The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (40 page)

The shattered remnants of the 101st, 66th, 15th and 22nd infantry were either skulking in the trees or giving themselves up to British infantry. Some fifteen hundred surrendered to the 5th Division. Elsewhere, the 3rd Division met the French fugitives: “Hundreds of men
frightfully disfigured, black with dust and worn out with fatigue and covered with saber cuts and blood threw themselves among us for safety,” one diarist recalled.

Among the French casualties were several of their leaders. General Thomières had been shot during the fight with Pakenham; he was captured but would soon die. Colonel Jardet, the ADC whose ciphered letter from Paris had provided such good intelligence to the British earlier in the year, was also killed. Command of the Army of Portugal devolved at this critical moment onto General Bertrand Clausel, who, in the best style of his imperial master, resolved to meet this present emergency with an immediate attack of his own.

The British 4th Division had already been checked atop the ridge, and Clausel threw the three uncommitted French formations into a general advance in this cental sector, supported by a dragoon brigade. At first, Wellington's men were driven back toward Los Arapiles in disorder. Marshal Beresford, accompanied by his ADC Major William Warre, rode into the retreating columns, trying to rally them. Beresford was soon shot in the chest and fell from his horse (although he survived). Warre recorded, “I escaped very well with two shots on my sword scabbard, and one thro' my holster, which is as near as I ever wish to have them.”

Although Clausel's counterattack initially made good progress, Wellington had more in reserve than his opponents and was able to throw three fresh divisions in their way. Wellington himself was now riding about the center, often on his own, firing off orders to the staff who somehow still managed to find him in the gloom and cacophony of battle. Clausel's attack had lost momentum, and for the British army there was one more great step to be taken to complete the victory. The French, meanwhile, had begun falling back to a position about half a mile behind the Greater Arapil hill, where they would make their final defense. Sensing the change in fortunes, Wellington sent the prince of Orange with an order to bring up the Light Division. He then ordered an assault on the Greater Arapil, which captured another French battery.

After 8
P.M
., with darkness almost enveloping the battlefield, Scovell found Wellington and was issued with new orders: to bring the 5th and another division across from where they had been fighting earlier in the afternoon. He galloped off to his task, even taking it on his own initiative to redirect one of the divisions at one point on its march across.

By 10
P.M.
the battle was almost at an end: elation spread among Wellington and his staff. When the officers of the adjutant general's department would eventually compile their returns, the loss of the Allied forces was around five thousand (including wounded), whereas that of the French probably exceeded fourteen thousand. Two eagles had been captured, a loss that always irritated the emperor, and twenty cannon.

Everything was set, late on 22 July, for an energetic pursuit the following morning. A couple of days before, Wellington had deployed a Spanish brigade to the main bridge on the French line of withdrawal over the Tormes. With any luck, thousands of men would be stuck on the Allied side of its channel. Two brigades of cavalry awaited the dawn keenly. They were fresh and had not been committed in the fight that the British would remember thereafter as Salamanca and the French as Los Arapiles.

On the battlefield, soldiers' wives went in search of their fallen husbands. Susannah Dalbiac was one, turning over the disfigured faces of one dragoon after another before hearing the joyous news that her husband was not dead. Scovell was relieved to find that his brother-in-law had also survived the great charge that had done so much to win the day. Clowes told Scovell that riding off the field he had encountered General Le Marchant's son, Carey. The young captain was quite ignorant of his father's fate and Clowes, who had led his regiment gallantly throughout the day, found that his courage had failed him at this dreadful moment and he could not bring himself to tell Carey that his father was dead and that he and his seven siblings were orphans.

The staff had a brief respite that night. They chattered excitedly in their bivouacs about a victory that had transformed every expectation of the war in Spain. Some wrote home, keen to break the news of the triumph to their loved ones. William Warre told his sister:

The following morning the pursuit was resumed, and General Wellington made the painful discovery that the Spanish force he had intended to block the Tormes had relinquished its position even before the action of the twenty-second, allowing the French to escape across the river. His immense disappointment was tempered somewhat late in the morning of the twenty-third when Bock's brigade of heavy cavalry caught the French rear guard near Garcia Hernandez. The retreating troops belonged to Foy's division, the only one of the Army of Portugal that had escaped largely unscathed from the previous day's pounding. Scovell watched from a nearby ridge as the German Legion dragoons prepared to charge the French, noticing squadrons of French cavalry nearby who did nothing to intervene. Their spirit had been broken, he reflected, for they had ceased to risk their own lives in defense of their comrades.'

Faced with the imminent onslaught, the rearmost French battalion formed square, but this specific, usually infallible tactic, was to fail them this day. As the German dragoons charged the French, their commander and his horse were hit by a hail of musketry; man and beast fell together onto the firers' ranks. In that moment, the integrity of their defense was broken. Troopers rode into the breach and the battalion was finished. Once cavalry rode into a square, it dissolved in seconds, for the French found themselves attacked from behind and it became a matter of every man for himself. A little farther along, another regiment was mauled too. Foy's division thus suffered more than eleven hundred casualties and Wellington's heavies notched up their second triumph in as many days.

