The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (15 page)

Wellington's “Stewart method” was copied in various departments of headquarters and divisions of the army. In most cases, though, it seems to have been achieved without reducing the generals in question to tears. The general quickly spotted the talentless officers, but rather than risk scandal, Wellington allowed them to serve on in some posts, and simply made sure that underneath this titular commander there was someone he could rely upon.

Affairs were happy enough in the quarter master general's branch. Both George Murray, its head, and William De Lancey, his deputy, fitted Wellington's bill down to the ground: they were active, handsome men of good family. The QMG branch thereby became his principal organization for getting things done.

While Wellington used his more zealous assistant or deputy assistant QMGs ceaselessly, and understood their professional merits, he could not necessarily conceive of them as the best company at mealtimes, or indeed as the stuff of which future generals were made. Those who wished to climb in the army hierarchy required both a modicum of military competence and breeding, in his view. “If there is to be any influence in the disposal of military patronage, in aid of military merits,” Wellington asked rhetorically of one of his correspondents in London, “can there be any in our army so legitimate as that of family connection, fortune and influence in the country?” By these criteria, Murray and De Lancey were sitting pretty. There were also the young men sent out to learn generalship at his feet, the aides-de-camp. Their numbers included sons of several of the greatest Tory landowning families of the day. As for someone like Scovell, his only “family connection” was with the Lancashire property of his wife Mary's clan. Only through ceaseless dedication to the organization of headquarters and perhaps valor on the battlefield might he be able to bridge the chasm between his actual social position and the kind Wellington thought desirable for promotion.

Mealtimes were the main ritual of the day at headquarters and revealed much about the staff's internal relations. The staff officer sent
ahead to find quarters always had to make sure that there was somewhere suitable for the general's table.

The mood of the assembly varied according to the news he had read in the London newspapers and the general state of the war. Earlier that summer, he had been in high spirits as the Austrians battered Napoleon at the Battle of Aspern-Essling. By September, though, Napoleon had turned the tables on the Hapsburgs, who had been forced to accept an unfavorable peace. The long-awaited British military expedition in northern Europe, a landing in Holland, had turned into the usual fiasco. They had failed to cause any noticeable diversion in support of the Austrians and the navy had returned the army to southern England with thousands of its men dying of malaria. In London, the prime minister had suffered a stroke and the government was in imminent danger of collapse.

The usual coterie around at dinner was drawn largely from his aides-de-camp although others, including Scovell, were often present. Those who received these dining-table morsels of bad news from their general were most often the ruddy-cheeked young scions of Britain's great political and aristocratic families serving as his ADCs. Wellington sometimes called them “my boys,” and like all proud fathers looked to them for a reflection of his own youthful perfection. He was already becoming estranged from his wife, Kitty, and his own children seemed to fascinate him less than those of his military family.

FitzRoy Somerset, the youngest son of the duke of Beaufort, became his firm favorite. When headquarters reached Badajoz the twenty-one-year-old captain still had little idea of campaigning and no formal military education. He owed everything to birth and interest. His position on the staff had been obtained on the recommendation of the duke of Richmond, who wrote to Wellington that Somerset was “an active and intelligent fellow and is anxious to go on service.” The commander of forces could hardly refuse, since he had been working for the duke, who was Ireland secretary, until shortly before the campaign. Although Somerset had been commissioned into the army five years before, he had been on almost continuous leave, precisely the kind of practice that fed the calls for reform of the officer corps.

Although dilatory about his military duties prior to arriving in the
peninsula, Somerset had acquired the engaging manner and ready humor indispensable for survival as the youngest of nine brothers. His family regarded him as nice but somewhat hopeless, a background similar to Wellington's, who had also been eclipsed for years by his older brothers and whose mother had written dismissively, “Anyone can see he has not the cut of a soldier.” There was another similarity more obvious to those dining around the commander's table. Somerset's hooked nose and arresting eyes suggested a young Wellington. His thick, tousled hair and good nature readily aroused a paternal love.

Like his new patron, Somerset was no fool either. He was kind, considerate, good at languages and very discreet. He was soon acting as private secretary to the general in numerous delicate matters of politics and intelligence. Somerset's charm won over even those whom he had eclipsed. FitzRoy's original commission had been into the 4th Dragoons, Scovell's old regiment, which was commanded by his older brother Lord Edward Somerset. While serving as adjutant of the 4th, Scovell had gotten to know Edward and the Somerset family. He and FitzRoy were already corresponding during the captain's studies at Wycombe. The young Somerset seems to have aroused some sort of paternal love in Scovell too. It was becoming clear by this time that he and Mary could only ever have children of their own by some miracle. Young FitzRoy's perfect manners and his evident rapport with Lord Wellington allowed him to become the vehicle for a sort of vicarious ambition on Scovell's part.

So the man who apparently had nothing in the race for advancement now had a precious thing in the young FitzRoy Somerset, a connection who was becoming privy to the commander's great secrets and had his complete confidence. The wheel of fortune was beginning to turn and Scovell's vast investment in a cavalry commission years earlier was beginning to pay dividends. Young Somerset may have had every advantage in life, but he had evidently seen Scovell's talents for what they were and, when the time came, would be ready to share with him the toughest intelligence problem facing his commander.

As these relationships moved into alignment, the greater scheme of military operations that Wellington would pursue for the next two years also became clearer, at least to those in the know.

