The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (7 page)

The outrage was surely enough to provoke the US to declare war on Germany, but Wilson’s reluctance to go to war was born partly by his desire to win the peace in Europe, but more by the political and social volatility of his own country. Twelve million immigrants had landed in the USA since the turn of the 20th century, profoundly affecting a country of 100 million people. Labour reformers clashed with business interests after the financial crisis of 1907 as both attempted to wrest control of the social marketplace, and the migration of millions of African Americans from the southern US to the north created social upheaval compounded by the immigrant tidal wave as people competed for jobs and housing. And then there was Mexico, embroiled in a revolution, on the USA’s southern border. Wilson feared the effects of declaring war on Germany on the stability of the country of which he had been president for less than two years.

Wilson’s first public response to the
Lusitania
’s destruction and American loss of life came on 10 May in Philadelphia, where he addressed 15,000 people at the Convention Hall – 4,000 of them newly naturalised American citizens. ‘There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,’ he told the crowd. ‘There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.’ The crowd, waving thousands of small American flags, erupted in a tumult of applause and patriotic enthusiasm, for even though Wilson had not mentioned the
Lusitania
(nor would he in that speech), ‘the audience did not hesitate to read the application of his statement’.

Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, had endured both a bomb threat at the German embassy in Washington, and the persistence of a group of US newspaper reporters, who chased him in a speeding taxi from his suite at the Ritz-Carlton to Penn Station. There the cornered von Bernstorff fended off their questions in surreal fashion, first by claiming that he wasn’t there at all, and then, in relief, agreeing to a reporter’s suggestion that he had to wait for instructions from his government.

But what really mattered to the world was America’s response. In Berlin, American ambassador James Gerard fully expected his country to declare war on Germany, and prepared to depart for home. Instead, on 11 May, he found himself delivering the first American ‘
Lusitania
Note’ to the Germans. The Wilson government’s high-minded response did not declare war, but rather asserted that Germany should not expect the United States ‘to omit any word or any act necessary to the sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens’.

Gerard had frequent conversations during that intense post-
Lusitania
period with Germany’s Foreign Minister Gottlieb von Jagow and Under Secretary of State Arthur Zimmermann. On one heated occasion Zimmermann, pounding the table with his fist, told Gerard that the United States wouldn’t dare to retaliate because ‘we have five hundred thousand German reservists in America who will rise in arms against your government’. Gerard’s response was highly undiplomatic, but traditionally American in its use of mob violence: ‘I told him we had five hundred and one thousand lamp posts in America, and that is where the German reservists would find themselves if they tried any uprising.’

Germany apologised to the United States for the loss of the
Lusitania
, but never accepted blame, arguing that it had destroyed the ship within the rules of warfare because it was carrying war goods. Even so, the German government wanted to keep the United States from joining the Allied cause and issued secret orders to its submarine captains to stop sinking passenger liners.

The United States accepted the German government’s apology. America would not be going to war with Germany over the
Lusitania
, much to the dismay of the Allies, who now wondered just what sort of outrage it would take to bring her into the fight. And the Germans didn’t need their 500,000 reservists to rise up in America. Von Bernstorff and his masters in Berlin were exploring other, potentially more deadly, options.

When a German machine-gun bullet struck Malcolm Hay in the head, he knew instantly what had happened: ‘the blow might have come from a sledge hammer, except that it seemed to carry with it an impression of speed’. In the few seconds before he lost consciousness, he noticed that his watch was spattered with blood. When he came round, he was ‘unable to move any part of my body except my left hand’.

Hay, future head of the army’s codebreaking outfit MI1(b), had joined the Gordon Highlanders on the day war was declared, and arrived in France as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in August 1914. As he marched through the countryside towards the Belgian town of Mons, enjoying a late summer heatwave, there wasn’t ‘the slightest hint of war’. That would rapidly change: his unit was about to bear the full brunt of the massive German offensive designed to drive the BEF back where they came from and deliver a devastating right hook towards Paris. Hay noted that ‘the German superiority at that part of the line was probably about three to one in guns, and five or more to one in men’.

