The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (17 page)

The crisis of the Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro having passed, the French restricted themselves to a costly but fruitless frontal assault on the village of that name. Wellington had beaten off the French attack. Captain Cocks later wrote in his journal, “I heard Lord Wellington say afterwards at his table he thought he had never been in a worse scrape.” The British general was grateful to those who had saved the day, most obviously Major General Robert Craufurd, commanding the Light Division, a man whose allegiance to the principles of scientific soldiering and Whig politics might have made him very suspect to Wellington two or three summers before. The general was also sufficiently relieved to bear no grudge against Don Julian. He knew that this Spaniard and his band were as excellent at gathering intelligence as they had been execrable at the business of regular soldiering. Perhaps there was also a mite of gratitude for Captain Scovell.

It was still “captain,” two years after the interview in Oporto when Colonel George Murray had promised Scovell promotion in return for his taking command of the Guides. Murray was always such a charming fellow, but where was this blessed step of rank? Might this battle produce
his majority, which he had waited so long for? Wellington appreciated physical courage, even if he had little time for men like Scovell under any other circumstances, and there was no doubt that his commandant of Guides had exposed himself to considerable danger on 5 May. A successful general could bring distinguished officers to the notice of Horse Guards in his victory dispatch. But when Wellington drafted it on 14 May, Scovell's name was not among the eighteen listed for promotion. There were eight officers from the cavalry regiments involved in the butchery near Poco Velho. Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons obtained his captaincy. Badcock of the 14th had gotten his step to major, lucky fellow, but Scovell was disappointed yet again.

Between the end of 1809 and May 1811 the campaign had followed precisely the pattern predicted by Wellington back in those autumn days after the battle of Talavera. The French had indeed invaded Portugal and marched right up to the lines of Torres Vedras. On the way, Wellington had administered a heavy defeat to Marshal Masséna, one of Napoleon's most talented subordinates, at Busaco, and then watched his myrmidons starve at the gates of Lisbon. Early in 1811, the British had followed them out of Portugal and Wellington knew that the fighting for the next year would center around the border fortresses. Three of those four key fortified places—Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and Almeida—had fallen into enemy hands.

The French had left a garrison in Almeida, and Wellington surrounded it before pushing beyond it to the Spanish frontier. Realizing that the British could starve the Almeida garrison at their leisure, Masséna had attempted to fight his way back toward those stranded troops. Wellington had anticipated this, and had chosen a strong position to block him, producing the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro. After his failure on 5 May, Masséna had no choice but to send word to the Almeida garrison under General Brenier that they would have to fight their way out. Masséna's headquarters found three soldiers who were willing to run the risks of trying to penetrate British lines and get the message to Brenier.

Two of the French messengers, leaving shortly after the battle, disguised themselves as peddlers and tried to make their way through.
Apparently they were intercepted and executed as spies, although it is not clear what became of their secret messages. The third soldier, Andre Tillet of the 6th Light Infantry, made his way in uniform, often crawling through the fields close to the Spanish border and up to the French outposts at the fortress.

Brenier signaled his receipt of the message by firing heavy guns at a prearranged time. He prepared the fortress for demolition and on the night of 10 May his men moved out of Almeida. The British pickets left surrounding the fort were too few in number and too dozy to stop Brenier's battalions from brushing them aside. Most of Wellington's army had its backs toward Almeida anyway, since it was facing eastward on the frontier. Brenier escaped the few miles through British outposts to French lines to the delight of Napoleon, who promoted him and gave Private Tillet the Legion of Honor and a pension of six thousand francs. Wellington was furious, for the escape had nullified the heroic defense at Fuentes de Oñoro. “The most disgraceful military event that has yet occurred to us,” he wrote to Earl Liverpool, venting on the inadequacies of his senior officer corps. “I am obliged to be everywhere, and if absent from any operation, something goes wrong … it is to be hoped that the General and other officers of the Army will at last acquire that experience which will teach them that success can be attained only by attention to the most minute details.” Any fair-minded observer in the army would have said that it had already been thoroughly reformed since 1809, but in his quest to turn the armament at his disposal into the most perfect engine for driving out the French, Wellington could see only imperfections in its organization and imbecility in many of its officers.

The French army, too, took stock after its retreat from Portugal. Napoleon wanted changes in its command and in the field, and many staff officers felt that communications had become impossibly difficult. In the spring of 1811, secret writing was blossoming in the French army. Staff officers in different places finally began doing something to protect the contents of their messages.

During Masséna's campaign against Lisbon, guerrilla activity had been so heavy that his Army of Portugal had been out of contact with Madrid and Paris for six weeks at one point. Portuguese partisans had
swarmed about the countryside, cutting the throat of any French footslogger who fell behind his column and arresting any suspicious-looking person who might be carrying a message. Masséna's attempt to emulate Joseph's tactic of sending out a local collaborator in civilian clothes proved unsuccessful. A Portuguese sympathizer, Lieutenant Mascaren-has, had been arrested while carrying dispatches in the disguise of a shepherd. Pathetically, Mascarenhas's idealized notion of peasant dress (he had equipped himself with a puppy in a wicker basket) and refined speech gave him away to the locals and he was later executed. In the end, Masséna had to send General Foy with an escort of an infantry battalion and a squadron of cavalry to fight their way through the guerrillas and act as his personal emissary to Napoleon. Foy had traveled all the way to Paris in search of pearls of strategic wisdom from their imperial master. The cycle of violence between the Iberian peasantry and French army had brought matters to a head, where now the dispatch of sensitive communications by mail was impossible.

Change, however, was afoot, as the British would soon realize. In April, the Anglo-Portuguese force operating to the south near Badajoz under Beresford's command had picked up a most interesting dispatch. Its message had been translated into a stream of symbols. Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin D'Urban, quarter master general to Marshal Beresford, commanding this Anglo-Portuguese force, had noted in his journal the capture of a ciphered letter from General Latour-Maubourg.
*

It translated letters of the alphabet into random symbols: for example,
A
was., B was 1, all the way down to +, - and = for
x, y
and z. To anyone with an understanding of deciphering, such a simple code was not hard to crack. Since the most commonly used letters, like the vowels
e
and
a,
were only represented by a single symbol in the cipher, it was just a matter of using the known patterns of spelling to break it. Indeed when Latour-Maubourg's message was brought into Beresford's HQ, D'Urban and his deputy, Major Henry Hardinge had little difficulty deciphering it. Hardinge, like his Wycombe classmate Scovell, had learned a little about codes at the college and had a particular interest in
them. He and D'Urban discovered the meaning of the captured message on the same day they received it. A large French army was building up to challenge the Allies on the plains of Estremadura. Beresford, who had two British divisions with him, was also cooperating with Spanish troops, with the aim of besieging the fortified town of Badajoz.

Intelligence led British headquarters to suspect that Marshal Soult, the old enemy of Corunna and Oporto, had put himself at the head of French forces in Estremadura. With the disastrous business of Almeida still souring Wellington's mood, he resolved to move south quickly to reinforce Beresford.

Wellington sent two divisions off on 15 May and followed them with a small suite of staff officers, including Scovell, on the next day. But as they rode down in hard stages through the hilly countryside, ominous news reached them. Soult had already attacked Beresford at Albuera on the sixteenth and it had been a most sanguinary affair.

On the afternoon of 19 May, Wellington rode through the
place d'armes
*
and into the center of Elvas, the greatest Portuguese fortress. The town sat in a place of exceptional natural strength, its whitewashed buildings occupying the crown of a hill. To Wellington's party, riding down to Elvas from the north, one of the most striking things about the town was the vast three-tiered aqueduct built into it in the sixteenth century. Each of the natural routes around the town were in turn dominated by two great outworks. Its defenses were so strong that Marshal Soult never felt the confidence to put them to the test.

Wellington's party clattered through the narrow streets and established a headquarters in the town center. There he received reports of what had happened a couple of marches across the border on the sixteenth. At about 4
P.M.,
he jotted a note to Lieutenant General Brent Spencer, who was in command of the divisions left behind to guard the natural gateway into northern Portugal. “I do not yet know the particulars of the action, nor the extent of the loss; but it is certainly very severe.” He then began to compose a letter to Beresford. He had driven Soult off all right, for the reports were clear about that. The British infantry had fought with magnificent determination, but their ardor had carried one brigade into disaster. It had been caught in the flank by
French cavalry and in five ghastly minutes 1,250 out of its 1,570 men had been killed, captured or wounded. The other British brigades had taken a heavy pounding too. Perhaps four in every ten redcoats in Beresford's army were dead or wounded.

