The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (41 page)

When it was no more than a few days out of Malaga, the ship carrying Soult's dispatch was sighted by a Royal Navy cruiser and a chase
began. The French captain evidently knew that he was carrying a letter for the emperor himself but was not aware of its contents. He decided to play it safe and make a run for one of the French-occupied Catalan ports. As soon as he landed, the captain saw to it that the letter was conveyed directly to the commander of the Army of Catalonia, Marshal Suchet. Suchet had done very well for himself in Spain, being the only general officer to receive his marshal's baton there. He had come by the same hard road as many of the other French commanders—the Italian campaign and the smashing of Austria and Russia in 1805. He was less senior than Soult and perhaps more nervous about remaining high in the emperor's esteem. Being in possession of the same deciphering table as Soult, a copy
en clair
was on his desk by 8 September.

Eloquently, and with many expressions of shocked disbelief, Soult informed the emperor that his brother Joseph was a traitor. According to the Soult, King Joseph had sent emissaries to negotiate with the Spanish government in Cadiz. The reason Joseph wanted him to quit Andalucia, Soult insinuated, was that his deal with the Spanish involved returning the south to their control in return for an accommodation in the rest of the country. The key passage of this scurrilous denunciation reads, “It is my duty to inform your Excellency that I have a fear that all the bad arrangements made [by Joseph] and all the intrigues that have been going on, have the object of forcing the Imperial armies to retreat.” The marshal's letter showed his gift for melodrama, suggesting that “I have thought it necessary to lay my fears before six generals of my army, after having made them take an oath not to reveal what I told them save to the Emperor himself.”

“Perhaps my suspicions are ill-founded,” Soult concluded oleaginously, “but in such a delicate situation it is better to discuss even the worst things … my peace of mind depends on the well being and service of the Emperor and of the safety of the army confided to my command.”

Quite what Suchet's reaction was at having such an extraordinarily compromising document fall into his hands, has not been recorded. Did Soult have such an intimate rapport with Napoleon that he could denigrate Joseph in this way? If so, perhaps Suchet should send the message on its way. On the other hand, as King of Spain, Joseph was his own nominal superior just as he was Soult's—Suchet knew that forwarding
such a message could then make him an accessory to treason. He resolved to act quickly.

The day that Soult wrote his letter, Wellington's army entered Madrid. The British general was a little nervous about taking this portentous step because he knew that the French could still unite a field army large enough to drive him back to the borders of Portugal. The political consequences of leaving the Spanish capital to be reoccupied could be serious, but he felt the blow his advance to Madrid would deal to the entire French enterprise in Spain would justify the gamble. Meanwhile, the longer Soult refused to quit the south, the longer Wellington knew he had to hunt the force he had battered at Salamanca, the Army of Portugal.

Joseph's regime and the class of Spanish sympathizers that had served it did not await the Allies' arrival. The king's French secretary of state, part of the evacuation of 9 August, noted that “all of the French families and those of the compromised Spaniards, who were more worried about the vengeance of their compatriots than the maltreatment of the victors, were rushing to leave the city, and a great many of them, bereft of means of transport or the money to hire it, decided to make the journey by foot.” This crowd, thousands strong, made its way southeast toward Valencia, the nearest city, where the king was setting up his temporary headquarters.

During the last two weeks of August 1812, the British commander was feted by
Madrileños,
*
nearly hysterical over their liberation. The general was never entirely comfortable with displays of public emotion and civic flattery, but he bore it well enough in the line of duty. Everywhere, redcoats were greeted with enthusiastic
Vivas!,
in the churchs
Te Deums
were sung for the city's deliverance and Wellington was obliged to sit through numerous tedious panegyrics. The great Spanish master Francisco Goya decided he must paint the conquering hero. Knowing rapid brushwork was the order of the day, Goya took a portrait of King Joseph on horseback that he had already started and added the British commander in chief's head instead. Goya's painting was ready for public exhibition on 1 September—a day of rejoicing and thanksgiving for Madrid's deliverance. Wellington took an instant dislike to it, feeling
that the body of the figure in the painting was too heavy altogether while his own was lean and wiry.

To escape the metropolitan clamor, the general had moved Allied headquarters to the royal palace
El Escurial.
Scovell went in search of the palace's art treasures, only to discover that the royal residence had been “stripped of its jewels and ornaments by the French.” Only frescoes, which even the most rapacious marshal could hardly have carried off, remained. Scovell always took any opportunity to visit the great cultural sights of Iberia and added the Escurial to his list of edifying excursions, along with the great library of the University of Coimbra, Lisbon's churches and Roman ruins of Merida.

Despite his reluctance to attend further noisy celebrations, on the first Wellington agreed to attend a bullfight in his honor in the amphitheater close to Madrid's Alcalá gate. This was a most suitable way of greeting the liberation, since Joseph's Bonapartist state had banned this traditional sport. Major Scovell, among other staff officers, went with him. While Wellington's position ensured his invitation to far more functions than he would naturally have wished to attend, it was a rare opportunity for a more lowly officer like Scovell to spend a day enjoying himself, especially after a hard season's campaigning.

At 4:30
P.M.,
with the late summer's heat giving way to a cooler evening, the show began. Ten thousand people were crammed into the amphitheater, and Wellington's staff officer looked around at this acme of Spanish spectacles with relish. “After parading before Lord Wellington's box and having roses thrown at them by the ladies (for all the Spanish youth and beauty was there), two of the mounted men returned and the bull was let out amid the acclamations of the people,” Scovell later jotted in his journal.

