The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (24 page)

D
uring the dying days of 1811, Wellington's officers were making the most of the lull in military activities. On many a December's morning they could be seen setting off from Frenada or Almeida in their undress coats and fur-lined caps. They slung fowling pieces over their shoulders and bounced along to the pleasing rhythm of cantering hooves and panting dogs, searching out the hares, foxes and any number of game birds to be found in the quieter folds of this wilderness. A gentleman could hardly hope for better sport. Wellington, who liked nothing more than a hard ride of twenty miles on a bracing December's day, himself hunted the Portuguese foxes in the traditional English manner, with hounds baying and horns blaring.

Since the long evenings in familiar company dragged, there was much reciprocal entertaining, the officers riding from one smokey little Portuguese village to its neighbor, where some rough-hewn peasant's table groaned under all manner of delicacies procured by generous payments
of silver dollars. To help fill the nights they got up to the sort of entertainments that recalled the country houses of their youth. A wrecked chapel on the outskirts of Fuente Guinaldo was fitted with painted scenery and soon echoed to Shakespeare's words as the young officers of the Light Division put on their production of
Henry IV.

While daily sport and leisure continued, Wellington was already considering his next campaign, and he kept a small number of officers on the staff busy compiling every scrap of information they received about the dispositions of the French army. Colonel George Murray had become the general's right hand in these and other matters. Early criticism of him during the 1809 operations in northern Portugal had given way to a much more positive impression. One of Colonel Le Marchant's correspondents in the peninsula informed those back at Wycombe, “Nothing can be more gentlemanlike in every instance than Colonel M.: I find that whole Army giving him credit for ability.”

Captain Edward Cocks, one of those quick to judge Murray, had been able to remove himself from staff duties and expressed the customary disdain of fighting soldiers for those who remained in such appointments: “A Staff man is not much with secret till he gets pretty high in his department. Colonel Murray may have the key to the great strategic movement of the campaign but your Deputy Assistants have little more to do than to look out for encampments with regard to water and forage and chalk doors for General officers.”

Notwithstanding these views, by the end of 1811 it had become clear to many an ambitious officer that an attachment to Lord Wellington's staff could be most advantageous. No less a personage than William, the prince of Orange, had appeared in the late summer to boost the bloodline of the general's corps of ADCs. On hearing of Orange's imminent arrival, FitzRoy Somerset had written home, “We understand that a great many amateurs intend to favor us with their company.” The duke of Richmond's son, Lord March, who had been an ADC for more than one year, became the prince of Orange's firm friend. Both of these handsome youngsters loomed large in Wellington's affections, eclipsed only by Somerset. Even a bad cold on Lord March's part caused Wellington to set pen to paper, telling the young peer's mother, the duchess of Richmond, “He is really a fine fellow; and you may depend upon my taking as much care of him … as if he were my own son.”
Wellington's solicitude in the case of this particular ADC was doubtless connected with his desire to treat the duchess as he would have done his own son's mother.
*

Some on the staff believed Wellington's favoritism toward aristocrats stemmed from boundless personal ambition rather than disinterested affection. “You may suppose the Puff is not without its object,” Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gordon wrote home, explaining a favorable mention given to the callow prince of Orange in Wellington's dispatches. That must be so, Gordon reasoned, since Wellington “has no idea of gratitude, favor, or affection, and cares not for anyone however much he may owe to him or find him useful.” This brutal verdict on the general's “private character” was given by an officer who described himself in the same paragraph as someone who “could not desire to be on a better footing with Lord W. in every sense of the word.”

For someone like Henry Hardinge, whose daring exploits had attracted the commander's notice, it became vital to remain in Portugal at all hazards, ignoring any chance of leave as this influx of aristocratic “amateurs” meant new competition for Wellington's attention. As someone whose prospects were far less rosy than these handsome young gents', the same lesson clearly applied to Scovell.

Those who were latecomers to this military ensemble found that only virtuoso performance would get them heard by Wellington or Murray. One acute observer noted: “The officers in the lower branches of the Staff are sharp-set, hungry, and anxious to get on, and make the most of every thing and have a view even in their civilities … there is much obsequious time serving conduct to any one who is on office, or is thought to have a word to say to Lord Wellington.” Scovell, at least, could rise a little above this, for he was now the veteran of several campaigns and being entrusted with secret work by the general.

His spirits were further lifted by the appearance at Frenada of John Le Marchant. He was newly promoted to major general and was going to take over command of a brigade of Wellington's heavy cavalry. Having left the classrooms of the Royal Military College behind, Le Marchant wasted no time applying his ideas in the field. Soon after his arrival, Le Marchant
learned that his beloved wife, Mary, had died while delivering their eighth child. The general's family and friends stepped in, urging him not to return from service since the opportunity in Iberia could be the making of him. Le Marchant resolved to stay with his brigade despite this terrible family news, thus displaying the kind of professional zeal that overcame any prejudice Wellington may have had against such a reformer.

Wellington had to think carefully over his next gambit in Frenada. He knew that there was little point launching a siege of Ciudad Rodrigo while Marmont or Dorsenne could come to the garrison's relief, and the British would find themselves witnessing a repeat of September's French concentration. He needed to know where each division of these armies was and how long it would take them to march toward Rodrigo. From this he could calculate when his enemies could achieve the kind of concentration needed to drive him off.

Meanwhile, everything had to be readied so that he could launch his strike without a moment's hesitation before the united French forces could intervene. The British siege train of powerful battering guns had been parked inside the walls of Almeida (just two or three marches from their target), awaiting the general's word of command. Other supplies too had been gathered: powder and shot to fuel these monstrous cannon; gabbions, great baskets that could be filled with earth to form protective cover for a besieging force; fascines, the bundles of brushwood that would be thrown down into the deep ditches around Ciudad Rodrigo's defenses; and a train of pontoons that would be used to bridge the Águeda upstream of the fort, allowing the British guns to be brought to the best place of attack.

Winter, in Napoleon's mind, was a time to take advantage of British lethargy. Autumn had already shown the emperor what kind of general this Wellington was: evidently not a man with great belief in himself, since he would never run the slightest risk. His army seemed to be full of sick men too, as far as the British newspapers and spies' reports went. The emperor felt it was ridiculous that affairs in the peninsula should consume so many troops and be such a source of vexation, and all just as he was contemplating a great military expedition against Russia. It was time to knock his marshals' heads together and put some order in the Spanish house.

On 19 November, Napoleon started dictating a series of terse orders.
The commander in the southeast was to hurry up and finish the siege of Valencia. The Spanish defenders of this great southern city had been struggling on for months and its continued resistance was an affront to the power of French arms. Marmont was to send him six thousand troops to settle this interminable affair. The emperor knew this would prompt some carping from the Army of Portugal, so he told Berthier to make it clear to Marmont: “the English have 18,000 sick in Portugal and are unable to undertake anything.”

And Dorsenne, what was he playing at? Why were these two infamous thieves, the guerrillas Mina and Longa, still raiding the Bayonne road at will? He was to set about those
banditti
and liquidate them. If he needed Bonnet's division, the northernmost of the Army of Portugal, to help, so be it. Berthier: tell Dorsenne one more thing. He must understand, “the great object is to take Valencia.”

As for Soult, he should know better. Lieutenant General Hill's victory in October smashing a French division at Arroyo de Molinos had been a disgrace. Tell him, Berthier, “it is unfortunate that, with an army of 80,000 men, they could not make the dispositions which prudence demanded to avoid being beaten by a troop of 6,000 English.” And lastly: “the great object at this juncture is to take Valencia.”

Having set his schemes in train in mid-November, the emperor didn't let his brother Joseph know about them until 13 December. He too would probably be worrying about the effect all this might have on the Portuguese frontier. So Berthier informed Joseph, “it is probable that the English will not undertake anything from now until the month of February, and there is reason to believe they will remain on the defensive.” The emperor had become fixated with Valencia and he was confident that the English would not emerge early from their winter quarters.

