The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (14 page)

By late June 1809, George Scovell completed his mission to Lisbon. He had arranged uniforms for his men: brown jackets (like those worn by the Portuguese light infantry) with red collars and cuffs, trimmed with black lace, as well as leather helmets crested with a comb of fur like those of the British light dragoons. It was not as splendid as some of the getups of the French
guides
and
eclaireurs,
*
who had a truly elite status in the some of the generals HQs, but it was distinctive enough. The mixture of
clothing demonstrated the Anglo-Portuguese parentage of the corps, underlining the common anti-French cause that united the two nations.

Throughout the first half of July, Scovell stayed behind with his men at the camp of Abrantes while Wellesley and the main army struck out toward the Spanish general Cuesta, intent on joining the two armies prior to bringing the French to a general action. Scovell's task in the meantime was to teach his Guides the basics of mounted soldiering, even if they were destined to be posted in small packets around the army and unlikely would ever act as a united force on the battlefield. Many, no doubt, had to be taught even how to stay on the horses that Scovell had bought them. There was sword drill and some basic instruction in maneuvering. Some of the training must have been designed with the very specific tasks of the Guides in mind. Officers had to be taught how to prepare reconnaissance reports for the British generals they were to be attached to, and all of the men had to learn how the British system of military communications would work. Relays were to be used to carry orders across long distances. They would be positioned at particular inns or farmhouses and each packet of dispatches was to have a ticket on which its progress along this chain would be noted. This way Scovell, Murray and even Wellesley would be able to monitor the men's activities and, in the event of mail going missing, could detect fairly precisely where and at what time it happened.

On 19 July, Scovell and the Anglo-Portuguese army's latest squadron set off in Wellesley's tracks into New Castille along the higher Tagus valley, fairly much along the shortest line between Lisbon and Madrid. This was difficult country of many hills carved about by deep river courses.

It must have been with great pride that the commandant of the Corps of Guides led his hundred or so troopers through spectacular scenery toward their rendezvous with headquarters. There were familiar faces in the ranks, some of the Italians that had endured those nerve-wracking hours on the quayside of Corunna, and there were new ones. All had been united in the brown uniform of his new command. A clatter of hooves and jingling of the men's accoutrements announced their progress. During a journey that took more than one week, the main army had once again moved farther forward into Spain.

Since leaving Abrantes, Wellesley had marched his twenty-one thousand troops toward the Army of Estremadura, one of the Spanish forces that had survived the first two years of campaigning and was lurking in corners of the country unconquered by the French. The British general wanted to join them and move toward Madrid. This threat to King Joseph's seat of government would then force the French to unite forces in defense of their capital, thus easing the pressure on those areas that had still not fallen under French control. This strategy was similar to General Sir John Moore's advance at the end of 1808, a sally into northern Spain that many said bought southern Iberia another year's freedom from invasion. Wellesley's thrust, seven months later, took advantage of a more favorable strategic climate. Napoleon had left Spain early in 1809, with thousands of picked troops of his old guard and much heavy cavalry, leaving his forces in Spain without a dominating leader and scattered more thinly. However, Wellesley's relations with Britain's supposed allies were to prove as poor as Moore's.

On 10 July the British commander had set out to meet the leader of this Army of Estremadura, General Cuesta, only to get lost on the way, a mishap Scovell must surely have thanked the heavens that neither he nor his Guides had anything to do with. Once he had met the Spanish general, Wellesley was exasperated to find him choleric, obstinate and apparently determined to assert his independence from British orders at all times. The only immediate benefit from the junction with Cuesta's army was that it provided Wellesley with a healthier flow of intelligence. He was now able to appreciate they were about to take on a French army of around forty-five thousand men. Faced with the problems of coordinating his troops, King Joseph had gone forward from Madrid to take personal command. It is a measure of the success of Wellesley's gamble that his Anglo-Spanish force had covered two-thirds of the distance between the Portuguese border and Madrid by the time the French had to assemble their forces at Talavera de la Reyna in mid-July.

Much to Scovell's regret, his Mounted Guides did not reach the army until the general action sought by Wellesley was almost over on 28 July. The British commander had deployed his forces in a defensive line three miles long running north from Talavera to the Sierra de Segurilla. Geography made it very hard for the French to go around either end of this line. Wellesley's northern flank was protected by the rocky hills of
the sierra, and its southern end was anchored on the city of Talavera astride the great River Tagus. Even the central section of his line afforded some advantages to the defender, for there was a little brook running north to south that was difficult to cross in parts. Where the British and Spanish armies met (about one mile north of the city), Wellesley had strengthened this formidable natural position by ordering the construction of an earthen redoubt containing several cannon.

The French had assaulted the Anglo-Spanish defenses during the twenty-eighth and been driven off. Both sides had been almost too eager to fight, for despite the passing of sixteen years in which the British had been the leading light in orchestrating and subsidizing Europe's anti-French coalitions, the two antongonists' armies had come face-to-face only on a handful of previous occasions. One French corps had attacked precipitately on the evening of the twenty-seventh, and the British First Division had mounted an attack at one moment on the twenty-eighth. Without having been ordered to do so, they rushed across the brook that marked the front of Wellesley's position and received a bloody check. The price for this almost savage determination to lock horns with the old enemy had been heavy casualties on both sides: 7,268 French and 5,365 British.

Despite the losses, in his dispatch to London Wellesley promptly declared a victory, reasoning that the Anglo-Spanish force had withstood a determined assault by the conquerers of Europe. They had also inflicted greater casualties upon the French. But it was the kind of triumph that Wellesley had no desire to repeat: it was too costly for too little strategic gain.

The army's officers knew that the butcher's bill Wellesley paid at Talavera had resulted in part from the amateurishness already detected in the Oporto campaign. In addition to the heavy losses taken as a result of the 1st Division's unauthorized advance (including the Guards) on the twenty-eighth, there had been incidents of British units opening fire on one another by mistake on the twenty-seventh, and of the army's followers having fled the battlefield, joining several thousand scattering Spanish troops. The principal lesson Wellesley drew from Talavera was that there was absolutely no point in cooperating further with the Spanish.

As he pulled back from the battlefield, Wellesley saw an opportunity to seek a smaller battle, at much more favorable odds: a way to cap
the campaign with something altogether more clear-cut than Talavera's messy outcome. He knew from Marshal Soult's letters captured with General Franceschi that this body had begun moving southeast from its position on Portugal's northern border toward his own area of operations. Subsequent reports from the Spanish peasantry had confirmed the arrival of French troops just a couple of marches distant from the line of British communications back into Portugal. General Wellesley assumed that Soult's corps (the 2nd, which had survived May's campaign in northern Portugal) would still be in a parlous state after its narrow escape across the mountains. But just a few days into his march, on 3 August, Wellesley had to abandon his plan.

A couple of days earlier, some Spanish guerrillas in Avila had detained a monk traveling by one of the dusty roads in that corner of the country. What had aroused their suspicions? An implausible manner? Perhaps a spoken Castillian that showed a little too much education, or was it an unlikely traveling itinerary? With drawn weapons they searched the man thoroughly and found that he was carrying a message from King Joseph to Marshal Soult. It may safely be assumed that the messenger, an
afrancesado
or Spanish collaborator, was swiftly put to death and his precious package sent to General Cuesta without delay. Fortunately for Wellesley, relations between the two men had not yet deteriorated to the point that Cuesta did not realize the import of this windfall and inform the British commander of it immediately.

Joseph's message urged Soult to move rapidly to cut off Wellesley's line of withdrawal. The arrival of this intercepted letter caused consternation at British headquarters because it blew apart their earlier assumptions about French deployments. It revealed that Soult was not just in command of his own battered corps of eighteen thousand, but also of Marshal Ney's—a combined strength of thirty-thousand men. There were only eighteen thousand British under Wellesley's command, so it was only by the capture of Joseph's secret messenger that a disaster had been averted.

Scovell was back at headquarters by the time this dramatic intelligence effectively ended the British campaign of 1809. He resumed his many duties mapping, exploring and generally involving himself in the business of communications. His Guides were scattered in their small packets across the army, in fours or fives to each division, and then on
to the wayhouses and stopping points on the stages that connected these forces.

By 3rd September, British headquarters had been established at Badajoz, a fortified Spanish town close to the border with Portugal, and the army was withdrawing itself from active operations for the remainder of the campaigning season. Even in August the army found itself facing considerable supply difficulties in Spain, which would only intensify with the onset of autumn as the fields became bare. Wellesley knew that if he was to feed his troops and their horses he would have to take them back, closer to the Portuguese harbors through which they would be sustained for the winter.

As for the headquarters itself, its arrival at each new location during the dying months of 1809 followed a familiar ritual. Firstly an AQMG or a deputy assistant, accompanied by a Guide, the mayor or some other worthy, would locate suitable premises. Large farms, convents, or the mayor's own residence might all answer for the purpose. The staff officer would then go around the new HQ and its surrounding buildings, chalking the names of particular officers or staff on the doors. When the headquarter's baggage arrived on its carts and beasts of burden, the servants would then begin to unload effects into their preassigned quarters. There was not a vast disparity between the retinues of the highest and lowest in this entourage. Scovell traveled with his servant, Healey, and two horses. His commanding general eschewed grandeur in the field, making do usually with half a dozen servants of the human species and seven or eight of the equine.

The day after his arrival at Badajoz, Wellesley was created Viscount Wellington in honor of Talavera. This transformation from a vaguely familiar to a household name happened at an appropriate time, since it was during these last months of 1809 that his decisions about the future of the army under his command would ensure his entry into the pantheon of great military leaders.

When granted his peerage, Wellington had been campaigning for five months, enough time for the army and the general to know one another better. In action on the Douro or Talavera, many regimental officers had noted the general's superb grip of his men as well as his air of calm even at times of crisis.

“I was particularly struck by the style of [his] order, so decided, so manly, and breathing no doubt as to the repulse of any attack; it confirmed confidence … he has nothing of the truncheon about him; nothing full-mouthed, important, or fussy: his orders on the field are all short, quick, clear, and to the purpose,” one young captain wrote.

Wellington had also cast his merciless gaze on the army and spotted many of his generals for the plodders or incompetents that they were. Perhaps it is unsurprising that in the case of the army's adjutant general, Major General Charles Stewart, five months had sufficed to convince Wellington of his failings. In addition to being an overdressed buffoon, Stewart's desire to question prisoners was too important a matter to be overlooked, particularly since episodes like his interview with General Franceschi. Lord Wellington later gave this account of a furious row:

Wellington had gambled correctly in thinking that Stewart would do almost anything to avoid being sent home in disgrace, and rather than simply dismissing him—Stewart was Lord Castlereagh's brother, after all—Wellington tried to sideline him from any significant military business. Stewart may not have been bright, but by September 1809 even he realized that his commander was not interested in seeking his opinion or even talking to him very much. The exacting task Wellington had in mind for him was the weekly adding up of soldiers in the Army, based on returns from the different regiments. Stewart wrote from Badajoz to his brother, Lord Castlereagh, complaining: