The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (31 page)

Nevertheless, as the first few messages in the new code were being studied at Fuente Guinaldo, a French staff officer's decision to add the extra two columns to the 1750 cipher table was already showing its effects in the similarity of the two names or titles: 1207 and 1264. Looking back to the first paragraph of Dorsenne's message, 1238 appears in a context that strongly suggests it can only
mean something like
my command, my corps
or indeed the
Army of the North.

As Scovell had scribbled in his notebook copy of Conradus, breaking these complex ciphers required the decipherer to know as much as possible about the affairs of the enemy camp. He would soon discover something about Dorsenne's relationship with the authorities in Madrid that would open up more of the meaning of that letter of 16 April. The emergence of a good working theory about common codes (like 13 or 516) or proper nouns and military names (1207, etc.) prompted a few successful guesses but was admittedly a very limited start to breaking the Paris Cipher. Even if deduction or just plain guesswork was to produce the meaning of a long string of code numbers bar one, that single unknown quantity, which might be the destination of a military movement or the date of its arrival, might render the entire work of decipherment worthless.

There was one other, quite unexpected aspect of the messages that was helping the decipherer to expand his knowledge of what was going on in the enemy camp. Since Marmont was assuming many of his messages would fall into British hands, he could use the uncoded passages to say some things directly to his enemy,
en clair,
and others, in code, to his masters. Marmont wanted it clearly understood by
whoever read
his letter of 22 April that Wellington had not intimidated him out of Portugal. At the time the British general had been to the south, some
parlementaires,
Allied officers under flag of truce apparently seeking to exchange prisoners, had ridden out to the French lines and made much of the imminent arrival of Lord Wellington's army. Marmont wrote in his letter, “This news was given affectedly by
parlementaires
and we haven't seen anything other than the single 1st regiment of hussars.” Marmont signaled also, to Berthier and the English, that he had not been seeking a general action with the Allies when he crossed into Portugal and did not retreat because he feared one. He also revealed that he considered he had been sent on an ill-conceived mission, writing
en clair,
“Your highness may judge from this that the results of the diversion that I tried to make in support of the Army of the South are more or less nil.” Thus, the French commander, unable to sublimate his intellectual pride, began quite deliberately sending interesting pointers to Wellington and Scovell. Had Scovell and Wellington been able to read
that clutch of coded dispatches in their entirety, they would have learned much about the alarm of the French command and its fears about where the British might strike next.

After Badajoz, Marshals Soult and Marmont both expressed the same conviction in their letters to Paris and Madrid: I will be the next target of Wellington's attack, the other French army must come to my help. There was hardly a general in Spain who had not reflected on the emperor's imminent departure for Poland, each drawing their conclusions about what it meant for their own expectations. Napoleon and his chosen commanders were embarking on an odyssey that promised easy victories (how could Soult forget his moment of glory pummeling the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz?), opportunities to enhance their reputations in the eyes of wider society, and abundant plunder. The sense, growing now for some months, that they had missed the Russian boat while being becalmed in this ghastly Spanish war led most of the key protagonists in the Iberian Peninsula to try to resign their commands in late 1811 and early 1812. Marmont had already tried to do so through his ADC Colonel Jardet when he went to see Marshal Berthier in Paris. King Joseph had once again been threatening to abdicate (prior to his receiving the supreme command). While Jourdan could hardly have left so soon after coming out, he had made his extreme reluctance to go there in the first place perfectly clear. Jourdan's appointment as chief of staff had itself brought Soult close to resignation.

The spirit of these officers was summed up well by General Foy, who asked Marmont to relieve him of the command of his division: “I ask to be posted to another army and the greatest favor I can request is to be sent somewhere with greater opportunities for manoeuvre, danger and glory.” Although busy preparing his campaign against the Russians the emperor soon detected these signs among the proteges he had abandoned in Spain. Through Berthier he wrote back to Marmont on 16 April, “I have prescribed the specific measures necessary to take the initiative, and give the war a character that conforms to the glory of French arms and ends these meanderings and vicissitudes, that already seem to announce a defeated army.” To pep up the forgotten army, Berthier ended his dispatch, “On his return from Poland, His Majesty
will go to Spain; he hopes that he will only be able to praise what you have done, and that you will once again merit his approbation.”

But by April 1812, those sitting on the Portuguese frontier knew that Wellington had gained the advantage and that, notwithstanding Berthier's flowery prose, the emperor would forget about them for months unless they, perish the thought, fell victim to some disaster. It was time for each army commander to look to his personal interest first.

Wellington himself, sitting at his desk in the mayor of Fuente Guinaldo's house, had not yet decided where he would strike next. In a letter to his brother in Cadiz, the British commander expressed his hopes that the repairs on Ciudad Rodrigo's defenses would soon be complete and added, “I don't yet despair, between ourselves, of being able to undertake the expedition into Andalucia this year.” Wellington, like some of the French superior officers, had half expected that the fall of Badajoz might precipitate an evacuation of the south by Marshal Soult. Remaining where he was exposed Napoleon's commander in southern Spain to the risk of having his line of withdrawal on Madrid severed by the British.

