As a starting-point the cipher-man assumed that the text was in English because he got it out of an English newspaper, but he did not stop there. He checked it from a negative view-point by finding the letter _w_ in it, which does not occur in the Latin languages, and by finding that the last fifteen words of the message had from two to four letters each, which would have been impossible in German.

Then he proceeds to analyze. The message has 108 groups that are presumably words, and there are 473 letters in it. This makes an average of 4.4 letters to the group, whereas one versed in the art normally expects about five. There are ninety vowels of the AEIOU group and seventy-eight letters JKQXZ. Harking back to that first statement of percentages, it is certain that this is a substitution cipher because the percentage does not check with the transposition averages.

The canny man with the sharp pencil then looks for recurring groups and similar groups in his message and he finds that they are:

AIIWG AII BKSM BKAI CT CTWY CTW DLMMJXL DL ESF ESBP FJNVX FJHVSI NPSI NPUXQG OSB OSY ROSB OL OL PORTELOGJ PO SQ SQA TP TP TLBWTPZ TLFNS TLFTWMC UVZUA UVD UV SMKUL XMKUHW YJL YJVTI.

Passing along by the elimination route he refers to his frequency tables to see how often the same letters occur, and he finds that they are all out of proportion, and he can proceed to hunt the key for several alphabets.

He factors the recurring groups like a small boy doing a sum in arithmetic when he wants to find out how many numbers multiplied by each other will produce a larger one. The number of letters between recurring groups and words is counted and dissected in this wise:

AII AII 45, which equals 3x3x5 BK BK 345, which equals 23x3x5 CT CT 403, no factors CTW CTW 60, which equals 2x2x2x5 DL DL 75, which equals 3x5x5 ES ES 14, which equals 2x7 FJ FJ 187, no factors NP NP 14, which equals 2x7 OL OL 120, which equals 2x2x2x3x5 OS OS 220, which equals 11x2x2x5 OSB OSB 465, which equals 31x3x5 PO PO 105, which equals 7x3x5 SQ SQ 250, which equals 2x5x5x5 TLF TLF 80, which equals 2x2x2x2x5 TP TP 405, which equals 3x3x3x3x5 UV UV 115, which equals 23x5 XMKU XMKU 120, which equals 2x2x2x3x5 UV UV 73, no factors YJ YJ 85, which equals 17x5

Now the man who is doing the studying takes a squint at this result and he sees that the dominant factor all through the case is the figure 5, so he is reasonably sure that five alphabets were used, and that the key-word had, therefore, five letters, so he writes the message in lines of five letters each and makes a frequency table for each one of the five columns he has formed, and he gets the following result: