The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (26 page)

For the British stormers, their advance caused the whizz and whine of musket balls overhead to intensify into an incessant cacophony. With the first men dropping, the Forlorn Hopes had to negotiate an earthen rampart that went all the way around the town, protecting the walls themselves. The first promotion-hungry man of the 3rd Division to mount this obstacle was, appropriately enough, Major Ridge.
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Others followed, and once on top they hurled bags of straw and fascines down into the ditch behind it. Using these objects to break their fall of fifteen or so feet, they jumped in and groped their way toward the breaches. “As we neared the breach, the shot of the enemy swept away our first men. Canister, grape, round-shot and shell, with fireballs to show our ground, and a regular hailstorm of bullets came pouring on and around us,” one Light Division soldier later wrote.

The first men looked up into the great breach to see the mouth of a cannon aimed right across the big gap in the wall, its crew waiting to cut them down. But the big gun had been rolled just a little too far forward, so that men hugging the side of the breach were invulnerable to its fire. Soon the first men appeared atop the ramparts, and a great cheer went up from the 3rd Division stormers.

The Light Division meanwhile, assaulting its own, smaller gap in the wall, heard the jubilant shouting of the 3rd and “this had a magical effect; regardless of the enemy's fire and every other impediment, the men dashed over the breach carrying everything before them.” It was at this moment of triumph, however, that the Light Division paid a hefty price. Its commander, “Black Bob” Craufurd, was standing atop the rampart, urging on his men, but he had only been there a few moments before he fell in a puff of red mist, mortally wounded by a musket ball. Further to their right, as the 3rd Division soldiers mounted the walls, they came under intense fire from their flanks and
from French sharpshooters in the building behind the breach. One after another, soldiers scrambling over the ramparts were cut down. One eyewitness noted the heavy losses suffered by Picton's men at this key moment: “In this small space they suffered a tremendous loss of nearly 500 heroic officers and soldiers. During the fighting, their dead and wounded were piled [one] on top of the other. The wounded cried out in agony as they were trampled upon.”

With the two breaches carried and other storming parties scaling the walls elsewhere, resistance crumbled and a group of officers and men made their way quickly into the city's central plaza to plant their regimental colors there. Despite Wellington's orders to the contrary, triumph soon turned to riot as those who had survived the storm sought to profit from it, breaking into houses to loot and drink themselves senseless. Many hours passed before order could be restored.

At Wellington's headquarters there was celebration. The operation had been successfully concluded and not in twenty days but in twelve. The British had suffered about one thousand casualties, the French twice as many (seventeen hundred being taken prisoner). Not only had the battle delivered one of the frontier's key fortified places, but the Army of Portugal's own siege train of heavy guns had been inside Rodrigo when it fell. No less than 153 cannon had been delivered into Wellington's hands and the loss of these would render Marmont powerless to retake the town or pose any serious threat to the security of northern Portugal.

Wellington's victory dispatch to the secretary of war, penned on the twentieth, contained much praise for the officers and men who had taken the city, and the engineers and gunners always so central to such an enterprise were given their due as well. It would not have shown good manners to trumpet his own personal achievement too loudly in the official record, but Wellington made sure that his partisans in London understood what a remarkable feat it had been to seize the fortress in twelve days. In a private letter to the duke of Richmond, he noted, “We proceeded at Ciudad Rodrigo on quite a new principle in sieges. … The French, however, who are supposed to know everything, could not take this place in less than forty days after it was completely invested.” Not only had Wellington won his prize, but he was delighted to have the
opportunity of denigrating his enemy and their supposedly unchallengeable grasp of military science.

The speed of events at Ciudad Rodrigo did indeed cause complete bewilderment in French headquarters. Marmont had expected to bring his forces together to relieve the fortress on 29 January, but this plan was fully nine days too late. Captain Cocks noted in his journal, “Lord Wellington's correctness in choosing this moment for the siege proves the exactness of his calculations. I would not be Marmont's aide-decamp to report the event for a year's allowance.”

And how would Marmont “report the event” to his master in Paris? It had happened after all because Napoleon had diverted three of the Army of Portugal's divisions toward Valencia, sent one more northward and insured that the best troops of the Army of the North had moved away from the frontier too. Marmont's command had been left too weak and scattered to do anything. He knew that it would be quite impossible to send a report to Paris along the lines of “Sire, it was all your fault for trying to direct this war at a distance of 300 leagues.” The marshal himself had erred in thinking he had until late January to get a relief column up to the border. Despite the repeated reports of British siege supplies building up in Almeida the month before, Marmont had shared Napoleon's assessment that the enemy were too sick and lethargic to do anything during the winter months.

French staff officers murmured to one another about the
événement funeste,
the “disastrous occurrence” at Rodrigo. Marmont had never experienced a reverse like this. His trajectory through the ranks of the
Grande Armée
toward the dukedom of Ragusa and the coveted marshal's baton had been cometlike. Not only did the loss of Rodrigo undermine his self-confidence, but for the first time he sensed that his reputation might be buried in the Iberian graveyard, just like that of his predecessor, Masséna. Count Miot de Melito, one of King Joseph's private secretaries, wrote, “This beginning hardly inspired great confidence in the military talents of this young marshal who had not, up until that moment, exercised higher command, and who was not known for any brilliant act, and owed the post in which he had succeeded one of the great captains of that period [Masséna] only to the blind favor shown by the Emperor to one of his old pupils.”

