The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (12 page)

In the fields outside Abrantes, the troops set to the local pines with axes and billhooks, lopping off branches to make huts for themselves. Far from a perfect shelter, this was their best refuge for the foreseeable future, since it took the administrators in London three years to send tents to the Peninsular army.

While the army gathered its strength in this new cantonment, battalions were drilled and supplies brought up, their commander contemplated a move into Spain. He used this interval in operations to begin tightening his grip on this lax army. He formed the brigades under his command into four divisions, larger bodies that could combine infantry and guns in self-contained elements that trained, marched and fought together. The adoption of divisions was, incidentally, a measure recommended to the duke of York by Colonel Le Marchant eight years earlier and one that had long been in use in the French army.

At the same time that his reorganization was under way, General Wellesley turned his mind to the large strategic picture, seeking political authority from London to enter Spain. With the eruption of war between Austria and France that spring, the British commander believed that a window of opportunity had opened: Napoleon's forces were divided and circumstances ripe for cooperation with the Spanish in seeking to bring to battle some part of the French force. Although British enthusiasm for the Spanish patriotic cause had lessened somewhat after the Corunna expedition, the ministry in London still sensed a popular desire among the English to help this nation in its heroic struggle against Bonaparte's legions. The commander of forces in the peninsula considered that Napoleon's other difficulties in Europe would not go on forever; it was time to seize his chance. In truth, Wellesley's enthusiasm for striking across the border was based on false assumptions about the degree to which the French emperor had reduced his Iberian garrison. Just like John Moore the previous autumn, Wellesley's lack of good intelligence was about to endanger the whole army.

This was now going to change. The memory of the Corunna campaign and their failure to trap Soult in May left Colonel Murray in no doubt that he must improve his knowledge of the situation in the countryside through which they intended to advance. Sir Arthur had made it clear that he expected such an improvement. Scovell's Guides were central to this, but since the QMG needed much more information than
they alone could provide, he dispatched his assistants and deputy assistants to all points of the compass, exploring. This did not mean recruiting some spy in the French court; it meant knowing how many horses might graze in a particular valley, or where the bridges were located on the Guadiana River. Even in 1809, Spain and Portugal were very imperfectly surveyed, and the best maps available to headquarters were fifty-year-old inaccuracies. Murray's envoys were to make sketch maps wherever they went, detailing the distances between villages, how many men might be quartered in each, the state of the rivers and their bridges and so on. This information was vital to understanding the enemy's plans and in planning the movement of British forces. When Murray had run out of members of his own staff, he started sending regimental officers.

The Royal Military College graduates had been schooled in military drawing and thought themselves the masters of this art. But Murray did not have time for perfection in this mapmaking. One of Colonel Le Marchant's correspondents in the peninsula wrote back rather tetchily to him in Wycombe, “Colonel Murray, with all his knowledge of ground on the spot, understands very little of it from a military plan and De Lancey privately told me he was most completely ignorant of what a military plan should be … the great object with him is to gain an accurate report of a country, its roads, soil, rivers etc and the means it possesses of affording shelter for the army. He employs everybody at this.”

As commander of the Guides, Scovell was sent on these missions too. His engraver's craft had been further improved at Wycombe so his maps were pictures of neatness and precision. There was a spareness to his mapmaking too: no unwanted contours or detail, just the pattern of settlements and the roads connecting them. Above each route, the distance to the next village was noted, below it the number of hours required to march it: “3 Leagues, 4 Hours,” and so on.

Scovell's opportunities for exploration, however, were short-lived, for, as the army lay in encampments around Abrantes, Murray had other work in mind for him. On 15 June, under the QMG's orders, the captain made his way down to the quayside on Abrantes' River Tagus. He picked up one of the riverboats that plied Portugal's great river which, for half a dollar, would convey you to Lisbon comfortably seated, under the shade of a canopy.