The events at Salamanca caused considerable eclat in the French command. Every previous assumption that Wellington was some sepoy general, an overrated mediocrity, had to be cast aside. Indeed General Foy himself was moved to compare his adversary to the greatest captains of the previous century: “The battle of Salamanca … put Wellington in almost the same class as Marlborough. We had the opportunity, until that moment, of knowing his prudence, his choice of positions, his skill at drawing things out; at Salamanca he showed himself to be a considerable manoeuvrer; he kept his dispositions hidden almost all day; he waited for our movements before revealing his own; he revealed little; he fought in an oblique order; it was a battle in the style of Frederick [the Great].”

Wellington's private verdict was given succinctly in a letter to Sir Thomas Graham: “After manoeuvring all morning in the usual French style, nobody knew with what object, [Marmont] at last pressed upon my right in such a manner, at the same time without engaging, that he would have either carried our Arapiles, or he would have confined us entirely to our position. This was not to be endured, and we fell upon him, turning his left flank; and I never saw an army receive such a beating.”

On 24 July, Wellington halted the army and set about writing his victory dispatch. There was praise enough to go around; the ordinary soldiers were thanked, as were the many senior officers, several of whom had fallen wounded. Le Marchant's heavies did not get the credit that their pivotal role merited, and it seems that General Cotton, following his argument with their now-dead commander, had already gained his revenge in the way this record was written. For the more junior officers, any mention in this missive meant promotion. Most of his aristocratic favorites were there: De Lancey, the prince of Orange and FitzRoy Somerset. The honor of going home with the victory dispatch and laying the captured eagles at the Prince Regent's feet was given to a highborn ADC, Captain Lord Clinton.

While Wellington might have ignored Scovell on many an occasion, he knew a secret shared by only two or three officers in headquarters. Without confidence about the size of the enemy army, he would never have given battle. It was Scovell's deciphering of letters in the Great Paris Cipher that had given Wellington the pronounced advantage as the campaign had drawn toward its climax. They had told him first that Marmont's army would not be reinforced by large numbers from the north, and then had revealed exactly when he must take them on. For this achievement Scovell was mentioned in the Salamanca dispatch and made lieutenant colonel just fifteen months after getting his majority. If he had any regrets at not sharing in the glorious charge of Le Marchant's brigade, this must surely have swept them away. For Scovell had achieved another step of promotion, not by drawing blood but by the application of science and intellect.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
T
HE
M
ARCH TO
B
URGOS,
S
UMMER AND
E
ARLY
F
ALL
1812

N
apoleon had decided that Marshal Soult, a onetime private in the “royal army, was among his most brilliant generals. As a sergeant at the time of the revolution who had soon risen to divisional commander after that tumultuous event, Soult was completely confident of his master's approbation. Indeed, he believed that he was but a victory away from being made monarch of some unfortunate vassal state. Soult's pretensions seem to have been touched off by Napoleon's decision to give the throne of Naples to another of his favorite subordinates, Marshal Joachim Murat. Despite his aspirations, which had shown themselves in Oporto during the brief occupation of 1809 and led many officers in Spain to deride him as
Le Roi Nicolas
or the Sultan of Andalucia, a royal title had eluded Soult. Nevertheless, he could use the stewardship of Andalucia to outdo his peers in another area: amassing wealth.

The French system of imposing taxes on Spanish communities following victorious conquests or episodes of revolt often took the form of property simply being carted off by Napoleon's troops. Marshal Soult
freely exploited these powers to amass a personal fortune. Even following the French drubbing at Salamanca and despite the fact that Wellington's advance through the center of the country made it a very real possibility that he would be cut off from France, Soult would not contemplate abandoning the lucrative vice-royalty he had carved for himself in Andalucia. Moreover he knew that the emperor had a weakness for bullying the siblings he had placed on several of Europe's thrones, among them King Joseph of Spain. The marshal believed he could play on Napoleon's ill will toward his brother Joseph. The king had been sending him fresh appeals to quit the south of Spain.

On 12 August, Soult tried an extraordinary gamble. He wrote to Napoleon himself in an attempt to destroy the little credibility Joseph had in the eyes of his own brother and dictate the strategy to be pursued by the entire army in Spain, a letter upon which he believed his own fate and that of his nation's arms in Spain would depend. The question was how to get it to the emperor without it falling into the wrong hands?

In the aftermath of Salamanca, resentments between Napoleon's marshals in Spain burned with fearsome intensity. Recriminations, accusations and rhetorical
rhodomontades
flew between them and their masters. While each sought to distance himself from the latest disaster and to heap the blame on another, no member of the marshallate embodied the spirit of recalcitrance more spectacularly than Nicolas Soult.

Since no message from Paris had reached his desk for more than four months, Soult knew that sending an overland courier would be risky. Even a squadron of dragoons could not protect such a messenger from parties of insurgents. Although he trusted the cipher, in this specific case it would be equally disastrous for the secret missive to fall into King Joseph's hands; even the strongest of escorts could not protect his dispatch from some curious French officer also holding the key to the
Grand Chiffre.

Soult's solution was to give it to the captain of a French man-of-war that was sailing from Malaga to Marseilles. Plenty of ships made the run up the Catalan coast unmolested, but there was always the chance that a Royal Navy frigate might intercept and board the vessel.