The first action of the contest consisted of mounted lancers taunting the bulls until the horned beasts charged, usually goring the riders' steeds. With his love of horses and innate sense of fair play, Scovell found this display revolting, noting that “two had their bowels let out, and the most cruel part of the business is that the Rider is not thought any thing of unless the poor animal dies under him.” Matadors on foot then dispatched several more bulls by plunging swords into the shoulders of the swaying, bloodied beasts. Scovell was transfixed by it all and wrote, “I never saw a more cruel or a more interesting sight than this is altogether.”

Wellington's attendance at the bullfight may well have been a deliberate ploy to ensure that he was publicly seen just as he was about to begin a bold strategic gamble. On either the same evening or early the next day, his headquarters was on its way again, heading north out of the city through the Guadarrama mountains and into the plains of northern Castille. The British drive northward would end around 135 miles north of the capital at Burgos. A corps under the trusty Rowland Hill was left to guard Madrid while the commander of forces was to try to use the bulk of his army to bring on another battle with the Army of Portugal. Wellington was racing against time; he had to hammer this French corps before it could be reinforced.

While Wellington's march to Burgos was based on a sound starting premise—that after Salamanca the thirty-five-thousand-stong Army of Portugal was still brittle and would collapse if seriously assaulted—it also involved considerable risk. The strategy relied, though, on Soult pigheadedly holding on in Andalucia, for if he abandoned the south, he would bring eighty thousand troops into play against the Allies and any move into northeast Spain, nullifying the Allied advantage in numbers and creating the risk that their supply lines back to Portugal might come under attack.

While Wellington's force pushed north, General Bertrand Clausel, the Army of Portugal's commander, despaired of the morale of his troops: “It is usual to see an army disheartened after a check: but it would be hard to find one whose discouragement is greater than that of these troops.” Unfortunately for Wellington, Clausel kept falling back to avoid battle and as the British commander pursued him, the garrison of Burgos got in his way. He could not simply bypass it, since that would leave them free to threaten the rear of his army.

Almost one thousand years before the British general ever laid eyes on it, Burgos had been a bastion against the Moorish advance into northern Spain. Its castle, positioned at the end of a great spur of high terrain dominating the River Arlanzon, was surrounded on three sides by steep slopes. When Napoleon saw it in 1808, he had admired the natural strength of the spot and ordered its medieval center to be clad in all manner of modern defenses so that it was fit to face the age of gunpowder and breaching batteries. The one easy approach, along the tongue of
land behind the citadel, had been blocked by a great redoubt bristling with guns, the Hornwork of San Miguel. A girdle of thick walls surrounded its old stone defenses and some two thousand picked men had been thrown into it by the French as they retreated.

From the outset it was apparent to many on the staff, including Scovell, with his experience of so many reconnaissance missions, that this fortress would not fall easily. And even if it could be taken, how would the Allied army be able to maintain this position so far into Spain, hundreds of miles from the safety of the Portuguese border? Certain doubts must have afflicted Wellington as well, but he committed himself to the siege operation.

After the horrors of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, it was asking a great deal of Wellington's tired army to attempt a third major operation of this kind in one campaigning season. Knowing well the feelings of the regiments that had suffered so horribly in the great breach of Badajoz, he decided to excuse the Light, 3rd and 4th Divisions from the work at Burgos. On 19 September the fortress was surrounded by troops of the 6th and 1st Divisions.

Wellington moved swiftly into attack, ordering the storm of the San Miguel Hornwork on the very first night of his siege. Troops of the 42nd Highlanders, the Black Watch, assaulted the position frontally, but took hundreds of casualties as they stalled in their approach. Only the intrepidity of the major placed in command of some light companies sent around the back of the work rescued the storming operation. He managed to break in and take it. It was none other than Edward Cocks, a onetime colleague of Scovell's in the intelligence department, who now led the storming parties of the 79th Highlanders, putting himself forward to lead these Forlorn Hopes under the gravest risks, driven by the desire to distinguish himself. On 27 September, Major Cocks heard a rumor going around the lines that he had been killed. He went into the trenches where British troops were burrowing their way toward the castle's walls asking for news, and received the ominous reply, “‘Nothing, Sir, but Major Cocks is killed.' One man actually argued the matter with me. A little further were my own men and some of my friends, condoling over my fate. The surprise on their faces was very whimsical and it was not a little gratifying to observe how one's death took.”

As the siege progressed into attempts to batter the citadel itself,
responsibility for directing this deadly work rested with the staff, and it was here that the British commander's old animosity toward the scientific soldiers was rekindled. Wellington's direction of the siege caused deep divisions, most importantly with his principal specialist adviser, Major John Burgoyne of the Royal Engineers. Siege warfare, with all its calculations about trajectories and the weight of shot needed to open breaches, was regarded by most officers of the time as the ultimate expression of scientific generalship. But following the great success at Ciudad Rodrigo nine months earlier, Wellington fancied that he had a pretty good idea of how to take a fortress more swiftly than the “experts.” The stage was set for conflict.

Major Burgoyne's main criticism was that his commander's lack of confidence about success caused him to throw men away with a series of half measures. After one operation at Burgos, Burgoyne wrote home bitterly that failure was the result of “the miserable, doubting, unmilitary policy of small storming parties.” During this row, Wellington did not apparently display the scorn that some witnessed on other occasions for low-bred officers of the technical arms. However, members of the staff who came from such backgrounds were well aware of the general's prejudices. Wellington believed the experience of France showed that artillery and engineer officers were potential revolutionaries, given that many came from bourgeois families and had, as he put it, “no connection with property.” He distrusted them, as he distrusted some Wycombites, because intelligence and education had been the main criteria in granting them an officer's commission.