Wellington knew that when word reached England about the scale of this loss, it might look very bad. All those carping Whigs and Radicals would be on their hind legs in the Commons denouncing the ministry's war policy yet again. With these concerns swirling around his head, Wellington jotted a sympathetic note to Beresford: “You could not be successful in such an action without a large loss; and we must make up our minds to affairs of this kind sometimes, or give up the game.” The next day, Wellington fired off orders, telling the hospitals in Lisbon to prepare for two thousand wounded and ordering up more gunners. The attempt on Badajoz had cost the British dear at Albuera, but it had cost Soult dearer still and his army was withdrawing, leaving the French garrison inside that fortress to face the inevitable siege. Having just paid this awful price, Wellington was determined to continue his attempt on the city and was ordering heavy guns and supplies forward.

On the twenty-first, Wellington left Elvas and rode a dozen miles across the plain of the Guadiana River to direct operations himself. He decided to look over the battlefield of Albuera and Scovell followed in his suite. They found the ground strewn with thousands of corpses. Wild dogs and carrion birds were already making a meal of them. Here and there, remarkably five days after the slaughter, plaintive voices cried out for mercy or deliverance. The Allied medical services had broken down completely. In some places, Wellington could see an orderly helping a canteen to the blood-caked face of some French hussar or Portuguese chasseur. Wellington wrote to Beresford, “I don't know what to do about the French wounded at Albuera. We must remove our own in the first instance.”

For Scovell, the field held its own particular horror. One of the four battalions in the brigade that had been ridden down was his own, the 57th Foot. After touring the battlefield with Lord Wellington, Scovell noted in his journal, “Our people had buried till they could work no longer, and there still lay an immense number that never could be interred. Of about 7000 British not one half remained fit for duty, and only two officers of my Regiment the 57th came out of the field unhurt. The left Centre Company had only two men left.” The colonel of the
57th had told his men to “Die Hard!” as the Polish Lancers and 2nd Hussars rode down on them. The moment entered army mythology, and the CO's order the English language.

Wellington returned to Elvas, where he reviewed Beresford's official account of the battle, a document that had been tainted by Beresford's terrible state of mind: he had gone to pieces after Albuera and sunk into a deep depression. “This will not do,” Wellington remarked as he read the dispatch, “write me down a victory.” The document was redrafted to be more upbeat. To ram the point home, the commander of British forces added in his covering note to the secretary of war in London, Earl Liverpool, “After a most severe engagement, in which all the troops conducted themselves in the most gallant manner, Sir W. Beresford gained the victory.” In letters to London and to the political authorities in the peninsula, he blamed the Spanish troops at Albuera for being incapable of maneuvering to defend themselves.

Among the staff officers milling about outside headquarters in Elvas the affair of the sixteenth generated much gossip. Wellington's aristocratic young military secretary, FitzRoy Somerset, wrote home telling his brother that he would not find the truth about Albuera in the official dispatch, confiding, “Beresford does not appear to have managed the battle with much skill.” Apparently Beresford had fallen into indecision
during
the battle itself. At one point, the marshal had fought for his life with a Polish lancer and clearly been shaken by the experience. Shortly afterward, Beresford had lost all hope and ordered a general retreat. The victory, if it could really be called one, had been won only when one of his staff officers had galloped forward on his own initiative and ordered forward the reserve, a brigade of fusiliers, to attack the faltering French. The word was that Hardinge had saved the day. A twenty-six-year-old staff officer had shown the character and presence of mind that Beresford lacked. Anxious lest he be eclipsed, Hardinge's superior, D'Urban, let it be known through his own partisans that he had given the fateful order to bring up the reserves and that Hardinge had been merely his errand boy. Preferring not to choose between them, both, it would later become clear, earned Wellington's gratitude for their presence of mind.