The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (37 page)

Marmont had begun the march south on the eighteenth with the intention of repeating his previous day's feat, moving down toward
Salamanca so quickly that he would oblige the British to do the same. Since he knew the celebrated marching power of the French
fantassin,
he was confident that he would either outstrip the British, threatening their line back to Portugal, or cause them to become disordered by these efforts. He had not however reckoned on the hunger for battle among his subordinates at Castrejon. The commander of the column nearest the British, General Clausel, saw an opportunity to attack.

Fairly soon, the French onslaught had forced the British cavalry back. A troop of Royal Horse Artillery came under attack as it retreated. The French horsemen tried to slash at the reins and traces of the teams pulling the guns, but failed to stop them. The British brigades fell back for ten miles, with Clausel's troops trying to catch up with them. The heat was oppressive and the dust thrown up by these deperate maneuvers began clogging the mouths of horses and men alike, making them desperately thirsty. On crossing the half-dry bed of the Guarena many threw themselves down on their bellies to lap up the tepid, dirty water.

At last, British infantry of the 4th and Light Divisions drew itself up and prepared to meet the onslaught, but at this point the French cavalry did not press their advance, since they would have had little chance of riding down these veterans. Instead they busied themselves with a continued bombardment from their horse batteries and called up a division of infantry. The French moved forward, drums beating the
pas de charge,
*
but were repulsed by the 4th Division, who gave them a volley and then advanced with bayonets fixed. The light was failing after several hours of continuous maneuvering; Clausel knew his time, like his men, was exhausted.

During the fighting on the eighteenth more than five hundred men of the British and Allied armies were killed and wounded—the French lost even more. At the end of it, Wellington knew that he would have to fall back again. The French were showing considerable aggression and a desire to bring on a decisive encounter. Wellington could not see any suitable killing ground on the flat land between where that day's action had been fought and where he had stood on 20 and 21 June, at San Christoval a few miles north of the River Tormes. On the nineteenth, therefore, the British continued to march south, relinquishing the remainder of the territory they had occupied for the previous month.

With each side's infantry marching across the parched León plains, the two armies sent dust billowing into the skies. Their paths moved closer and closer until they were marching along beside one another at a distance of only five hundred or six hundred yards. The British looked over their left shoulders at the French, who looked back over their right. Each side watched its opponent marching along all day waiting for the least irregularity in its formation or drill to attack. Major Warre wrote to his father, “There never was a more interesting or beautiful sight than that of two hostile armies of upwards of 35,000 men each moving parallel within a mile and a half of each other and often within cannon range.” One young Guards officer said in his letter home, “We have amused ourselves with plenty of marching lately, very little fighting but a good deal of chess playing with the enemy.”

This contest was testing the mettle of every player. Wellington and Marmont knew that any slight mistake on their part might precipitate an onslaught that would break their army and their reputation in one hideous battle. For the superior officers, there was a sense that every order from their chiefs had to be attended to swiftly and properly or they might be held responsible for disaster. Those lower down in the ranks wondered about their own fate: would the campaign end without the general engagement they had expected for the past month or might there still be some great fight that would claim their lives?

Riding along, Captain Tomkinson turned from watching the parallel march of the French and looked aloft, where vultures and other birds of prey were circling. The blood and suffering of the previous day's combat were fresh in Tomkinson's mind. Watching the birds as they awaited their carrion, he was unable to stop himself thinking about “the horror of being wounded without the power to keep them off.”

During the two days since the march had begun, Scovell had been riding with the army trying to snatch a few moments to decipher Joseph's message to Marmont on 9 July. It began:

Inserting what he knew, Scovell could decipher this to a considerable extent:

This deciphering is not without fault, though the error is not particularly significant: 1241, General Caffarelli's location, was not Burgos, as Scovell thought, but Vitoria, somewhat farther north, in the Basque country. Joseph went on to explain how Marshal Soult and General Count D'Er-lon had overestimated the strength of Allied forces in front of them (and of the guerrillas) to justify their own failure to act in support of Marmont: nothing could be expected of them either. For Wellington this was definitive proof that there was nothing farther to be feared from the Army of the North. Joseph's dispatch also provided that uniquely satisfying species of intelligence: that a strategy of his own, namely the use of the Spanish to tie down troops north and south of Marmont, had worked.

The real nub of the letter came toward its end. Wellington had been aware for many days that units of the Army of the Center were leaving
their usual positions and concentrating. He was unsure however where they were heading. It might be that their concentration was purely defensive in case he, Wellington, pushed toward Madrid. It might be that they were meant to join D'Erlon in an offensive against his exposed right or the central Portuguese frontier. While allowing for the possibility that he might have to fall back in defense of his capital, Joseph expressed his wishes for the coming days as follows:

This became:

Thus, Wellington had the confirmation that much of the Army of the Center was marching to unite with Marmont. The phrase “Naval 1070
nero”
was obviously Naval Carnero, which gave the British a good sense of Treillard's route of march. Joseph then described how he had removed his troops from different centers around the capital. This information allowed Wellington and the staff to conclude various factors central to their strategy for the coming days: that the Army of the Center would unite with Marmont; its strength (adding the figures they already knew of its composition and subtracting those of the various detachments diverted by Joseph); and its likely route of march.

