The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (10 page)

Soult's escape had only been possible at considerable cost, as the commander of British forces was quick to point out to the government, lest there be disappointment in Whitehall. Wellesley wrote to Lord Castlereagh on 18 May, “It is obvious that if an army throws away all its cannon, equipment, and baggage, and everything that can strengthen it and enable it to act together as a body … it must be able to march over roads on which it cannot be followed with any prospect of being overtaken by an army which has not made the same sacrifices.” His argument had some validity: Soult had lost four thousand men in Oporto and the subsequent retreat. He had left behind dozens of cannon too, leaving his army without any artillery, unfit to take to the field except perhaps against guerrillas.

The British general was not going to dwell on the near miss with Soult at the foot of the Serra da Geres in his letters home. In particular, he was not going to reveal the extent to which Soult's escape had been due to his own miscalculations, caution or failure of intelligence in his HQ. Instead, he made the most of his daring assault of the Douro at Oporto, an action that announced his return to Iberia with the necessary éclat.
*
It would lift spirits in London. By liberating that part of the country it also cemented the Anglo-Portuguese alliance against the French. Wellesley's official dispatch presented the events in northern Portugal in a suitably triumphant way, but there was little room for real candor since these accounts were published in the newspapers. For Napoleon devoured British news sheets with relish, and they sometimes found their
way to his Paris
cabinet
within three or four days of publication. So instead of conveying the confused realities, Wellesley soothed the ministry with comforting sentences. In a General Order to the troops on 12 May, the general also singled out the secretary of war's brother, Major General Stewart, for praise in directing the cavalry on 11 and 12 May. The second charge, Wellesley claimed, “obtained the victory, which has contributed so much to the honor of the troops on this day.”

Among the ambitious young officers, Warre aside, who had not found the glory they were looking for, Wellesley's politically colored account touched off much frustration. Captain Edward Cocks of the 16th Light Dragoons, an aristocrat but also a fiercely dedicated young officer, wrote to his brother correcting the official version of events and damning the meddling adjutant general: “Depend on it from me, whatever Sir A. Wellesley may choose to say, [Major General Stewart's] only merit on either day was being Lord Castlereagh's brother. On both occasions when he came within sight of the enemy he said, ‘there's your enemy, charge them,' and
went
back.” (emphasis in original).

Captain Cocks was soon to become involved in intelligence work and to gain Wellesley's unqualified respect, but at this early stage of the campaign he echoed the anger of many in the army that Soult had been allowed to escape. “Why,” Cocks demanded in his journal, “was Colonel Murray as QMG so ignorant of the road beyond Salamonde that he could give no directions to the Guards when General Beresford was so well acquainted with the country and when a few questions directed at any Portuguese peasant would probably have given sufficient explanation?”

As a member of Wellesley's staff, Scovell could have answered these questions only too well. Communication with Beresford, whose people knew about the old Roman route, was too difficult, and General Wellesley had refused to see the Portuguese officer who could have imparted the same knowledge. A couple of days after his commander gave up pursuing the French, Scovell noted angrily in his journal, “We have now seen what it is to neglect the advice of an individual, especially one who knew the Country so well as the Commandant of Braga.”

Early on in his relationship with his new commander, Scovell had detected the general's aristocratic hauteur,
*
and witnessed the costs of
maintaining a strict hierarchy at headquarters. It was simply not done for deputy assistants of the quarter master general's branch to tell the general he
had
to see someone, or indeed even to say the same to Colonel Murray. One officer of the QMG department summed up the prevailing relations among these officers: “One ought not however to venture an opinion … nobody can appreciate all the motives that sway a Commander in Chief but himself.” This attitude was not shared by Scovell. Indeed, in his account of the Oporto operations sent to Colonel Le Marchant, he made a number of criticisms of their conduct and of the rigid way that business had been conducted at headquarters, reasoning: “I think it by far the most instructive part of a campaign to know why we fail; success is in the mouth of everyone to account for.” At Wycombe, the colonel's former pupil had evidently perfected the philosophy that no general was beyond criticism, but that any remarks of this kind must stem from a desire to perfect the army rather than to villify some particular person.

Le Marchant had helped found the Royal Military College in 1799, and its graduates had come to form a body of professional officers often referred to as “Wycombites” or, later, as “scientific soldiers.” The education of the officer corps was just one plank in the raft of reforms that Le Marchant and a few like-minded officers wanted to introduce. Their other ideas extended to the formation of a professional general staff to plan and oversee operations; reforms of the system of promotion and patronage, leading to advancement strictly on the grounds of professional competence; and the grouping of troops into divisions of all arms (infantry, cavalry and artillery) so that they could operate more effectively in battle. The army hierarchy, notably the duke of York, had initially responded favorably to these ideas, accepting that change of some sort was necessary if Britain were to withstand the mighty French, who had defeated every major European power. The colonel's most ambitious proposals submitted in 1802, however, were soon suppressed by generals who felt that while copying the French army might possibly improve military efficiency, it was too dangerous to Britain's social order. They saw any argument for reform, be it of promotion or perhaps the granting of important posts on the staff on the basis of ability rather than patronage, as a dangerous drift toward ruin, rebellion and Jacobin excess.

In 1806, Le Marchant wrote despairingly:

Wycombe men were taught that science and brain power were more important to victory than noble birth or the maintenance of patronage. Not all of those who passed through the college adopted these arguments uncritically; William Warre, for example, seems to have emerged from his studies with his conservative views intact. As for Scovell, it had taken the experience of the Corunna campaign to convince him finally of the army's desperate need for reform. Once he had accepted this creed, Scovell applied his mind devotedly to schemes for tackling the army's myriad faults. He had taken to scribbling away in his journals and notebooks until late into the night, even after a hard day's march. Scovell hoped that one day he might impart the many lessons he was learning on campaign to a new generation of officers, perhaps as a teacher at the Royal Military College. The need to perfect the army was so important and so urgent that he did not feel that his commander or any other senior officer should be placed above scrutiny.

This attitude was precisely the kind of thing that irritated Wellesley, a strict believer in hierarchy. If a captain on the staff had something of benefit to say, doubtless Colonel Murray could say it for him. The general had both personal and philosophical reasons to distrust these self-appointed reformers.

He was a younger son of one of the great Anglo-Irish landed families. He had grown up amid a deafening chorus of panegyrics sung to the intelligence of his older brother Richard, and early on seems to have developed an instinctive dislike of those with too great a measure of intellectual self-confidence. Those with an exaggerated view of their own brain power could go to hell as far as he was concerned.

As a colonel in the army, Wellesley had spent several years attached to headquarters in Ireland, at Dublin Castle. These were times of revolutionary ferment in Ireland (and indeed in 1798, after he had left, of a French-supported rebellion), from which Wellesley emerged with a conviction that land owners were the key to social order and patronage was the best mechanism of keeping them happy.

Events in France and Ireland had persuaded him that the dangers of revolution in Britain were also very real. Wellesley believed it highly significant that Bonaparte had emerged from an artillery academy, and he saw the sons of France's new professional class, the bourgeoisie, as the force that had forged that country's Jacobin mobs into mighty legions threatening the established order of all Europe. British officers who came from a similar background might be just as dangerous. “These are in fact the description of officers who have revolutionised other armies,” Wellesley would later write. “Having no connection with the property and rank of the country, they are the more easily disposed to destroy its institutions.”

In May 1809, when Scovell wrote to Le Marchant that the most instructive part of a campaign consisted of being frank about its failures, he had set himself entirely at odds with Wellesley. It was one thing to have toyed with such ideas under a forward-thinking commander like the late Sir John Moore, but under the new circumstances of serving a reactionary Tory general, they were close to sedition. And if Wellesley naturally distrusted the reformers, Scovell repaid the compliment. The general's refusal to receive the Portuguese commandant of Braga had been taken by the deputy assistant QMG as snobbery and it clearly rankled. In seven years of keeping his journal, Scovell did not pen one word of affection toward Wellesley. Equally, though, despite the many occasions where he questioned the way operations had been carried out, Scovell never attacked his commander in personal terms either. This was not only the best professional attitude to take, but it was also vital for self-preservation, since he was writing a journal that might, in the event of his injury, be taken from his baggage and read by rivals at headquarters.

Scovell's private criticisms of Wellesley's professional conduct had to be subsumed in public, however, for he understood only too well the reality of relations between the aristocratic general and his lowly DAQMG. Wellesley was the key to everything Scovell wanted in life—
for as long as he remained in the army, in any case. It fell to Colonel George Murray, the QMG, to use his considerable charms to soothe the discord between his reactionary master and a staff that contained quite a few reform-minded Wycombites. As a former teacher at the Royal Military College who hailed from a landed Scottish family, Murray was better suited than anyone for this task.

The tensions were deeply felt in the days after Soult's escape, but with an added sense of foreboding for Scovell. Murray had decided that Scovell himself would play an important part in the prevention of any repetition of these events. Scovell knew what Murray had in mind and it troubled him deeply.

The army retired from the Geres mountains, heading south back to Oporto. Scovell rode with Major General Payne, the commander of the light cavalry brigade. Doubtless he was deep in thought, for Murray and De Lancey had already expressed their desires. But what was it that
be
wanted and how could he get it when he held so few cards? While riding with Moore's headquarters the previous summer, Scovell had formed a scheme and lobbied for it, even though Murray had little time to listen or to read the captain's memorandum on the subject. Scovell wanted to lead cavalry again and saw the opportunity to build a new corps around himself. He had realized that Wellesley, like Moore before him, was working with a limited cavalry force: six regiments, or about 4,000 men. In the coming months Horse Guards was most reluctant to send more regiments of these troops: there was still a threat of invasion to the British Isles, Ireland rumbled away, and the ministry was also assembling a major military expedition to northern Europe. What little cavalry the British commander had was constantly being reduced by detachments: eight dragoons to carry letters here; a troop of cavalry to guard an important convoy there; a squadron to explore uncharted territory somewhere else. Scovell understood that if Britain were to maintain its army in the Iberian Peninsula for the foreseeable future, it would need more cavalry, and that some would need to be locally raised. There were plenty of precedents for this in the American war, and in Egypt nine years before when the British had been accompanied by a mongrel band of emigres, deserters and adventurers called Hompeshe's Hussars.

The auxilliary cavalry raised in these previous campaigns had been trained to ride to the charge and formed into squadrons large
enough to give battle. The Mounted Guides he had organized for General Moore, on the other hand, were only ever errand boys for headquarters, and there had been only a few dozen of them. If it was not possible to place himself at the head of a larger body of fighting horse, then Scovell would happily remain Major General Payne's DAQMG for the time being and consider whether he really had a future in the army.

On 24 May, the major general and his pensive companion reached the bustle and gaiety of Oporto, a world away from the scenes of the Ponte Nova bridge, of torched villages, wounded French conscripts being impaled on the pitchforks of locals and of smashed equipment strewn across the savage mountains.