The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (42 page)

In the case of the general's assistant QMG and commander of the Guides, the tensions had been exacerbated by a rebuke on Wellington's part during their advance to Madrid. On the march, when communications with Lieutenant General Rowland Hill's detached corps had broken down for a single day, and despite his previous pleasure (notably the mention in dispatches), Scovell received a considerable dressing down. While relations between the AQMG and his master soon returned to their usual pitch of formal correctness, Scovell could not forget the incident, for it gave him an intimation that his devoted service to headquarters during three and a half dangerous years had not been enough to overcome Wellington's personal prejudices. In addition to the vital code-breaking work, Scovell's organizational skills had also made him quite
indispensable in running the army's communications. Dozens of new messengers (most of them Don Julian's guerrillas) had been taken on to help cover the greater distances between the Portuguese frontier and Burgos. By late 1812 Scovell was directing hundreds of men in this task and, adhering to the principle that prompt payment was the best defense against treachery on the part of the messengers, spent £22,477 in little over one year on it. None of this, though, seemed to count as much as a noble pedigree in the eyes of his master.

Scovell's resentment, usually carefully kept off the pages of his journal, emerged openly during the bad-tempered conflict between science and intuition in headquarters at Burgos. When officers gathered in huddles to discuss the operation, Scovell was naturally inclined to take Burgoyne's part. In fact, he repeated his criticisms almost to the letter.

On 22 September, for example, he wrote in his journal after one attack, “It failed and the cause, in my humble opinion, was the taking of men by detachments instead of at once taking a regiment. “Although the use of bands of volunteers from different units was common in storming operations, it evidently struck many of the staff as a bad idea at Burgos. Specifically, Burgoyne felt that any Forlorn Hope of picked volunteers needed to be backed by a full regiment acting in support: Wellington refused to commit men in this way. When the final assault failed on 19 October, Scovell wrote, “I have little doubt that a well supported attack would have carried the place.”

It had soon become apparent that the small train of heavy guns marching with the main army was quite inadequate to the task of battering Burgos. More than once these eighteen-pounders were established in a battery, only to be overwhelmed by the fire coming from within the fortress. Gun carriages were smashed and men ripped apart by the fire of the garrison defenders. Wellington did not have the time to bring up the large train he had used earlier in the year and which, by an uncharacteristic oversight, he had neglected to call upon when he first meditated the siege of Burgos. One member of the staff suggested that they ask the Royal Navy for help. A messenger could reach the Biscayan littoral in just a few days and would then be able to ask Commodore Sir Home Popham, who commanded the squadron there, for the use of heavy naval guns. For ten days, Wellington did not accept this very wise
advice, and when he finally acceded to it the guns could not be brought over the Cantabrian sierra fast enough to alter the issue.

While Wellington was tackling these myriad problems at Burgos, Scovell was trying to Cope with some quite new difficulties of communication.

By August it had become clear that the army would march deeper into northern Spain, closer to the Biscayan coast, and that consequently there would be closer cooperation with Commodore Popham. This officer was a fire eater, a type that became famous in his service: in 1806 he had interpreted a vaguely worded set of orders from the admiralty so liberally that he launched an invasion of South America on his own initiative. He combined audacity in action with great diligence in matters of staff work and was something of a savant on the matter of codes. Indeed as far as the navy was concerned he had written
the
book on the subject. Popham's treatise,
Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary,
had made communications by flag between warships more efficient and secure. With this background, naturally Popham suggested that communications between them, across no-man's-land, ought to be protected by a cipher.

Wellington relied on Popham to coordinate actions by guerrillas on the coast and support them, but he did not feel that ciphers were justified. He wrote back to the commodore: “I beg to observe to you that I have no cipher in which I could correspond with you: and unless the Spaniards in the north are very different from those I have seen elsewhere, or the enemy opposed to you more active than those I have met with, you have no reason to apprehend that your letters will be intercepted. Those to whom they may be entrusted may not take the trouble of carrying them; but they would prefer death to delivering them to the enemy.” In other words, he did not believe their communications were in jeopardy. This reply might be seen equally as a backhanded compliment to Scovell's efficient system of Spanish messengers, a poignant comment on the lack of a common code between the two services, or indeed an example of the kind of
froideur
that rendered professional intercourse between army and navy so unsatisfying to both partners.

When it came to communications with the army's expeditionary corps in eastern Spain (which had finally landed after Lord William Bentinck's procrastination earlier in the summer), Wellington took a
different line: he was quite certain that he wished to encode his thoughts. In this case, messages going between the two armies could be sent either back into Portugal, thence by boat around to Catalonia, or by Spanish messengers across central Iberia; either way there was a risk of them falling into French hands.

Wellington's attempts to furnish the armies with a common cipher had initially been almost as badly managed as King Joseph's first experience with the
Grand Chiffre
in 1811. A diplomatic cipher had been sent out, but there had been problems initially with making sure both sides had the same table and later with words not contained in the tables.

Scovell's solution to the problem was most ingenious. He made sure that both headquarters had copies of the same edition of pocket dictionary and used this tome as the basis of his code. So, to quote an example given by him, the code 134A18 could be deciphered as follows: 134 was the page number; A is the column; 18 is the number of words or letters from the top. This type of code is extremely strong, and it successfully protected communications with the Catalonian expeditionary corps. It was his experience with breaking French ciphers that gave Scovell such a solid grounding in codes and helped him establish this “two book” system. The British need for such ciphers was obviously less than that of the French (with their need to coordinate operations across a bandit-infested country), but it is remarkable how the man in charge of Wellington's communications arrived so quickly at what was a virtually impregnable solution.

As the siege of Burgos progressed, it was becoming more and more apparent how difficult an undertaking it really was. The trenches needed to approach the walls under cover proved very hard to dig. The ground was rocky and the slope so steep that French sharpshooters on the ramparts more than one hundred feet above were often able to fire down on the working parties. Attempts to batter the walls with gunfire proved so ineffectual that Wellington and Burgoyne decided to try blowing them up instead. The first blast of this kind, on 29 September, hardly inspired confidence. As Scovell noted wearily, “Recourse was had to a mine which in my humble opinion was made at the opposite place to where it ought to have been formed.”

One day of frustration followed another. Morale sank among the rank and file and tensions rose in the staff. For the general and his staff officers, Burgos was made all the harder by the loss of a trusted friend. Just twelve days after he had written home about the exaggerated rumors of his own demise, Edward Cocks was cut down during fighting in the trenches. Scovell noted simply in his journal, “My firm friend Cocks was finished in this business.” Cocks's daring scouting missions in the early days of the war had made him a particular favorite of Wellington's, who wrote, “He is on every ground the greatest loss we have yet sustained.”

After four weeks of grim struggle, Wellington ordered a storm at dusk on 18 October. It failed. A series of costly attacks brought the British close to the inner defenses but did not carry them. By the time Wellington gave up, 509 men had been killed and more than 1,500 injured, all in vain. The soldiers cursed the bloody place.

The failure at Burgos left Wellington horribly exposed. He was hundreds of miles from the Portuguese frontier and knew that the time when Joseph could assemble a large army was fast approaching. He had also discovered that Clausel's corps had been reinforced from France and was ready to advance against him. After stubbornly holding out for so long, Soult had, at last, evacuated the south and was in a position to combine forces with the others.

The decision on 21 October to fall back toward the frontier had important political consequences. British troops relinquished the Spanish capital to the taunts of its distraught citizenry. The army faced a long and arduous withdrawal back to the Portuguese borderlands. Inevitably opinion in London would see the failure at Burgos as a costly reverse and the campaign, with its glorious episodes of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and Salamanca, would end on a sour note. As Wellington's men began their march, the first driving rains of the fall lowered their spirits further.

With Wellington countered at Burgos, King Joseph found himself considering the consequences of Marshal Soult's scurrilous dispatch of 12 August. Soult's objective in writing it, namely his desire to hang on in Andalucia, had been superceded by events, but the reverberations
caused by that ill-judged letter had been slowly gathering force in the French high command.

It had not taken Marshal Suchet, the French commander in southeast Spain, long to send Soult's treacherous letter on its way. Unfortunately for Soult, his habit of picking quarrels had also made him an enemy of Suchet. So Suchet took the king's visit to Valencia as a welcome opportunity for retribution. Soult's message was forwarded to the very man it had accused of treason.

The duke of Dalmatia's letter was an unhappy product of a system in which different commanders had maintained their own direct relations with the emperor. Even since March, when the right to direct strategy had at last been ceded, the recalcitrance among his commanders still rendered Joseph's job a grievous burden.

By the autumn of 1812, southern Spain had been evacuated, and almost everywhere the
guerrillas
were gaining strength after the French humiliation at Salamanca. What vexed Joseph the most was that he still carried all the responsibility but in fact had very little power. His response to reading Soult's letter therefore was to try to use it as a pretext to have him sacked.

Joseph picked his trusted staff officer Colonel Desprez to carry a letter to the emperor demanding Soult's dismissal. This officer set out from Valencia on 9 September on a journey that was to become something of an epic. Having traveled three hundred leagues to reach Paris on 21 September, he discovered that his imperial master was away in the midst of Russia and he had to ride a further eight hundred leagues across eastern Europe until he finally arrived at Napoleon's headquarters in Moscow on 18 October.

While Colonel Desprez was making his way to an emperor who insisted on maintaining the ultimate personal control over the Iberian struggle from the other end of Europe, Joseph was having to deal with Marshal Soult in person. Having quit Andalucia, Soult met Joseph, Suchet and Jourdan for a council of war in Cordoba on 3 October.

“The ruler's first interview with the marshal produced some lively arguments,” according to Marshal Jourdan's understated account. “They were conducted face to face. At all times Joseph, always generous, appeased him and showed himself ready to forget what had happened.” A new battle plan was proposed in which Soult would be given
command of a substantial column and move toward Wellington. Some of his army of the South, however, would be needed by other commanders, a proposal that triggered an immediate outburst: “The Duke of Dalmatia, having received his orders, instead of hastening to carry them out, pressed the King to make changes, gave him advice and suggested that he did not have the right to transfer from one army to another troops that the Emperor had confided to his command … the King, deeply unhappy with this obstinacy, directed him to carry out his written orders, or failing that to relinquish command of his army to the Count d'Erlon.”

Soult was cowed into cooperation; the king argued bygones should be bygones: neither was sincere and both decided to bide their time. Since Colonel Desprez was still on his odyssey along the highways of eastern Europe, Joseph knew that it would be some time before he received an answer to his request for the marshal's dismissal, time in which it was essential that they act to retake some of the ground lost in this disastrous campaign.

By 17 October Joseph had cajoled his marshals into launching a new plan of war. Soult's Army of the South, and Joseph's own Army of the Center, would attempt to link up with Clausel's force to the north. It was exactly this movement that sent Wellington scurrying back from Burgos to the comparative safety of the Portuguese border.

When Joseph finally received the emperor's response to his letter of 9 September, many weeks had passed. The missive itself must have been a bitter disappointment to the king of Spain. His messenger, Colonel Desprez, had reached Napoleon on the very day that the emperor's fortunes had turned. He had just resolved to abandon Moscow, having realized that holding Russia's capital would not secure her capitulation. The emperor's message was therefore terse, telling his brother to sort out the problems with Soult by himself.