The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (23 page)

Wellington could not have been more fortunate as to Curtis's location, geographic and social. Salamanca was the ideal place to gain warning of any great project of Marmont's three or four days before it might bear fruit on the border. Being professor of astronomy and natural history at the university, as well as rector of the Irish College, Curtis also had an entrée into the higher level of society. When Marmont was in Salamanca, he frequently entertained the town's grandees at his table. From some of these contacts, Curtis might learn something about the marshal's plans.

These agents' reports, combined with those of exploring officers and deciphered letters, were consumed voraciously by Wellington in his Frenada headquarters. Scovell worked away on his deciphering, and Somerset received some of the agent reports from a Guide coming to the
door, but only the commander himself obtained the intelligence picture in its entirety. He guarded this prerogative jealously, and by the autumn of 1811 was becoming quite nervous about sharing his knowledge with others, lest it lead the French to find his agents. The commandant of northern Portugal, one General Silveira, needed to be kept in the picture about French movements but, as Wellington noted in a letter to Beresford, the Portuguese officer had aroused his anger because “the intelligence received from Salamanca by General Silveira, and forwarded by him to the Portuguese government, from which papers it is copied in the English papers. Our correspondents there will certainly be discovered if this practice is continued.”

On 15 October, Wellington and his staff momentarily forgot any anxieties they may have had when Frenada's little central square echoed English voices bearing some unexpected and quite remarkable news. General Regnaud, the governor of Ciudad Rodrigo, had been captured by Don Julian Sanchez.

The day before, Regnaud had ridden out of the fort with a small escort of cavalry. The tedium of his situation was such that he had wanted to take some exercise riding around the little plain of Rodrigo. A party of guerrillas was lurking in the trees not five hundred yards from the gate. They had gone there to carry off as many of the garrison's cattle as they could find, a brigandry that had assumed a patriotic legitimacy, since it was designed to reduce the supplies available to the French. Seeing the governor's party make its way down the steep slope from the city walls to the river and then cross the Roman bridge over the Agueda, the guerrillas had decided that the odds were favorable for combat. Regnaud, two of his staff and a good many cows were taken.

Regnaud must have thought himself a lost man when he was bound and carried off by the guerrillas. Who indeed would not have wondered whether they would torture him, whether they would finish him off with a knife or a shot to the head? He had been delivered first to the HQ of General Carlos D'Espagne, commander of a small Spanish force attached to Wellington's army. This release from the custody of the guerrillas brought no relief—far from it—for D'Espagne had first wanted to shoot Regnaud. The British, however, prevailed upon D'Espagne to hand over his prize, and Wellington thought it only right that Regnaud should receive decent hospitality at Frenada. The governor, after all, had
become a British prisoner, unlike the poor General Franceschi. The captured Frenchman was invited to dinner.

Wellington's table in the Frenada headquarters was not a large one, so Regnaud joined about a dozen British officers as they sat down for their meal at five in the evening. Major General Charles Stewart was there, as was Scovell, Somerset and several of the commander's young ADCs. Stewart commiserated with their guest for his bad luck. The adjutant general noted “his misfortunes were borne with the utmost philosophy and good humor,” and there was every reason why they should be.

There must have been several times between his capture and this meal when Regnaud feared immediate execution, yet here he was in the warmth of Wellington's headquarters consuming a tasty roast and feeling the inner warmth of the fine claret. Finding himself in such elevated and civilized company, relieved beyond measure, the governor became most talkative. Scovell's presence at the table was assured by his superb grasp of French and his need to learn as much as possible about the hidden world of the enemy camp. Any detail Regnaud let slip about the name of some brigade commander or the jealousies between two generals might prove significant in the deciphering of dispatches. One of the keys to breaking strong ciphers, Scovell had scribbled in his Conradus notebook, is “knowing
well
what is going on” (emphasis in original).

Wellington naturally led this gentle cross-examination; it was his table, after all, and his own French, polished decades before at a military school in Anger, was extremely good. After several meals in this company, Scovell had learned much. He summarized it in his journal:

The ebullience at headquarters resulting from Regnaud's capture brought its own bitter aftertaste two days later. The French had launched a hunt
for spies, with exactly the consequence that Wellington had feared. Father Curtis had been arrested in Salamanca. Eventually he obtained his release, but he remained under suspicion by the French for the rest of the campaign, having to rely on ever more elaborate methods to get his messages out. Wellington's spy in Ciudad Rodrigo immediately fled the city, fearing an imminent arrest.

Just before the end of that month, however, a happy equilibrium was restored at headquarters. Lieutenant Colonel John Grant, who had disappeared while on exploring duties in Estremadura some weeks before, presented himself. He had been taken by the French, but was rescued by a guerrilla commander called Temprano while taking exercise outside his prison in Talavera. It was precisely the kind of guerrilla daring that made the French look flat-footed and cheered the company around Wellington's dinner table greatly. News from Lieutenant General Rowland Hill, commanding Anglo-Portuguese forces to the south, was also most encouraging. He had attacked and routed a French division at Arroyo de Molinos, leading Napoleon to recall its commander in disgrace.

At the end of October a ciphered message from Marmont to General Foy was captured and brought in to Frenada that proved particularly interesting in light of Regnaud's table talk.

Marmont and King Joseph had fallen into dispute. Foraging closer and closer to Madrid in search of supplies, the Army of Portugal had incurred the king's displeasure by raiding storehouses earmarked for other troops. Marmont wrote to Foy, “As a general principle you must not obey any order given to you in the name of the King, if it runs counter to my stated aims.” The marshal added, “I am going to Madrid and will spend two days there in the hope of enlightening the King on the conduct his true interest dictates he should display toward the French army.”

Wellington was evidently thrilled at receiving this deciphered message. It gave some inkling that the cooperation between Marmont and his fellow generals that had thwarted British plans since June was not necessarily going to remain a fact of life. It was also the kind of high-level gossip that he loved. Writing to the secretary of war in London on 13 November, he enclosed a copy of Marmont's letter, “which shows how these gentry are going on; in fact each Marshal is the natural enemy
of the King and of his neighboring Marshal.” Mindful of the risks to his sources of intelligence, Wellington added, “Pray take care that this letter is not made public, as it would disclose that we have the key of the cipher.”

The key, in fact, was already changing. Ever careful, Marmont's staff made sure that new cipher tables were circulated whenever possible. When Regnaud's successor as governor of Ciudad Rodrigo arrived on 30 October (escorted by an entire division of infantry), he most likely brought new codes with him, for when the Allies captured a message bound for the fortress a couple of weeks later, it could not be deciphered from the existing Army of Portugal key. The changed cipher was based on the same 150-character table, but the meanings of each number had been rearranged.

For weeks, a small number of officers had been setting their brains to the methodical elimination of possibilities required to make out each letter, word and then sentence in code. Scovell had been doing it, but so had Somerset, and even Wellington himself, all of them trying to solve the puzzle together. By November, with changes being made to the Army of Portugal cipher, Scovell found himself increasingly responsible for the effort. The duties of the army commander and his military secretary were too varied and too consuming to allow much time for chasing after these riddles. Scovell had shown great aptitude and more and more he became the master of this work. Wellington increasingly looked to him for prompt solutions to these vital puzzles. Scovell relished his newfound position.

Deciphered by Scovell, the message brought in mid-November produced intelligence of another mission to replenish the fortress. Wellington prepared a military response, a kind of ambush in which the Light Division would be used to surprise the relief, but the French were becoming cannier. When they had escorted the new governor into Ciudad Rodrigo at the end of October, they made sure nobody was allowed to leave Salamanca for forty-eight hours before the column departed, barring the way to any tinker or muleteer concealing a scribbled warning to Wellington from Father Curtis. Marmont's staff also had its own spies (usually itinerant Spaniards) and they seem to have detected British preparations. On 27 November, Wellington abandoned his mission, noting in a letter to London, “I think it probable that they will have
heard of our movements; and if they entertained the intention of moving a convoy to Ciudad Rodrigo, they will now abandon it.”

Scovell however was thinking of ways to turn the French army's secret writing to British advantage. He was in possession of the new cipher. What if they also obtained the services of one of the captured
afrancesados
and used him and the code to get a false message into Ciudad Rodrigo? He noted in his journal, “The French figured Cipher is a very mean one. I have suggested that it might be employed by us with effect against the Garrison.”

The idea was certainly ingenious: a fake letter in the Army of Portugal cipher might be used in conjunction with some
ruse de guerre,
such as sending troops dressed as Frenchmen to one of the gates at a predesignated time, so penetrating the defenses without a costly siege. Ingenious, but not to Lord Wellington's taste. That type of trick was the sort of thing the French and Spanish got up to, but it would not answer for him. He was already meditating plans for a new attack on the fortress with his powerful siege guns and several divisions of infantry.

As the temperatures dropped and November became December, the army was put into winter quarters. Divisions and brigades were broken down and sent to the little villages of the Beira Baixa hill country. There the men and horses could sleep in barns or farmhouses while their chief considered his plan of war for 1812.

CHAPTER NINE
T
HE
A
TTACK ON
C
IUDAD
R
ODRIGO
, J
ANUARY
1812