Scovell's Guides were to be formed with the help of the Portuguese
army as well as the British. He needed the assistance of the ministry of war in Lisbon, a task he approached with a grim realism. “Colonel Murray has pursuaded me again to take the Corps of Guides, with a promise of endeavouring to procure me promotion,” Scovell wrote to Le Marchant at the end of May. “I give you my word I do it with great reluctance … if I get disappointed this time I think I shall give over soldiering and come home.”

Certainly the challenge facing Scovell might have seemed suited only to an incurable optimist or a fool. The Italian and Swiss remnants of his previous Guides were back in Portugal and were being joined by some Portuguese smugglers, Spanish ne'er-do-wells and Irish soldiers of fortune. Murray had made much of the fact that Scovell would have the assistance of eight junior officers in this new endeavor. But the lieutenants and cornets promised to supervise this polyglot parcel of rogues turned out to be a team of callow youths from Coimbra University. They were men of good Portuguese and Spanish families, no doubt about it. They could speak French fluently and most had some English too. But they did not have the slightest idea of soldiering, and it would fall to Scovell to educate them.

Scovell's reformed Guides were to be entrusted with tasks of the highest sensitivity: guiding the army through unfamiliar territory and carrying the commander's dispatches. Wellesley understood there were risks in entrusting his sensitive communications to the Guides. Colonel Murray had already made clear in writing the previous summer that “the officers are to be
very particular
as to the character of the men” (emphasis in original). Wellesley refused a French émigré a commission in the Corps on the grounds that he might be a double agent and “would have opportunities of acquiring and conveying to the enemy much useful information.” Ultimately, general Wellesley and the QMG believed that the loyalty of their messengers was best bought with silver coin, promptly paid and in good quantity. It was a mercenary troop and the General was under no illusion about the type of men who formed it, listing the qualities required of its officers as “intelligence, some honesty, and a knowledge of the Spanish and Portuguese languages and English or French.”

Scovell was now responsible for transforming these men of “some honesty” into a reliable, smart, self-confident corps as fast as possible. This would require training, uniforms and weaponry, in search of which
he was traveling to Lisbon. Just one month after writing to Le Marchant in despair, Scovell was throwing himself into his new project with vigor. There had been years of fruitless graft in the garrisons of Lewes, Derby and Wycombe, so he was thrilled to begin overcoming the many practical difficulties that faced his Corps. Reclining in his packet boat, he gazed at the lush countryside of the Tagus littoral and his spirits lifted. Even if Captain Scovell believed his new task was his last hope of ever achieving something in the profession of arms, he relished it, particularly as it simultaneously satisfied his passions for travel and culture. He described the passage to Lisbon as “a most delightful voyage.”

His riverboat looked much the same as they had in Roman times, a great lateen sail hung from the mast, just like that used by the Phoenician galleys. A flat bottom ensured the craft had the shallow draft needed to clear the river's sandbars and banks. It was an ancient rig, but it answered well enough for navigation of the Tagus. It sped Scovell the eighty miles downstream in just nineteen hours. He disembarked from this shady boat into the radiant light and pungent stench of an early June morning on the Lisbon quayside, ready to execute his mission.

While Scovell was in Lisbon, on 25 June, three French officers were embarking on an infinitely less pleasant odyssey not far across the Spanish border near Tordesillas. Accompanied by his two aides-de-camp, General Jean-Baptiste Franceschi rode toward a river ferry carrying vital dispatches from Marshal Soult to Joseph, king of Spain. Far from being a mere messenger though, Franceschi had commanded Soult's light cavalry division throughout the pursuit of John Moore to Corunna as well as during the previous month's near-disastrous campaign in northern Portugal.

In many ways, Franceschi personified the unusual qualities of Napoleon's officer corps. As a young man, he had never wanted to be in the army: quite the opposite, he had been an artist, a sculptor. When thousands of patriotic French had answered the cry of
“la patrie en danger”
*
just after the revolution, Franceschi had volunteered for the Paris “Artists' Company” and had gone to the front. Bobbing along in a sea of revolutionary ferment, he had progressed from infantry soldier to
artillery lieutenant, hussar officer and then aide to Soult in just five tumultuous campaigns.

