The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (4 page)

Scovell's fellow DAQMGs, also captains, like Warre, were ten years younger. Hardinge, his friend and one of Moore's aides-de-camp,
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was a dozen years Scovell's junior. These sharp-set young bloods were running the real race. William Warre, from the family of port shippers who were renowned even in this time, was strikingly handsome. One portrait depicts him in the dashing dark blue uniform of the light dragoons with seductive large eyes, a kiss curl across his forehead and the fur-trimmed hussars jacket, or
pelisse,
thrown over his left shoulder. Another of the young DAQMGs had his own secret weapon in the advancement game: his maiden aunt and her constant companion, Goully, one of the ladies-in-waiting at Windsor. These two formidable spinsters made sure the ambitious officer's name was not forgotten by the duke of York and even the king himself. As for Hardinge, he was in the same lowly regiment as Scovell, the son of a Shropshire clergyman. But Hardinge had two advantages: at twenty-two he benefited from twelve years that Scovell could never regain, and this was an army where the highflyers had to be noticed by twenty-five or twenty-six. Hardinge also possessed that uncanny ability to be at the right place at the right time, something that creates a mystique among soldiers.

Just six months earlier, in the summer of 1808, the British army had set out with bold hopes and noisy public fanfare to aid their Spanish allies in the Iberian Peninsula. All of England had been talking about Spain's heroic struggle against Napoleon. Scovell had joined this expedition a few weeks after it landed in Portugal.

The defeat and capture of a French corps at Bailén in July 1808 had caused a sensation throughout Europe. General Dupont had marched eighteen thousand men into British captivity, a humiliation never inflicted on France by its more powerful enemies Austria and Russia in a dozen years of campaigning. Events in Spain captured the imagination of British society so completely that, for a few months, the usually bitter party game between the Whigs and Tories had given way to consensus. The former were smitten by the romance of Spain's popular rising against the French and the tales of what ordinary folk, animated by patriotism, could achieve. The Tories regarded Napoleon's reverses as the long-awaited evidence that these godless Jacobin regicides would receive their just desserts.

When, the month after the Battle of Bailén, Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley had defeated a French force at Vimeiro in Portugal, this was all the government needed to send a full-scale expedition to the Iberian Peninsula, under Castlereagh's vague directive to “cooperate with the Spanish armies in the expulsion of the French from that Kingdom.”

Late in 1808, however, following the twin humiliations of the French at Bailén and Vimeiro, Napoleon had gone into Iberia to sort out the mess himself, and the Spanish armies there had started collapsing as soon as he struck them. It rapidly became clear that Britain's force of thirty-five thousand was not going to win the war on its own. Retreat was Moore's only option.

While Colonel Murray and the officers struggling to draw up evacuation plans had come under heavy fire for a series of organizational blunders in the course of the campaign, Scovell's duties had actually grown. He had proved himself to Murray as a very capable officer, and the QMG was doubtless impressed by Scovell's thirst for self-improvement and desire to learn as many professional lessons as he could from his first campaign. The captain's habit of sitting down to write in his journal, often after having spent long hours in the saddle in driving rain or snow, was one of his most admirable traits. Whereas other officers might down a few glasses of wine and then lose themselves in the oblivion of sleep, Scovell would find a table and scratch away with a quill, digesting the lessons of the campaign before taking his rest. This diligence led Murray to give Scovell the responsibility for much of the army's communications.

For an army of thirty-five thousand to follow the plans drawn up by Moore and his QMG, a constant stream of messages was needed. In
practice this meant orders and reports being scrawled on small bits of paper by a general, often on horseback, and carried away quickly by a courier. If this missive arrived late, in the wrong place, or not at all, the consequences could be catastrophic. Sometimes these dispatches were entrusted to British dragoons. Other times they were carried by a small ad hoc unit under Scovell's personal command, the Corps of Guides. The Guides were an odd assortment, a group of a few dozen men assembled on the cheap, all foreigners hired locally for their knowledge of the countryside and their ability to speak the language. When Scovell was placed in charge of his little band of Italian, Swiss, Portuguese and Spanish deserters and ne'er-do-wells, none of them even knew how to ride a horse, and their commander had been forced to teach them everything on the march. While Scovell resented being worked to the point of exhaustion on a task that would win him few plaudits in the army, he did recognize that it would offer him a good opportunity to display his extraordinary abilities as a linguist, another skill that had already been noticed by Colonel Murray. Scovell's French was fluent, he was picking up Spanish as he went, and he had some grasp of Italian. Using these abilities, he was at least able to teach his men, where most other English officers would have floundered.

Perfecting the army's system of communications was just the type of thankless task eschewed by those members of the staff most obsessed with seeking glory and promotion. Scovell was no less intoxicated by heroic dreams—he clung to his hope that his ultimate destiny lay in leading a regiment of British cavalry, sabers drawn, to some glorious charge—but he was sensible enough to his station in headquarters to know that he could only reach his goal by applying himself diligently to the tasks Murray gave him. Already, Scovell had become fascinated with the workings of secret messages, codes and signals. The navy were the experts in this field, and on his passage down to Portugal months earlier, Scovell had copied dozens of signals into his notebook, filling in the sketched flags with brightly colored inks. It was his attention to the navy's signaling methods that had resulted in Murray delegating him to superintend the vital task that lay in the hours ahead: embarkation at Corunna.