Besieged from the flanks and the rear, Hay and his troops joined the general British retreat; suddenly the glorious weather was their enemy as they trudged along the endless road, suffering from the choking dust and the hot sun. Near the small village of Bethancourt, Hay called a halt and they dug in. Heavy shelling began the next morning, followed by wave upon wave of German infantry. As they swarmed forward, Hay was struck down.

For the rest of the day, he swam in and out of consciousness, tended to by his men. Ordered to retire at midnight, they carried him away on a stretcher, the pain almost unbearable: ‘I still remember the agony caused by the weight of my body pressing down on my neck … while my head, just clearing the ground, trailed among the wet beetroot leaves.’

The next day, further orders arrived: the wounded were to be left behind. Two of Hay’s men stayed with him as long as possible. Then he lay helplessly by the roadside until the Red Cross picked him up and he was ferried to a civilian hospital at Cambrai. For the first month, he was attended to by French medical personnel, who were struggling to accommodate the flood of Allied casualties filling every available space: wounded men were lying in the corridor.

His condition remained critical: an abscess had formed in the wound owing to the presence of a bone splinter, and he needed surgery. The doctor used a lancet to reveal the jagged, splintered edge of the skull. Then he ‘broke off one or two pieces of bone about the size of a tooth, then jammed in a piece of lint soaked in iodine’. Hay survived this crude procedure but was still too sick to be moved, whereas most of the captured British casualties, victims of the same massive German offensive that had netted Hay, were being ‘sent to Germany packed in cattle trucks, with no medical attendance, no food, no water’.

On 21 October, he was transferred to a small, gloomy French Red Cross facility in an old school building. Here his knowledge of the language allowed him to develop friendships with the locals who visited the sick, including a woman who would cook them tasty meals that Hay would help prepare, peeling the potatoes for the twice-weekly treat of
pommes frites
. He even conquered his aversion to snails. Another bonus was a consignment of English tobacco courtesy of a patriotic
marchande de tabac
, who had buried the most valuable part of her stock in a back garden.

As he slowly recovered feeling in his stricken limbs and began to gingerly walk again, Hay observed the consequences of German occupation: such things as bicycles and sewing machines were requisitioned, while those caught in possession of pigeons – which were used by both sides to carry messages – would be condemned to death.

Once the Germans took charge of the hospital, conditions deteriorated rapidly, the wounded piled up, and Hay was kept awake at night by the mournful cries of the dying. He also received a stark reminder of how lucky he’d been: ‘a French soldier was brought in with a head wound in almost exactly the same place as my own, but a hair’s breadth more to the front of the head. This difference of perhaps a tenth of a millimetre had left the Frenchman deprived of speech, memory and motion.’

Shortly after Christmas, which was marked by a tree, turkey and plum pudding, Hay joined the list of prisoners deemed transportable and left by train on 6 January. The journey seemed interminable. There were several changes, food was a rarity, and once in Germany itself, Hay and his fellow prisoners were subjected to abuse from their guards – who ‘behaved with great rudeness and barbarity’ – and from hostile crowds gathered on station platforms.

Eventually he arrived at his destination, Festung Marienberg, ‘a place of great architectural and historical interest’, about a mile outside the town of Würzburg, and joined around 50 fellow officers, mostly French, with a sprinkling of British prisoners. Hay slept on a narrow wooden plank with a mattress made from ‘a coarse linen sack … stuffed with straw’. His few privileges included being able to write one letter a day; a weekly visit to Würzburg, where he was allowed to buy food to supplement his meagre cabbage-based diet; and a wash in the public baths once a month.

In his spare time he played cards, chatted with his fellow inmates, attended Mass and worked on building up his strength. Aside from the bitter cold of winter, boredom was the main discomfort: ‘the misery of inactivity … the monotony, the aimless futility of existence … this is the real trial that makes prison intolerable’.