In Badajoz, Wellington had time to take stock of his army's situation. Since news had reached him of Austria's defeat by Napoleon, it was clear that in 1810 the entire weight of the French military machine could once again be turned against him. Britain could not afford an army capable of meeting 100,000 Frenchmen in open battle. The Spanish army could not be relied upon in any way at all. The French, he deduced, could soon sweep aside the Spanish regular armies and fall upon him with considerable strength. Since he had no intention of engaging such a superior enemy force, he would probably have to withdraw to Lisbon and embark the British army. Probably. As he considered the ignominy of a second Corunna, alternative strategies formed in his mind.

If Spanish cooperation was of dubious value, a quite different picture had emerged with the Portuguese. Since July, Marshal William Beresford had been retraining these forces with the help of dozens of seconded British officers. Scovell's classmate from the Royal Military College, Henry Hardinge, had joined this effort. He was serving as deputy to the quarter master general of the Portuguese army, Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin D'Urban,
*
another Wycombite. Their reports to Wellington were sufficiently encouraging that Wellington decided (early in 1810) to incorporate a Portuguese brigade into each division of British infantry.

On 20 October 1809 Wellington gave secret orders to his chief engineer, Colonel Fletcher, to begin the construction of a series of defensive lines just behind Lisbon. Fletcher was to be given enormous resources of labor, materials and cash to create a system of forts, ditches, inundations and other obstacles, the lines of Torres Vedras. Wellington reasoned that the farther the French advanced into Portugal, the longer their lines of supply would be and the shorter his own. If he combined these defenses with guerrilla action and devastation of what was already a very poor countryside, the French would be starving by the time they reached the Torres Vedras defenses. Their logistic predicament would either force them into a precipitate and extremely costly assault or leave them melting away.

In order to delay the French entry into Portugal, and make the stakes as high as possible, Wellington needed to defend the two natural gateways into the country. The northern one led from Castille across a barren
heathland in the Portuguese Beira down, southwest, through hills to Lisbon. The southern route went from Badajoz in Spanish Estremadura, across the Alemtejo plain to the mouth of the Tagus just south of Lisbon. Each of these gateways to Portugal was guarded by a powerful fortress: Almeida in the north and Elvas in the south. Laid out according to eighteenth-century principles, these places had been surrounded by deep ditches and armed with numerous walled bastions bristling with heavy guns, making the capture a major undertaking. Almeida and Elvas each had its twin on the Spanish side of the frontier, namely Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. Each of these places was somewhat less strong than its Portuguese counterpart. At the end of 1809, all four fortresses were still in the hands of their Portuguese and Spanish masters. Wellington had greater confidence about the survival of those on the western side of the frontier, since their Portuguese defenders had been stiffened with British officers and were under his control. While he hoped the Spanish could hold up the French for a while at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, he was less inclined to make any great effort to assist in their defense.

As he prepared his defense in depth at Torres Vedras (about one year before he would use it), Wellington also had to give urgent consideration to the issue of early warning for the border fortresses. If he knew sufficiently far in advance of an imminent French offensive and which of the two major invasion routes the French were taking, he would enjoy enormous advantages. However, during the recriminations that had followed Talavera, he reported, “At present I have no intelligence whatsoever … as the Spaniards have defeated all my attempts to obtain any by stopping those who I send out to make enquiries.” The British commander knew he must develop his own network of spies and other methods for obtaining information.

In the autumn of 1809 and the following winter, he therefore sent out several British “exploring officers” who scouted no-man's-land in uniform alone or with one or two orderlies. They ingratiated themselves with the Spanish authorities in the border region, observed what was going on and gathered reports of French movements. Brave as they were, their grasp of languages was generally no greater than the average officer of their island race. Locals were needed to recruit and operate a spy network. Contact was made with Spanish civilians willing to relay reports and generous sums were promised: 100 dollars per month in one
case (with supplementary payments of four dollars for each report received); £500 being assigned to the establishment of a circle of spies in another province.

While committing bags of silver to this goal, Wellington and the staff were predisposed to view any intelligence it produced through spectacles tinted by their unfortunate experience with Spanish and Portuguese reports. “Spaniards more frequently report what they wish than what is true, as we all know to our cost,” Major William Warre told his father in a letter, and Wellington himself noted: “It is most difficult to form any judgement from the Spanish and Portuguese accounts of the strength of any French corps; and I generally form my estimates of their strength, not only from these accounts, but from intercepted letters.”

Access to his enemy's mail was critical. Wellington was beginning to realize that it presented him with the most valuable form of intelligence. Not only were these missives penned by the enemy's commanders themselves and therefore free of Iberian exaggeration, but they also might give warning of a French action
before
it happened. The great majority of his spies and indeed his own observation officers, on the other hand, could only report the march of a French division once it had begun.

The first task therefore was to get the guerrillas to hand over captured French dispatches to agents of the Anglo-Portuguese army rather than to the Spanish, thereby speeding up the whole process and keeping it free from Allied interference. In part, this could be achieved simply by circulating the word that handsome amounts of silver would be placed in the hands of anyone providing such trophies, but it would also require the British to form close relationships with some of the guerrilla commanders. As 1809 slipped into 1810, all of this work was under way. The staff in Portugal soon enjoyed a good flow of intelligence since its native officers could pass easily in the border area, and some of Scovell's Guides could also be sent to meet agents or their messengers and convey their information directly to headquarters.

It was in winter quarters 1809–1810 that Wellington laid the foundations of his intelligence network and, more importantly, the strategy it was designed to serve. During the next two years events would reveal the wisdom of his calculations.