The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (11 page)

Next morning Scovell stepped into the bright light and incessant noise of the city's streets. He had been invited to see Colonel Murray at HQ. The captain had washed and donned the smartest coat he could find in his baggage. He had made the best of his appearance and was now ready to make the best of his arguments.

Murray did not waste time with preliminaries. It was necessary to raise the Corps of Mounted Guides again urgently. The Guides' skills were needed if there was to be no repetition of episodes like Soult's escape. Wellesley's intention to do this had already been announced two days earlier in a General Order to the army. The commander of the forces saw a wider role for them than they had previously had. He was most anxious that the army obtain the best possible intelligence and he knew that few men could be trusted with the delicate task. Murray spoke in his mild Perthshire brogue, fixed Scovell in his gray-blue eyes and asked him whether he was ready to take on this task.

It would be with the utmost reluctance, Scovell replied. The captain knew he could not refuse an order, but Murray's request had not yet been couched in those terms and this was as close as the deputy assistant QMG could go. Disillusion with the army had finally reached its limit for Scovell. He had taken on untold extra duties as an adjutant in the 4th Dragoons, his old cavalry regiment, without extra pay. He had applied himself with complete dedication at Wycombe. He had penned any number of schemes and plans to try to unite his interests and those of the service, all without success.

Anxiously, Scovell went on to explain himself. The current situation
with General Payne's cavalry brigade was most agreeable to him and offered every opportunity for distinction. The colonel surely remembered that the formation of the Corps of Guides the previous summer had been attended by every conceivable difficulty. He had been presented with a pack of deserters from the French infantry, a few dozen nags bought cheaply in the Portuguese markets and told to turn them into a force of mounted soldiers. There had been no junior officers to assist him. He had devoted himself to this unenviable task while trying to fulfill all of the other duties of a deputy assistant at headquarters.

Murray perhaps realized that the moment when a man as bereft of interest and wealth as Scovell declined a request, it was time for delicate proceedings. The quarter master general also knew that Scovell had shown unique linguistic skill in dealing with his polyglot horde during the last campaign and that he brought abilities to the task that many other officers did not have. Murray was aware that none of the DAQMGs with better connections would regard the job of controlling the Guides as a desirable one. There were no real alternatives.

The Scottish colonel reassured his captain. Murray was capable of great charm, which had won him Moore's respect in Egypt nine years before and Wellesley's on the Copenhagen expedition in 1807. If great captains of such strong will and differing temperaments as Moore and Wellesley had been seduced, then what chance did Scovell have? There was no question of the Guides being established on anything other than the most formal basis, as General Wellesley's General Order had made clear. It would be a much larger unit this time, at least one hundred men, with four lieutenants and four cornets as commissioned officers to carry out Scovell's orders. Couldn't he see that this was the very cavalry that he himself had advocated in his memorandum? Their duties would be extensive, and the enterprise was one that Sir Arthur would overlook with the closest personal interest.

Scovell had made his protest. The conversation was moving to its climax. The general and he himself, Colonel Murray said, understood that such a large task could not be superintended by a humble captain. The QMG made clear that if his deputy assistant accepted the command, it would be rewarded by a recommendation of promotion to major. Scovell knew very well that the step from captain to major was
about the most difficult to make. The simple mathematics of the army establishment did not allow any but the most determined or best connected to manage it: there could be a dozen captains in a regiment but only two majors. The promotion would also carry with it one from deputy assistant to assistant quarter master general, which meant greater status and a further increase in pay.

Scovell finally agreed to Colonel Murray's proposal. The die was cast. Captain Scovell was on his way to becoming the man in charge of Wellesley's communications and a vital part of his intelligence apparatus.

CHAPTER FIVE
F
ROM
O
PORTO TO
A
BRANTES
, J
UNE TO
J
ULY
1809

I
t was still dark on 4 June 1809 when the soldiers of the Guards, the Buffs and numerous other regiments were woken by the reveille of drums and bugles. Men picked themselves up, stretched their stiff limbs, rolled blankets, groped around in the darkness for their coats and slung their muskets. In dozens of places around the south of Oporto the bleary-eyed bloody backs of Wellesley's army fell in, the men forming themselves into files. They gathered at company alarm posts, some simple landmark near the bivouac where the captain in command checked the names of his men against his roll, ready to send the word “all present.” And then the tramping of feet would begin, punctuated by the occasional cursing growl of a sergeant and tapping of drums keeping time. It was still early when the companies had been sorted into their battalions, aligning themselves and ready to march in a preordained sequence. Companies
*
assembled, ten at a time, into battalions. When each battalion was complete, they sent word to their major of brigade that they were ready to march. Once more, in that murkiness of dawn in the Douro country, the army began composing itself from the bottom up.

The business with Marshal Soult was rapidly slipping into history and the British general was setting his armament on a new trajectory: south. The task of letting each brigade commander know his place in the order of march and how far away the next night's resting place would be was that of the quarter master general's department. For far from being just a matter of improvisation for Colonel Murray, there were rules and conventions he had to observe; the order of brigades on the line of march preserved the hierarchy of George Ill's army. The Guards went first and the other brigades followed in order of their commanders' seniority. Some newly made up major general, or a colonel acting the part, formed up at the back. Within each brigade the senior battalion, the one with the lowest regimental number, generally led off. In this way even the daily routine of campaigning reminded the officers and men of their places in the greater scheme of things. This sense of order was profoundly comforting to someone like Sir Arthur Wellesley.

Colonel Murray and his acolytes had drawn up plans to move the army down to Abrantes in central Portugal, where they would encamp pending further orders. General Wellesley had freed the north of the country, but he knew that several French
corps d'armée
(under Marshals Victor and Ney, as well as General Sebastiani) lurked somewhere in Spain.
*
At any time, they could combine to form a much larger force than Marshal Soult's and fall upon the British or Spanish. The next stage of the campaign had to be planned with great caution, for Wellesley knew that Britain's army was small, fragile and, in spite of its success at Oporto, still showing every sign of being unprepared for a general action. Any severe upset at the hands of the French would result in the end of the Peninsular mission.

A wise general measured the marching of his troops carefully. March them too far, too fast, and you wore out the soles of their boots. March them farther still and you started to wear out the men themselves and they would begin falling by the wayside. For this reason, Wellesley and
Murray tried to maintain a reasonable pace as they redeployed, with stages of three leagues, or ten to eleven miles, each day. During each day's tramping along the dusty tracks that passed for Portuguese roads, there would be three or four rest stops. But even this slow deployment was sufficient to bring every kind of problem seeping to the surface.

Boots made cheaply by the contractors who clipped the taxpayer started falling apart. Uniforms had split at the seams and torn, and had to be patched with local gray or brown cloth, for red could not be found. Some soldiers had replaced their boots with the espadrille sandals made by the locals, others had paid the cobblers found within their ranks to patch up and mend their footwear.

Many men began straggling, weary of stumbling along under sixty pounds of equipment. Others fell into despair, wracked with regret at having taken the king's shilling at some county fair or inn back in England only to find themselves awaiting their fate as food for cannon. It wasn't just the feeble and the dejected, however, that lagged behind. The heat of an Iberian summer brought down even stouthearted men, who sometimes fainted trying not to fall behind their mates, or, sometimes for the same honorable aspiration, simply dropped dead of heat exhaustion.

As the troops marched down through Coimbra toward Abrantes, the same daily routine of mustering, marching, halts and bivouac was repeated. Wellesley, Murray and the other staff officers watched their men closely. Much sloppiness was laid bare. Too many officers had no idea of their duties. One captain in the Buffs, for example, confessed in his journal that he knew nothing of the military profession despite having been in the army for two years. Each night's bivouac was accompanied by scenes of disorder. Supplies were sporadic, and often enough the men went hungry for want of organization rather than lack of food. Sentries were improperly placed, allowing soldiers to go off and plunder the local Portuguese. Sergeant Cooper of the 7th Fusiliers described it all vividly:

Brown was a lucky man, for if caught, he certainly would have been hanged for striking the officer. Evidently, the threat of flogging or even the gallows had not yet become effective enough to deter those who went looting.

With each episode of plunder the anger of the peasantry grew, and with it the chances of confrontation. One officer of the 14th Light Dragoons described an incident in which he and some troopers were stoned by Portuguese peasants who thought the soldiers were about to steal from their orchard. The cavalrymen gave chase and administered a “sound thrashing” to the locals.

As the march went on, Wellesley became more and more vexed by these incidents and their impact on his campaign. If the rabble under his command carried on in this way, the peasantry might become as hostile toward them as they had been to the French. Many on the staff had been shocked by the brutality toward the enemy wounded they had witnessed during the pursuit of Marshal Soult in the north. And indeed, lone British soldiers threatening the Portuguese began to fall victim to the farmers' knives and staves; at least three were killed, presumably while looting, on the march to Abrantes.

The British commander issued a General Order denouncing “the conduct of the troops; not only have outrages been committed by whole corps, but there is no description of property of which the unfortunate inhabitants of Portugal have not been plundered.” As the army approached its temporary resting place in the center of the country, Wellesley, Murray and the rest of the staff busied themselves trying to solve the many problems they had noticed during their brief campaign in the north and march down. Orders had been fired off as they went: on 31 May for six thousand pairs of shoes to be distributed to those who had worn them out on the march; on 1 June concerning the use of mules to carry stores with the regiments; on 2 June regarding the need to supervise those left behind sick; and on 3 June requiring units to carry three days of rations with them on the march.