Inevitably, the emperor's response to the fall of Rodrigo was what
Marmont would have feared. Napoleon, Marshal Berthier wrote on 6 February, “is not satisfied with your direction of the war; you have a superiority over the enemy, and, instead of taking the initiative, you are always on its receiving end. You march your troops around and tire them out; this is not the Art of War.”

Marmont sent his senior aide, one Colonel Jardet, to Paris to pick up what gossip he could about whether the Rodrigo episode had caused lasting damage to his reputation. After a few days in Paris, Jardet wrote a twenty-eight-page letter to his commander in Spain describing the state of affairs with great clarity and candor. Matters of this delicacy naturally needed the protection of a cipher. Since the colonel was not in the possession of the
Grand Chiffre,
and it made sense in any case to encode it in one understood only by the Army of Portugal, he chose one of Marmont's 150-character ciphers. While this step may have secured the contents from the great majority of French officers or indeed Spanish guerrillas, it did not withstand an attack by Major George Scovell, and it was on his desk that Jardet's letter ended up.

After the British triumph at Rodrigo, while Marmont worried about his fall from grace, Wellington considered his next step carefully. The obvious move now was an attack on Badajoz, the last of the four great frontier fortresses still in French hands. Just one week after the fall of Rodrigo, the general had sent off sixteen of the twenty-four-pounder siege guns on their long journey to the southern frontier. Wellington knew that once he had taken Badajoz he could consider Portugal secure and would then be able to launch his army in earnest into the Spanish interior, perhaps even to the gates of Madrid itself. On the other hand, if the move on Badajoz went as badly as Beresford's had in 1811, the end result would be the same: to destroy any hopes of achieving great things in the campaign of 1812.

Wellington had always appreciated that he would have to bide his time until the heavy rains of February and March to nourish the Estremaduran fodder and thus sustain the large force of cavalry needed on the plains around Badajoz. Additionally, if the disappointment of the previous summer was to be avoided, he had to frustrate any concentration
of French forces for several weeks while he prosecuted the bloody business of siegecraft. This would require inspiration, since Marshal Suchet had at last successfully concluded the siege of Valencia, freeing thousands of French troops for action elsewhere.

At this stage, every insight into the deliberations of the enemy camp was vital, so Scovell had to attack the cipher used in Jardet's letter with alacrity. The colonel had begun
en clair,
describing his arrival in the metropolis and his interview with Marshal Berthier late at night in his office. Napoleon's chief of staff had evidently been in a generous and self-effacing mood while pacing up and down in his office and holding forth to Jardet. As the letter moved to more serious matters, it switched into streams of digits. Jardet had used the cipher cleverly, inserting many blank codes and using parts of words
en clair
to cause confusion: to take one example, the word
loi
appears at one point bracketed with numbers (25.17.1oi.54.43.19.17.me.58.18.2). While this might at first seem like a reference to law,
loi
in French, it was in fact the result of a canny encipherment of a longer word,
I'eloingment.

Despite Jardet's skills at this craft, the great length of his message and the limits of the Army of Portugal cipher meant there were several good places to start the attack. The colonel noted:

The first section, as it switches into code, is vulnerable. Could the first four letters represent e
tait, he was?
No, since e
tait
is a five-letter word. What about
est,
or is? That is one letter too short, but of course blank codes could make coded words longer than the originals. Scovell was also sufficiently versed in this type of cipher to know that higher numbers were often used as vacant codes. If 59 is blank, then 20 is
e,
14 is s and 29 stands for
t.
Moving on to the next coded word or phrase, 36.49.1.12.63.14.17, it is sandwiched between two words
en clair
: “that he is the 36.49.1.12.63.14.17 of.” Here again the context reveals something. He is: “the architect of,” “the instigator of,” “the father of”? There were only so many possibilities, which again
had to be tempered by the suspicion that blanks might have been used to increase the length of the coded word. Eventually, Scovell could have tried “the cause of.” He suspected in any case that 14 stood for
s,
and if he knocked out the two highest numbers (49 and 63) as blanks, it would fit. This kind of assumption was obviously unscientific until it had been tested in other passages containing the same code numbers, and of course the great length of Jardet's missive gave him many other places to check his solutions. Eventually the passage above emerges as:

The colonel's skill in ciphering was impressive compared to many other staff officers whose efforts reached Scovell, but it could not overcome the basic limitations of the Army of Portugal cipher. In one passage, for example, Jardet wrote that Marmont could not “be responsible for the 36.49.10.50.45.28.18.53.41.20 of the Army of Portugal.” The section in code seems too long for the word
command,
but in fact Jardet had padded it out with the blank numbers 49 and 53. While this might seem ingenious, the cipher he was working with contained vacant codes only above 40, so the decipherer would soon be speculating about the relevance of those higher values.

After many hours of work, the product of Berthier and Jardet's lucubrations in Paris revealed itself to Scovell. Marmont's operations, it was clear, were severely hampered by supply problems. Any future mission to assist Soult in defending Badajoz would require the Army of Portugal's commander to stockpile supplies in the Tagus valley so that his men did not starve on the journey south.

The letter, however, did give reason to doubt that Marmont remained committed to helping Soult again as he had been the previous summer, particularly since the Rodrigo business had shown him that all manner of mischief might take place on his own patch if he divided his army to help save Badajoz. Jardet revealed that each marshal was now just looking to save his reputation:

Jardet, it is clear, had explained to Berthier that Marmont had no desire to continue in his post under the current circumstances. Berthier, ever the conciliator, had tried to smooth things over. The emperor understood, of course, the rigors of Spanish service and that the duke of Ragusa did not have a magic wand to produce supplies for his hungry men and broken-down horses. Jardet's letter continued: