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The Great War (1914-1918) Forum

Remembered Today:

Soldier's code in Fargo Hospital autograph book


Moonraker

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In the Fargo Hospital autograph book that I recently acquired is this page:

1066773637_Fargocode.jpg.09aabb5c4dd3c7f854483a5ab17e9a6b.jpg

 

Suggestions from the forum's code-breakers would be very welcome!

 

And the date is curious too, as all the other entries relate to 1919. The book's owner transferred to Fargo on January 17, but "43"???

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It looks as though the GMB 19/1/43 has been added later in a heavier hand or a sharper, darker pencil.

It's  most likely the initials of the words in a love/affection/appreciation song or poem.

 

Starter for 10:

Y=You

I=I

L=Love

Edited by Dai Bach y Sowldiwr
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6 hours ago, Dai Bach y Sowldiwr said:

... Y=You

I=I

L=Love

That's very sweet of you, Dai. :D

Thinking back to those "secret code" articles in my childhood comic books, the simplest cypher involved substituting the actual letters with those one, two or whatever characters further on or back in the alphabet or jumbling the latter up, with a simple key being needed to read the original.

 

There are three "Ls" and "As" - could one of these indicate "Es"?  And there appear to be a mixture of commas and full stops.

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I did glance at some "how to crack a code" websites, but was stymied by the message having no obvious word breaks. :rolleyes:

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It could be something deviously clever or childishly simple. It could read backwards, down each column then across or up etc.

 

As noted by the OP the 43 must be significant, a clue to a possible shift?

 

There seems to be an S̀ which doesn't really lend itself to the character shift idea when there's a normal S. Perhaps a place? Back to Dai's idea that each letter is the initial letter of a word.

 

Punctuation. I've seen war period handwritten letters by educated men with barely a trace of familiar 21st Century punctuation. Is this another clue? EG. Shift the . letters by 4 and the , by 3.

 

Then again there could be a some phonetic mis-spellings so even when cracked correctly it's still slightly garbled.

TEW

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I don't impose my interest in Wiltshire and the War on my friends. (Years ago, I had a friend with an uncle in Sutton Veny - the site of a major WWI camp - but she was completely indifferent to my postcards of the village, which she visited on a regular basis.) Very occasionally if a postcard that I've newly acquired has arrived that day, I might very briefly show it to a visitor. But two very recent guests have been fascinated by the autograph book and spent some time examining it; today's even read out eight or ten of the contributions. When she was married, she had some sort of celebration close to Stonehenge, just a couple of miles from Fargo. The other friend is Ukrainian and has only passed the monument on her way to the West Country.

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