Franceschi's flamboyant temperament made him well suited to the French cavalry. Among these men, the hardships of campaign or the possibility of death were born with humor, fatalism and a sense of honor. He had evidently considered that he was safe enough riding with an escort across this rebellious land. Marshal Soult was anxious, in any case, that King Joseph learn as quickly as possible of the terrible state of the army that had escaped the British in northern Portugal and crossed the Serra da Geres. It was probably a Spaniard who had seen Franceschi during a stopover that passed on word of the important traveler.

When the general and his two companions neared the river, they were ambushed. The guerrilla party reponsible was not large—some accounts say just eight men—led by a local tough nick-named
El Capucino,
the Friar. Any struggle was short-lived; perhaps the guerrillas succeeded in dismounting their victims before offering the choice of death or captivity. This offer of quarter was rare during such an attack, but
El Capuano
must have realized that this senior officer was a considerable prize.

Franceschi was initially taken to Zarza la Mayor, close to the Portuguese frontier. Several days after this capture, Major General Charles Stewart arrived in Zarza with a small escort. The adjutant general was charged with handling prisoners and, in Stewart's view, tapping them for intelligence. Since Franceschi was a Spanish prize, formalities had to be observed. Stewart could not remove the general from their custody, although he left this account of their interview:

Stewart remarked in his later history of the war that the French captive had been carrying important dispatches. Whether he discovered this at the time of their melancholy conversation but could not induce the Spanish to part with them, or whether he did not even think to ask, is unclear. What is certain is that he returned to Wellesley's camp in
possession of nothing other than his insights into the French national character. The two long letters to King Joseph that had been in Franceschi's care were sent to the Spanish war ministry in the south. Protocol being what it was, these messages had to be copied before they could be handed to the British minister there. The Anglo-Spanish alliance was still tinged with mutual suspicion, for the two countries were old enemies that had been fighting as recently as 1807, and it was only Napoleon's invasion of Iberia that had led them to set aside their differences in the face of a common foe. The British representative relayed the copies of Soult's letters to Wellesley on 9 July, describing them as “infinitely curious in various respects,” and the commander of British forces finally received them several days later, almost three weeks after they were written.

Marshal Soult's dispatches to Napoleon's brother, King Joseph, ran to dozens of pages and were indeed packed with information. One painted the bleakest picture of his operations in northwest Spain, noting the many factors that led to “an increase day by day in the number of our enemies, and make the war in this country most murderous, infinitely unpleasant, and without any end in sight.” Soult needed huge sums of money to provision his army and cover the many expenses of occupation. He also told the king that he was moving southeast, closer to Wellesley's next intended area of operations. Even so, the time it had taken to get hold of the dispatches and the limits of Soult's own knowledge about wider French deployments meant that this “infinitely curious” mail could not dictate Wellesley's next strategic moves.

The British commander shared Stewart's sympathy with the plight of the captured French general, but there was nothing they could do to prevent his maltreatment by the Spanish. Animated by patriotic fervor, Britain's allies had treated their prisoners lamentably, if indeed they had consented to take them at all. The Spanish had broken an agreement to send home the corps captured at Bailén the previous year, confining the unfortunate French troops to prison hulks or barren islands in the Bay of Cadiz where epidemics carried them off in the thousands. Wellesley believed that the rules of war and civilized behavior should have dictated a different attitude, particularly toward Franceschi, and tried by various methods to arrange his exchange, send him money and alleviate his situation. The Spanish, however, kept him in a series of dark dungeons, subjected him to regular beatings and provided only measly
rations. The following year Franceschi became ill with yellow fever and died in captivity. This kind of event contributed to the increasingly grim reputation of Spain among French troops. In other campaigns they had marched across Italy or Austria to be greeted by deputations of local worthies who, anxious to avoid too much unpleasantness, even presented them with the keys to their towns. In Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, they had found that many townspeople would rather fight to the death than yield to the invaders, and the countryside was awash with bands of murderous brigands. One French general wrote, “I shall always remember how I was afflicted with great anxieties; every day saw the murder of several Frenchmen, and I travelled over this assassin's countryside as warily as if it were a volcano.”