This was intelligence of the very highest order, especially since Wellington was a general who defined so much of what he
did
do by setting out the limits of what he would
not
do. He would not fight Marmont once he had made his junction with Joseph, that was clear. But spies' reports of 20 July (two days old) suggested that the Army of the Center was not yet moving. Wellington could therefore calculate that he must bring on a general action in the next four days or else give up the game. He also knew from the 9 July letter that he could seek this battle without worrying about the French armies north and south of him.

There was one small reinforcement that might reach the marshal at any moment, but Wellington knew it would not be large enough to alter radically the balance of forces. An unciphered dispatch hidden in a Spaniard's clothing and dated 12 July showed him that the only hopes still entertained by Marmont of a reinforcement by the Army of the North were a column of cavalry with one battery of guns (less than one thousand men and six cannon) that might still get through. In his uncoded missive to the commander of that column, Marmont had revealed a certain desperation: “the valor of the army and the glory of French arms do not allow you to spare a single day in setting out.”

After a tiring day with the two armies completing their parallel march down to the line of the River Tormes and Salamanca, Wellington wrote to Earl Bathurst in London: “I am quite certain that Marshal Marmont's army is to be joined by the King's, which will be 10,000 or 12,000 men, with a large proportion of cavalry.” The general was therefore quite confirmed in his resolution “to cross the Tormes, if the enemy should; to cover Salamanca as long as I can; and above all, not to give up our communication with Ciudad Rodrigo; and not to fight an action, unless under very advantageous circumstances, or it should become absolutely necessary.”

The commander of forces did allude to one advantage he enjoyed over Marmont, namely in the matter of communications: “The Army of Portugal has been surrounded for the last six weeks, and scarcely even a letter reaches its commander,” he told the secretary of war. Given the effectiveness of the guerrilla screen, it was quite likely that the marshal was unaware of Joseph's letter of 9 July (and indeed, it became clear several days later that none of the copies sent by His Catholic Majesty had got through to Marmont). Consequently Wellington understood more
about the situation of the French armies than did the marshal himself, a state of affairs that presented obvious dangers for Marmont. If he was unaware that the king was marching to his help, he might seek precipitate action against his retreating enemy, fearing they would escape him, rather than waiting for this substantial reinforcement.

British headquarters had evidently been impressed by the aggressive spirit shown by the French during their crossing of the Duero and attack on the Castrejon line on 18 July. Wellington had every reason to believe that Marmont would try to bring on a battle between 21 and 24 July. He had already chosen two suitable defensive positions where the British might fight such an engagement. One was the familiar ridge of San Christoval, a few miles north of the city. The other was south of the Tormes, near the village of Arapiles, where the topography would allow him to observe the approach of an enemy force while concealing the bulk of his own.

Early on 21 July, Wellington drew up his army in battle array on the San Christoval ridge. Marmont chose as he had done one month before, not to oblige him by assaulting this formidable position. Instead, the French advanced guard went to the south and east, finding fords across the Tormes that would allow them to continue their march and perhaps, by veering west after they had crossed, draw a great arc around the south of Salamanca, thus cutting Wellington off from his route back to Portugal.

With reports of Marmont's movements coming in during the afternoon, Wellington realized that his first chosen battle position was becoming useless and he would have to order the army to cross the river as well and take up the second. Since the distance upriver to the British fords was less than that to the French ones, his divisions were able to make up for the lost time of occupying their morning position and begin assembling south of the Tormes during the afternoon.

Wellington had already had the opportunity of looking over the ground on that side of the river during his advance through Salamanca several weeks before. The geography there was particularly favorable to his purposes. Any army heading back to the Portuguese frontier had to travel southwest from the Spanish town. Two chains of features would help the general cover that movement. One ran south from the Tormes, a gully a couple of hundred feet deep carved by a tributary of that river.
The other salient natural position was a ridge running more or less westward from the first. At the “elbow” of these two chains of high ground were a pair of rocky tors, the Greater and Lesser Arapil hills. As night fell on 21 July, Wellington's army occupied the first line, presenting a barrier several miles in length running south from the Tormes. Ahead of it was a screen of light cavalry, observing the French divisions as they formed after their own crossing and went into their bivouacs.

That night, the open plains south and west of Salamanca were studded with the fires that soldiers of both sides built to dry their clothes and cook supper. Most of the troops were exhausted and famished after marching fifty miles in a few days. Their officers had played their parts as pawns in Wellington and Marmont's gigantic game of chess and were suffering from a profound mental as well as physical fatigue. There was still a sense of expectation that action might be joined and these listless feelings of nervous excitement charged the conversation in the bivouacs just as the heat and dust had charged the atmosphere above.