From day one of his captivity, he was looking for a way out. If he could convince the authorities that his injuries were serious enough to rule out any possibility of him fighting again, they might agree to release him. Though his medical certificate, ‘a most alarming piece of evidence as to my condition’, supported his case, he also appealed to the American ambassador in Berlin, and to a very well-connected family friend, Princess Blücher. She wrote to him on 29 January promising to ‘do my best to get you included among those for exchanges’. She handed his medical report to the American consul, who was staying at her hotel, and he agreed to do what he could to help.

Her timely intervention sealed his fate, and on 12 February 1915, his doctor told him he was going home. By the 16th, having travelled first class and been treated ‘with all possible kindness’, he was in Holland waiting for a boat back to England, his mood strangely muted; ‘not hilarious excitement or placid contentment but an exceeding weariness of mind and body’.

The whole experience left him convinced that Germany was in the grip of a virulent militaristic nationalism that threatened everything he held dear. Had Malcolm Hay’s captors known what a significant contribution he was going to make to the Allied war effort, they would never have let him go.

Tall and slim, with blue eyes, Malcolm Hay was born on 21 January 1881 into an aristocratic Scottish family with connections to medieval French nobility and a 1,000-acre estate at Seaton, near Aberdeen. His parents played only a minor role in his childhood: his father was an old man, while his mother tragically died of diabetes when Malcolm was 11.

At school, he showed a gift for languages and considerable sporting talent, playing golf, tennis and hockey. Aged 17, he was packed off to stay with relatives in France. Life at their country chateau was pleasant enough, but Malcolm professed not to have enjoyed his time there and resented missing out on higher education. In 1902, he married his first cousin, Florence de Thienne, and the couple had two children. In 1908, he returned to Scotland and assumed control of his ancestral lands. A conscientious and benign estate manager, he got to know every one of his tenants personally.

Though Hay sailed, fished and hunted, he did not conform to the stereotype of a country Lord: he was politically liberal and a Scottish nationalist. In 1900, just two years after it was founded, he joined the Royal Automobile Club (RAC), an extremely exclusive organisation given the sheer expense and novelty of owning a car. Membership of the RAC brought with it a host of perks: repairs done on the cheap by specially appointed mechanics, reduced rates at certain hotels, and a dispensation from the French government that allowed members to take their vehicles into the country without going through customs.

On the surface, Hay and Blinker Hall could not have been more different. Alice Ivy Hay, Malcolm’s second wife, wrote that Malcolm greatly admired Hall but thought ‘he could be entirely ruthless, especially in what he considered to be the execution of his duty’. By contrast, Hay was a thoughtful, compassionate man ‘with a genius for friendship’. Yet his gentleness concealed a hard inner core: ‘he could be fierce too, especially in his hatred of injustice’.

It was his mental and physical strength that got him through the ordeal of incarceration and meant he shrugged off the wounds that left him permanently disabled. To keep fit, he rode a tricycle round London, much to the dismay of his family, and he refused to let his lame left leg prevent him from playing golf: ‘he invented and used a weird and wonderful golf putter, a kind of cross between a croquet mallet and a croupier’s rake’.

On his return from Germany, and after a period of convalescence and rehabilitation at his manorial home in Scotland, Hay headed for London, where he presented himself at the War Office (WO) and ‘begged to be given something to do – otherwise, he insisted, he would die’. He was fluent in French and Italian, and had a good knowledge of both German and Spanish, and since the War Office habitually used wounded officers for intelligence work, he was offered the job of running MI1(b), the military’s cryptographic outfit. He accepted on the condition that there would be no interference from the WO and he would have a free hand to run MI1(b) as he saw fit. Naturally the mandarins resisted his demands for as long as possible but relented when he threatened to quit.

Though he had no previous experience, Malcolm Hay proved to be a natural codebreaker. As long as there was a sufficient quantity of messages to act as a guide, he believed any code could be solved.