Still, Soult, for reasons best known to himself, was staying put. Wellington understood from intercepted letters that the French were so desperate for supplies that the Army of the South would have difficulty resisting any move the Allies made until the Andalucian harvest had been reaped in June or July. Just as he had carefully calculated the positions of French troops before launching his attacks on the border fortresses, so the British general now took his time to consider what he could achieve in the time available before the crops were in and the enemy armies were finally able to combine against him in southern Spain. Should he perhaps forget Soult and attack Marmont directly instead? The harvest came a little later in the north, which bought him a week or two more to fight the Army of Portugal that lurked just inside Spain on more favorable terms. It was also true that if he fell upon Marmont, Soult was less likely to march north, for not only was the man notoriously self-centered but the Army of the South also had many troops tied down preventing revolt in the Spanish localities, and this made it harder for them to assemble a few divisions quickly.

One thing was clear to Wellington. Whether he hit Soult or Marmont first, he needed to stop them helping one another. A French pontoon bridge had been built over the River Tagus at Almaraz, roughly halfway between the two French forces. Some magazines had also been established nearby, as he had learned from captured letters. Demolish the bridge and the French would have to go much farther upstream, most of the way east to Madrid in fact, to help one another. Destroy the magazines and it might even mean any French reinforcements would have to turn back. Already before the siege of Badajoz, Wellington had thought about sending the commander of his detached corps in the south, Lieutenant General Rowland Hill, to attack Almaraz, a raid that could only be launched if the British were sure that the area was weakly garrisoned.

On the last day of April, one of Marmont's messengers was seized by Don Julian's lancers on the road from Salamanca to Madrid. His packet of letters contained a note
en clair
about the imminent dispatch of Lieutenant Colonel Colquhoun Grant to France for imprisonment. Wellington had already received at least one note smuggled out from the prisoner and knew he was being held in Salamanca. The intercepted letter recorded Marmont's lack of interest in a possible prisoner exchange. Seeing that all hope of getting his intelligence officer back by such means was gone, the general sent messages to various guerrilla commanders promising a generous reward to the man who would spring Grant from captivity. None however was able to achieve this, and Colquhoun Grant was soon on his way back to France under heavy escort.

Despite this bad news, it was the other elements of Don Julian's haul that caused Wellington to move into action. A letter to Jourdan, although it had been partially ciphered in the
Grand Chiffre,
gave an indication that Marmont's forces were suffering most serious difficulties of supply.

Marmont's letter had been rather well enciphered, so its transitions in and out of code did not give a huge amount away. Had the British staff been able to read it, they would have learned much about the duke of Ragusa's operational problems. The shortage of rations meant that his army was so dispersed that it would require twenty-five days to concentrate and move to the assistance of Soult in the south, whereas the British could switch their axis of operations in just five days. It was,
in effect, a carefully constructed and longer version of a theme that was already becoming familiar to Jourdan from his other correspondents Dorsenne, Marmont, Soult and Suchet: My problems are immense, don't expect me to give any great help to anyone else. While for the moment at least the
Grand Chiffre
was protecting much of that information successfully, the passages
en clair
allowed Wellington to learn something of its import. Revealingly, at one point Marmont had said, “I am staying at Salamanca until I am better instructed as to what 164.516 …,” and after the coded passage picked up, “with more considerable forces than those that I have until I am certain that Lord Wellington has established his HQ on this frontier.”

It could be deduced from the marshal's letter that he was staying put pending a discussion with Jourdan and Joseph on the next strategic move. Knowing from his other sources of information that the Army of Portugal's southerly deployments were not particularly strong, the British commander saw that the moment had come to strike at the junction of the two main armies opposed to him, on the River Tagus just across the Spanish frontier. On 4 May, he sent orders to General Hill to move quickly to destroy the bridge at Almaraz.

CHAPTER TWELVE
T
HE
S
ALAMANCA
C
AMPAIGN
O
PENS
, M
AY
1812

E
arly on the morning of 19 May 1812, soldiers of the 71st and 92nd Highlanders found themselves stumbling about in a steep-sided ravine close to the Tagus. The sun had yet to warm the still air, but the men were clammy from the unfortunate combination of a humid season, a red woolen coat and a heavy burden of impedimenta. The men of this British brigade were carrying heavy scaling ladders to help them enter the small forts that protected the Almaraz bridge. They had tried to move into position before dawn, but the country was so difficult that “when daylight … at length showed us to each other, we were scattered all over the foot of the hill like strayed sheep, not more in one place than were held together by a ladder.” Amid much whispered Gaelic cursing, the sergeants tried to bring the soldiers together again, fearful that at any moment their presence would be discovered and the morning calm would erupt into gunfire.

Almaraz's bridge was defended by a fort at each end. The larger,
Fort Napoleon, was the first target of the assault. Several miles away, the crossing was overlooked by three smaller posts along the Mirabete ridge. These positions had a breathtaking view over the valley of the Tagus and dominated the pass through which the French army's traffic north and south had to go. As the morning air warmed, eagles began circling around the Mirabete ridge, their great spread of wings banked to keep them inside the rising draft of warm air, their eyes scanning left and right in the perpetual search for prey. Neither the men in the forts on the ridge nor their avian companions would have spotted the Highlanders that morning, though. The British raid had been carefully planned, and the soldiers were bypassing the Mirabete behind a small ridge that screened them from its far-off lookouts.

The risks involved in taking this roundabout route through rough country were all part of Rowland Hill's unconventional plan. The soldiers had nicknamed this ruddy-faced general Farmer or Daddy Hill, friendly sobriquets that arose from Hill's even temperament, diligence and paternal concern for his soldiers' welfare. Notwithstanding his benign reputation, Hill had given orders “that every person in the village of Almaraz should be put to death, there being none but those belonging to the enemy in it.” As the troops neared their target, they received the order “Fix bayonets.”