During Violette Szabo's training in Great Britain, SOE radio coder Leo Marks proposed the poem The Life That I Have, which he had composed during Christmas 1943 in memory of his girlfriend Ruth, who had recently died in a plane crash in Canada.

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Previously, famous poems were used by SOE agents to encode messages. But their very celebrity was an element of insecurity, as enemy cryptographers were able to determine the original from published sources. Leo Marks countered this disadvantage by using his own poems.

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