The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (38 page)

Long after most men had fallen into a deep sleep on the dusty earth, the pealing of thunder announced a torrential downpour. Many a soldier's blanket was soon awash with rain and mud. Lightning bolts plunged from the sky, cavalry horses reared, neighed, broke their tethering and careered about, trampling somnolent dragoons under hoof. It was not the rest that these tired men would have hoped for. What was more, for thousands of them, this disturbed, crazy night was to be their last.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
S
ALAMANCA,
22 J
ULY
1812

I
t was still morning on 22 July when Pakenham's division went splashing through the ford at Cabrerizos. The previous night's rain had brought the river up above its usual July depth and many of the men found the cold water soaking them all the way up to the chest. They held their muskets above their heads, anxious to keep their weapons dry and ready for action.

By one of Wellington's characteristic dictates the deputy adjutant general (and his brother-in-law) Edward Pakenham had been placed in command of the 3rd Division. Its usual commander, Picton, had fallen ill. The chosen man, for Pakenham was most decidedly among the inner circle of the staff, had thus found himself leading one of the most formidable formations in the army, nearly six thousand veterans with the nickname Fighting Division. With them was the small Portuguese cavalry brigade under D'Urban that had been detached on intelligence-gathering duties earlier in the campaign. As their horses came dripping
out of the Tormes, the last Allied presence north of that river had been called in. These troops marked the tail end of the British redeployment back toward the Portuguese frontier.

With the evacuation of Salamanca, Wellington had ordered his supply train down the Ciudad Rodrigo road at dawn. A great column of wagons, pack mules, camp followers and other livestock was making its way back toward the border. Although the thunderstorm of the previous night had thoroughly soaked the soil, it did not take long for its top to be dried by the sun and for the movements of men and beasts to send its characteristic dusty smudges across the azure morning sky.

Marmont's staff officers and cavalry vedettes were out early trying to form an idea of their enemy's movements. In crossing the river, both armies had turned through a right angle. For days they had been marching south, with the French trying to get around Wellington's right flank and cut off his withdrawal. Now the British general occupied a line that extended south from the Tormes. Marmont's game, turning the British right, remained the same, but that now meant pushing his people around the southern end of a British line rather than an eastern one.

As the French divisions got under arms, General Foy, occupying the end of the French deployment closest to the river, set out to survey the enemy lines. The British had occupied the ridge opposite, a move by Wellington that denied the enemy any knowledge of what lay beyond the feature. Foy could see them drawn up, half a mile away across the gully that ran from south to north, carved by a tributary of the Tormes. Foy knew that the few battalions he could see probably represented a small portion of the enemy army's deployment. At times, glancing through his telescope, Foy could spot Wellington and his staff on the flat-topped tor to his front. He decided to press forward a little to see if he could get a better idea of the British position while he awaited his marshal's orders. Somewhat to his surprise, Foy discovered British and Portuguese light infantry on his side of the ravine, around a ruined chapel known as Nuestra Senhora de la Peña.

He decided to deal with these outposts as usual, sending his own
voltigeurs
and
tirailleurs
*
forward to drive them in. The French light infantry set off with alacrity, skirmishing up to the rocky edge of the ridge, alternately firing, running forward and dropping into cover behind a boulder or in a fold of the ground while they reloaded. As this exchange of fire picked up, Wellington sent more light troops forward. Dark-green-clad marksmen of the 95th Rifles reinforced the defenders of Nuestra Sen-hora de la Peña. With more than a thousand men on each side stubbornly exchanging shots, Foy realized that this was something more than the usual nighttime picket just waiting for its orders to move out.

Wellington was determined to maintain the position around the ruined chapel a little longer so that he could keep his own main body out of sight while trying to force Marmont into showing his. That way the British general would allow the baggage to get well under way and see whether the day might present an opportunity to offer battle while the numbers were still advantageous. Just a couple of hundred yards behind the battalions spotted by Foy early that morning, but shielded by the lie of the land, were no less than five divisions of British infantry standing in closed column, ready to march.

The British commander jotted his first orders of the day. Major General Pakenham and the cavalry marching in his company were to make a long trek, ten miles or so, all the way behind the army (and for most of their journey, invisible to the French). Having started the day as his left flank, on the river, they would eventually become the right and be ready to check Marmont's usual game of trying to get around that side of the British line. Meanwhile the men that Foy had seen early that day were being pulled back off their ridge and replaced with a rather more formidable looking assembly, Wellington's main infantry reserve, the 1st and Light Divisions. Four divisions still remained hidden. For Wellington's intention in posting the 1st and Light was to act as a strong rear guard if he continued his withdrawal or as a temptation to the French commander to fall upon what he would see as a manageable portion of the British army.

As the British commander surveyed the ridge on the opposite side, studying Marmont's reactions, he was accompanied by a large entorage. At first sight this assembly might have seemed an unruly riot of color, but each man had been assigned a place in the great scheme of things: there were his boys, like March, Somerset and the prince of Orange, ready to drive their thoroughbreds across the Spanish fields in the delivery of
some pencil-scribbled note; Cotton with his glittering entourage of young cavalry officers; Beresford in a blue Portuguese coat, surrounded by his own retinue (Majors Warre and Hardinge among them); and there were those dedicated to the efficiency of the staff rather than its decoration, Lieutenant Colonel De Lancey, Major Scovell and others of the quarter master general's staff.

Two miles away, Marmont was surrounded by his own people. Even though it was only 9
A.M.,
the armies had already been in motion for hours. When the Army of Portugal's commander heard reports about the fighting around Nuestra Senhora de la Peña, he drew precisely the conclusion that Wellington would have wanted. It was clear the British were moving off again. Vedettes had seen the baggage heading back toward Portugal. If most of the British force could not be seen, it was probably because they too had joined the march. The troops across from the chapel were no more than a rear guard. Should he attack?

Marmont's best hope had always been to catch a British division or two without proper support and hammer it; but if Wellington was returning to the frontier, the French would soon lose the opportunity. Foy, the marshal's onetime classmate from the artillery academy, worried about his chief's judgment. “He is a good man, estimable and respectable,” wrote Foy, “but he and others are entirely deluded about the nature of his talents. He was not born to be a field general. His face too easily reveals the hesitancy of his spirit and the anxiety of his soul; thus the army enters into his secret. He asks advice too often, too publicly and from too many people.”

On the morning of 22 July, Marmont's uncertainty revealed itself once more in orders that would keep his options open. Artillery was to be brought up, ready to open a cannonade on the British divisions in front. Meanwhile, Thomières and Maucune's infantry divisions, accompanied by light cavalry, were to make their way south and turn Wellington's flank there.

As the morning wore on, the front began to turn through a great arc. It became obvious that the French were crossing the 1st and Light Divisions' feature about one mile to the south. Wellington's attention suddenly turned to this advance, near the larger of the two flat-topped
(Arapil) hills that the locals call
los hermanaos,
the little brothers. Seeing French troops appearing near this rocky tor, he ordered some Portuguese infantry to take it, but they failed. At this point, Wellington resolved to throw the 1st and Light Divisions south, to decide the fate of this singular feature and perhaps draw Marmont into the open in its defense.

But indecision that morning was not only evident in the French camp. Almost as soon as he had set his men in motion, Wellington changed his mind. Scovell, among several staff officers, watched it happen and recorded, “Lord Wellington was more than once about to attack, but was prevented by the insinuations of those about him.” Another officer of that group, Captain William Tomkinson, watched the general confer with his old confederate Beresford before canceling the attack on the Greater Arapil, and noted rather more candidly:

Instead of precipitating battle, the British general fell back once more on that which he knew best: a defensive posture that challenged his opponent to bring on the fight. He was doubtless aware of the murmurings of his staff, for once more, just as he had done on 20 June, the general had faltered at precisely the moment when battle seemed desirable. Major FitzRoy Somerset, ever loyal to his master, detected the insinuations and wrote somewhat defensively that Wellington “was fully as anxious as the youngest
fire eater
in the army to avail himself of any favorable opportunity to attack the French” (emphasis in original). Having halted the attack on the Greater Arapil, the general busied himself positioning several divisions along a new line, a step made necessary by Marmont's maneuvers to the southeast. The 1st and Light would remain in their north-south arrangement, whereas the new positions would stretch back from the east to west, the whole British deployment forming a right angle or L shape.

Wellington and his staff galloped up the Teso de San Miguel, a hillock
that rose behind the village of Los Arapiles, close to the bend in this new line. Although this vantage point was not as high as the “little brothers” to its left and front, it was an extremely good place to study the field. If he looked over his right shoulder, more or less behind him, Wellington could follow the progress of Pakenham and his light cavalry as they moved along, following the orders he had given them that morning. Ahead, behind a ridge topped with dwarf oaks, he could see plumes of dust that revealed the passage of French forces to his right. Atop the bigger of those fraternal features, the Greater Arapil, he could see Marmont and his suite. Between himself and his adversary, Wellington's sharp eye could discern a dip in the ground where he could hide many of his troops from the marshal's gaze. Wellington ordered the 4th and 5th Divisions, with Le Marchant's heavy cavalry brigade, to occupy that ground.

At about 3
P.M.,
Wellington's servants brought him a picnic lunch on the Teso San Miguel. Munching some chicken, he watched French teams setting up their cannon on the ridge opposite him, and beyond Los Arapiles, the tree-topped Monte de Azan, apparently with the intention of bombarding the center of his new line. He looked to his right. The dust still showed the progress of a French force at least a mile away. He totted up the Army of Portugal's constituent parts. Foy's division remained where it had been that morning. There was another atop and around the Greater Arapil hill. There were two or three more deploying on the ridge to his south, with the cannon. Elsewhere he could see the columns of dust kicked up by marching feet. Scouts brought further reports of the French division and cavalry marching farthest to his right. Why were they still moving, if everyone else was establishing a new line in front of the village of Los Arapiles? Wellington knew how many divisions there were in the Army of Portugal and he could account for all of them. Scovell's deciphering had told him very clearly that there were no reinforcements yet from the Armies of the North and Center. What were those people doing on the French right, moving farther and farther away from support? Marmont's maneuvers were creating precisely the sort of threat to his own army that he had been hoping for the past five weeks to cause the British. Wellington threw aside his half-munched chicken and announced, “By God! That will do!”