What did Joseph make of all this? Once again, he had taken offense at his brother's high-handedness. Now, however, he had a confidant in the palace to commiserate with—one detail of May's Rambouillet agreement that had at least been honored. Marshal Jean-Baptiste Jourdan had arrived in Madrid in September. Initially he was simply the governor of that Iberian city, but had also been sent out to act as the king's military adviser. This Jourdan was no youngster. He had already been a soldier when Marmont was born, even fighting in far-off America back in 1781. As the commander of the army that saved the country from
being overrun by invaders in 1794 at the Battle of Fleurus, he had earned the lasting gratitude of many in revolutionary France.

He may have looked old and tired, but Jourdan, a small, rotund cannonball of a man, still had a wise head on his shoulders. He had also, during his previous service in Spain, learned how to give Joseph military advice in a tactful and friendly manner. The news of his arrival in Madrid excited all kinds of resentment in the headquarters of those commanding armies in the various corners of Spain. Men like Soult, Marmont, Dorsenne and Suchet viewed one another with suspicion at the best of times, feelings that had already emerged in General Regnaud's table talk (at Frenada) and in the letter from Marmont to Foy that had been deciphered at Wellington's HQ. While somehow, during the second half of 1811, they had managed to sublimate these feelings in the common good, Jourdan's arrival seemed to turn this volatile assembly of ambitious men more and more into open rivals, an effect that had been compounded by the angry tone of Napoleon's orders of late November and early December. Every field commander aspired only to remain high in the esteem of his imperial master in Paris, but they knew that Joseph had not only been militating for a greater role but that the emperor was likely to launch his Russian campaign soon, so removing himself from day-today superintendence of Iberian matters. For a Soult or Marmont, anxious to increase his wealth or perhaps even secure the throne of some vassal kingdom, the emergence of this partnership between Jourdan and Joseph in Madrid was most unsettling.

As Jourdan began organizing a proper military headquarters to serve Joseph, the issue of securing his high-level dispatches had at last been settled. The
cabinet
of Hugues Maret, Napoleon's chief administrator in Paris, had at last furnished the king and his marshal with a Great Cipher, which during the last days of 1811 had been circulated to all of the most senior leaders. There would be no repeat of the farcical episode of the previous summer: the field commanders, Joseph in Madrid and Marshal Berthier in Paris would all have the right codes to begin secret communication.

Each user of Joseph's new
Grand Chiffre
would have two tables: one for enciphering, the other for deciphering. The basis of the new code was one of the 1750 ciphering tables printed up by de Puisieulx for the Bourbon
foreign ministry. The enciphering table arranged words, syllables, phrases or letters alphabetically.
A
began with four different ways of writing the letter on its own and then continued:

In this way, the ciphering table set out the numbers to be used as the staff officer or confidential secretary turned his master's prose into secret writing. The table used the same coding number for different cases or genders. In addition, it allowed many options for breaking words down into syllables or bigrams (two-letter groups).

At the receiving end, the person deciphering would use the other table, one in which the codes were listed in numeric order, each followed by its meaning. The deciphering table was drawn up with a grid of columns and horizontal lines. Looking from the top left corner, the first column ran from 1 to 100, the second across started at 101 going down to 200, and so on. The horizontal lines separated the code numbers into groups of ten, all of which was meant to aid rapid deciphering.

The code table sent to Madrid had 1,200 code numbers, and these were mostly already filled out. As a ready-to-use diplomatic cipher, it therefore contained many words that were irrelevant to military operations in Spain: 490 stood for Stockholm, 837 for the Crimea, and so on. Additionally, Joseph's officers could soon see that many standard words and phrases needed for waging war in the peninsula were not included in this cipher. Rather than spelling them out laboriously, they decided to add to the standard 1750 table, increasing the coding numbers by 200 to a total of 1,400.