A Coded Chess Position

     When World War One began the German government believed they were prepared for every emergency. When Kaiser Wilhelm II came to power, the German General Staff had preparations made for everything. 
     They knew when war was declared, all communications with England would come to a halt. Germany still needed communications with the outside world though and the plan was to actually use the English cable and mail system to do it. Of course the English were wise to the threat and established rigid censorship over the mail and cable messages. No coded messages were permitted, including postal chess.
     The English were familiar with all the tricks and had all the diplomatic codes of all the world's governments and so they believed that strict censorship would catch any German coded massages. Add to that, the French General Joffe had the amazing good fortune to capture a German code book. The English thought they had everything covered, but they were wrong. 
     The Germans communicated with their embassies everywhere and agents scattered worldwide kept the government advised of enemy activities. Plots of English warships were known as were the location of minefields and even gun ranges were estimated in the event of German naval bombardment of coastal towns. The Allies were puzzled; how did the Germans do it? 
     The Germans had scrapped all the usual complicated letter and figure codes and developed new methods. One ingenious system was to code a message using a stencil. A metal plate had holes cut in it and when a letter was covered with the stencil only a few words, the coded message, could be read. There were two problems: everybody knew about it and carrying around a metal stencil was dangerous. 
     Another system used was geometrical figures. For example, the bottom of the page is the base of an equilateral triangle. One then draws an equilateral triangle all around the page and the words touching the lines make up the coded message. 

     In another example this picture of a railway car gives important information: American Expeditionary Forces = 500,000, Cavalry = 100,000, Aircraft = 1,704, Artillery= 39,600, Machine Guns = 318, Field Guns = 309, 5 rifles per man and 18 rounds per rifle

     At the beginning of the war the English were treating captured German officers in a courteous fashion and one clever German officer succeeded in getting information about the number of, and equipment carried on, British destroyers by enthusiastically learning to play golf and sending his wife coded letters filled with what appeared to be details of the game. What appeared to be information on strokes and distances were really information on British ship locations, etc. The information was deciphered using a book of Shakespeare as the “code book.” 
     In one case, a chess position was used as a coded message sent from Paris by a dancer who was spying for the Germans. Her letter and sketch of a chess position were enclosed in the embassy mail of an attache with whom she had become "friends."
     She was an avid chess player and problem solver and asked if he knew of any strong players in his own country who could help in solving the problem, which he did not. But, after making some inquiries he informed her there was a strong chess club. So, she brought him a sketch of a chess problem and asked him to send it to the chess club to see if they could figure out what opening had been used. 
     He duly sent the position via embassy mail to the club. When the French government discovered the sketch they were suspicious. They had been keeping eye on the lady and knew she had visited in a hospital and had met with a German aviator who had been shot down behind the French lines. They deciphered the diagram which proved to be a pictorial code showing the position of a large body of French reserves massed behind the lines. 
     Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any details on the actual position of the French troops that were portrayed in the diagram. True story? It appeared in Everybody's Magazine back in 1918. 
     Everybody's Magazine was an American magazine with headquarters in New York City and was published from 1899 to 1929. Initially, the magazine published a combination of non-fiction articles and new fiction stories. By 1926, the magazine had become a pulp fiction magazine and in 1929 it merged with Romance magazine. 
     Below is the position which is actually quite legitimate and out of curiosity I let Stockfish examine it for about half an hour; it looks like a draw.