Just as the campaign marked the beginning of Scovell's involvement with trying to organize the army's communications, so it had shown the
extraordinary intelligence that could be obtained by intercepting enemy dispatches. One month before, an order from Napoleon's headquarters to one of his marshals, General Soult, had been captured by Spanish guerrillas and sold to the British. From it, Moore had learned that Soult was advancing into northwest Spain with a detached corps small enough for the British to fight successfully. This precious knowledge saved Moore from blundering into the main French army. Later, at the end of December, another vital scrap of intelligence (in the form of a report from a Spanish agent that Napoleon was marching his main force toward the British in an attempt to cut off their retreat) caused Moore to turn his small force around so that it could find a safe place of embarkation.

But now, all hope to expel Napoleon from the Iberian Peninsula seemed extinguished and the British troops were ready to leave the Continent, hopeless and dejected. For just as the army scattered about Corunna had been the best Britain could field, the minds put to the task of directing it had also been top flight. General Sir John Moore was widely acknowledged as the most professional commander in the army. His attention to detail, zeal for the service and active intellect were generally respected. If these men had failed so miserably, what hope was left?

CHAPTER TWO
T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
C
ORUNNA
, J
ANUARY
1809

A
t dawn on 15 January the feeble first light revealed a scene of great activity in Corunna Bay. The dismounted cavalry had been embarking throughout the night. Longboats crisscrossed the harbor, carrying the troopers to their cramped berths. They clambered on board with their valises and portmanteaus and into the dirty spaces offered by vessels usually carrying coal or bales of wool. Some of the horses had been saved, generally the officers'. One final moment of anguish awaited one cavalry subaltern who had not had the heart to kill his charger. “One of these poor brutes followed the boat which bore its master—an officer of the 18th Hussars—to the transport,” noted the commissary in his journal. The animal's head could be seen straining to stay above the swell, nostrils flared as its legs galloped away underwater, and it “swam like a dog from the shore to the ship; but it could not be taken on board. All who witnessed this incident had tears in their eyes.”

Moore's artillery was already largely afloat. Some guns had been
hoisted on board the few vessels at anchor in the harbor even before Hood's squadron arrived. By the fifteenth, there were only nine field pieces ashore, and they garnished the infantry's positions on the hills behind the port. Some were apprehensive about this, since they suspected Marshal Soult would bring far more guns to bear, and they were not wrong, for as that dawn broke the first of forty cannon were already being manhandled into range of British positions.

On the heights of Palavea, two of the French field pieces had been dragged up by their gunners and by noon they opened fire. This ominous, unmistakable sound echoed across the bay, shattering the illusions of anybody who might have thought Marshal Soult was going to give up and allow the escape of his quarry. It took no time for the French artillerists to find their range, and many of Moore's troops stood in positions that offered no cover.

Scovell was hard at work down on the quayside. He had his own private worry about the embarkation; namely whether he could honorably discharge his reponsibility to his Guides. Since they were an exotic mix of half a dozen nationalities (none of them English), he was afraid that they would be left behind if the battle was lost and it turned into a pell-mell scramble for the boats. And since many of Scovell's Guides were deserters from the French army, they could expect only one thing if Soult captured them. At this moment, on the afternoon of the fifteenth, however, there was nothing he could do for them. They were still up with their divisions and he had others to embark.

Moore's deputy assistant QMG was unhappy for other reasons too, as he stood watching the bustle in the port. He believed that the order to get so many guns on board was unwise in the extreme. Around fifty pieces had been embarked, turning a British superiority in that arena into a decided weakness. “Knowing that we should be obliged to fight an action to ensure our safety,” he asked rhetorically in his journal, “why deprive yourself of so powerful an arm?” He did not take into account, however, something evidently beyond the ken of a frustrated and passed-over captain, that the loss of artillery was a peculiarly political thing, a matter of propaganda. Generals were court-martialed for the loss of guns. Napoleon, an artillery officer by trade, had made a curious fetish of listing with delight the pieces captured during his many victories in his news sheet, the
Moniteur.

The firing on the morning of the fifteenth had not heralded a general action. The French still had men and equipment they wanted to bring up. Moore's plan of defense, as day turned into evening, was based on a string of hills behind the port, which like two great arms embraced the goings-on in the harbor. The only real weakness in this position was where the arms met, where a small river called the Monelos cut through the massif and ran down to Corunna Bay. If the French could batter their way through this natural opening in the defenses, the withdrawal of much of Moore's infantry would be threatened. Soult could then hope to capture a few thousand of them, and his already considerable prestige in Napoleon's court would be further enhanced. The tactical soundness of the plan was typical of the man, for he had risen by grasping the detail of successful military operations while accepting their overall direction by the emperor. Napoleon himself had broken off the chase when it had become apparent that he and his guard could not catch up with Moore. He did not want the British to have the satisfaction of escaping him in person, so he had ordered Soult, whose troops nicknamed him the Iron Hand, to continue the pursuit.