The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (36 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
T
RIUMPH
O
VER THE
G
REAT
C
IPHER,
J
ULY
1812

A
fter the campaign's furious start, nobody knew what to make of the long pause on the Duero. The British kept their forces back from the riverbank but allowed lookouts and staff officers to conduct their surveillance there. The river presented a formidable barrier, dissuading the British commander from launching an attack. Day by day the enemy became a little more relaxed and finally began to approach their side at the same time as Wellington's men. Major William Warre, in a letter to his father, described the scene:

In Medina del Campo, young Guards officers took advantage of the hiatus in operations to entertain the local gentry. For eight successive evenings, they held dances in their impromptu mess, lavishing champagne and compliments on any half-respectable dancing partner they could find.

While this surreal impasse went on, the more junior members of both armies found themselves at a loss trying to understand their commanders' plans. On 7 July, General Bonnet finally marched into Marmont's camp, bringing sixty-five hundred infantry, a battery of guns and a hundred horse with him. This brought the marshal's infantry and artillery strength to the sort of numbers he felt were a prerequisite for offensive action. He still felt weak in cavalry, having about twelve hundred fewer than his enemy. He addressed this deficit in a remarkably resourceful, if unpopular, way: the Army of Portugal's officers had their personal mounts requisitioned. Troopers whose horses had died or gone lame suddenly found themselves astride some nag that had been carrying a colonel's camp kettle and cognac until the day before. Clearly these horses were untrained in the evolutions required for mounted warfare, and their new masters had but a few days to school them. By this expedient, Marmont had added about a thousand men to his cavalry formations and, if nothing else, that might look impressive through an enemy spyglass.

Marmont was still hoping to receive more cavalry from Caffarelli and King Joseph, but he felt that he was reaching the point where he must bring matters to some sort of conclusion. He had seen for himself at San Christoval that Wellington would not attack, even when he had superior numbers and the advantage of the ground. While he understood his generals' reservations, the time was approaching to disorient this British mediocrity with some brilliant maneuvers and then hit him hard on the open plains of León.

Once Bonnet's division had joined them, Marmont began marching and countermarching up and down the river. Feints were made, fords
explored and alarms given. The British had to react to each movement in earnest as their outposts sent back reports. One day after another, divisions were stood to, cavalry formed up near some threatened ford and everyone scorched by the sun for a few hours before being sent back to their bivouacs. Inevitably, frustration began to build among the British officers, who knew that each of these responses had to be conducted with alacrity and precision lest they incur the wrath of their commander, or worse, allow the passage of the French van. One British major wrote home grumpily, “They have manouevred a great deal. In fact they seem to keep their people in constant motion … to what end all this marching and countermarching of theirs can be, I cannot guess.”

If Marmont's maneuvers were succeeding in their aim of confusing the lesser officers, what of their captain? Wellington, by mid-July, had lost the initiative. He understood that each day's inactivity played into the Army of Portugal's hands. Sooner or later the French would build to a strength where he could not face them in this open country, and then it would be a matter of clapping spurs to his exhausted beast of an army and driving it back toward the Portuguese border.

At his table, Wellington was withdrawn. The staff were perplexed that he had not given battle on the San Christoval position, when the superiority of British numbers was so evident. He understood their inferences and he did not care one jot for their opinions. He had ignored the siren calls of those around him before on at least a dozen occasions during these years of Peninsular campaigning. No, he alone was responsible for the fate of this precious British army and he alone would decide.

And London? That was a more delicate question. He had told them he was seeking a general action with Marmont, an affair that might end with the church bells ringing across Old England, Eagles laid at the Prince Regent's feet and handsome promotions for one and all. If he produced nothing there was bound to be criticism and scorn from the usual voices in the Commons. He might even become the victim of popular lampoon, like the duke of York following his fruitless expedition to Holland. Wellington after all had marched fifty thousand men to the “top of the hill” and was about to march them back again without result. He had lost his earlier opportunity of smashing Marmont while the balance of forces was really favorable. Wellington would have to ready the ministry, through the agency of Earl Bathurst, his new master
as secretary of war, for the disappointment of a withdrawal to Portugal.

On 3 July he wrote to Lieutenant General Graham, commanding the army's left wing (who was about to return home sick), “It appears certain that Marmont will not risk an action unless he should have an advantage; and I shall not risk one unless I should have an advantage.” The next day, in a letter to Bathurst: “I hope that I am strong enough for Marmont at present,” Wellington explained, “but your lordship must see that so much depends on the Spanish forces to the north, if they cannot match our advance and move up to the Duero line, well, then, we may be obliged to fall back.” On 13 July, he wrote in a note to Lieutenant General Hill, commanding the force detached to the south in Estremadura, “I am apprehensive that, after all, the enemy will be too strong for me; but we shall see.”

By 14 July, with spies' reports coming in that Joseph's Army of the Center was collecting in readiness to march, it was time to tell Bathurst in London that hope for a large battle was disappearing: “It is obvious that we could not cross the river without sustaining great loss, and could not fight a general action under circumstances of greater disadvantage than those which would attend an attack of the enemy's position on the Duero.” Another piece of bad news made Wellington's mood even gloomier. A planned landing by several thousand British, Spanish and Sicilian troops under the command of General Lord William Bentinck on the Mediterranean side of Spain, in Catalonia, had been postponed. Wellington wrote to his brother (in Cadiz) on 15 July, “Lord W. Bentinck's decision is fatal to the campaign, at least at present.”

At the outset, one month before, it had seemed clear to everyone on the staff and at home in Horse Guards that the key criteria for Wellington's efforts would be the balance of forces with Marmont and the availability of the right fighting position. When both of these had been favorable, at San Christoval on 20 and 21 June, Wellington's confidence had faltered. Now that the initiative was passing to the French, he had to explain himself to the politicians in London, and indeed those running the Spanish war in Cadiz. In his disappointment and frustration, Wellington placed the operations of the Spanish forces in Galicia and Lord Bentinck's Catalonian expeditionary force at the center of the picture, even though he had never expected them to produce anything more than diversions. Good manners, and his unfailing political
instinct, dictated that he blame the Spanish in his letter to Bathurst, and the British commander, Lord Bentinck, in the version that would be passed to the Spanish authorities.

Having warned his political masters, Wellington began to worry about the military practicalities of getting away from the Duero line without mishaps. The reports that the Army of the Center was about to march concerned him greatly, for if they attacked his right flank or moved directly on Salamanca rather than joining Marmont, he could be in serious difficulty. It was at this delicate juncture that the guerrillas delivered another clutch of intercepted mail.

The most interesting of the dispatches was written on a tiny slither of paper hidden in a riding crop. It was largely in the
Grand Chiffre,
but it was clear that it was from King Joseph to Marmont. This highly important piece of information, sent from Madrid on 9 July, reached Wellington late in the afternoon of the sixteenth and its contents might well reveal exactly what the king was planning to do with the armament he had collected. Just as the staff began their study of this important document, urgent reports of movements along the Duero began to arrive.

During the day, Foy and Bonnet's divisions had begun crossing the River Duero at Toro, on Wellington's left. Since he had kept the main body of his force a little way back from the river, the French crossed without opposition. On the evening of the sixteenth, the British commander confidently expected this breakout at Toro to build into Marmont's general attack, and he ordered a leftward movement of all his forces. Headquarters joined in the shift westward.

The men of the two armies got little rest that night, as the sixteenth became the seventeenth. The British moved into defensive position, ready to face an eruption of French troops from Foy and Bonnet's bridgehead.

Marmont, however, had deceived his opponent. In the darkness, those two divisions crossed back over the river, destroyed the bridge and started moving eastwards. At the other end of the French line, divisions under Maucune and Clausel moved over the Duero at first light on the seventeenth, accompanied by a brigade of light cavalry under General Curto. Within a few hours they had occupied Rueda, which was to the right of Wellington's line and which the British general had laid open as a result of Marmont's feint the previous day. The first stage of Marmont's maneuver had succeeded brilliantly. He had fooled Wellington into
moving left, only to reappear on his right. The Army of Portugal was across the river virtually without loss and Wellington had missed his opportunity of using it as a defensive barrier. During the next few days the marshal used the same tactic repeatedly, marching southward around the British right in order to outflank it. These maneuvers served his higher purpose: if Wellington was not fast on his feet, the French would get between him and the Portuguese frontier, cutting off his line of withdrawal.

Scovell reflected on the events of the seventeenth with little sentimentality: “On the evening of this day it was discovered that we have been outmaneuverd and that the Enemy had actually crossed in great force at the Bridge of Tordesillas and the Fort of Polios. Marmont deserves great credit for the way in which he carried on the deception.”

The British fell back about twelve miles, taking up a new defensive position along the line of a small river, the Guarena. Before dawn on the eighteenth, Captain William Tomkinson, attached to the staff of the army's cavalry commander Lieutenant General Stapleton Cotton, went out to inspect the outposts on this new defensive line.

“I had scarcely got beyond our picquets when I met a squadron of the enemy's cavalry. More were coming up, and in half an hour the picquets were driven back on Castrejon, and from the number of squadrons showed by the enemy, it was evident they were in force, and advancing,” he recorded. The French cavalry were accompanied by a powerful company of horse artillery, armed with sixteen cannon. These men, riding on their limbers or on horses so they could keep up with the cavalry, were soon bringing their guns into action against some squadrons that General Cotton had drawn up in their way. Tomkinson fell back in front of the French, only to find a troop of the 16th Light Dragoons (with which he had been serving until a few weeks before) standing ready to charge. The effects of the French artillery were immediate. Trooper Stone, whose mount stood in line with the squadron, was hit, and “the shot, round shot, hit him on the belly, and sent pieces of his insides all over the troop—a piece was on Lieutenant Lloyd's shoulder, the first time he was ever in action,” Tomkinson later recalled. Within an hour Lieutenant Lloyd, who had only joined the regiment the previous day, was dead too. A desperate cavalry battle was joined as Cotton's brigades protected the rear guard of the army.