The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (45 page)

Longa was a gunsmith from Rioja who had joined the patriotic insurrection in its early days. His band varied in strength between a few hundred and a few thousand. They had successfully evaded many attempts to wipe them out. They judiciously sought refuge in the high sierra whenever things got too bad. By late 1812 Longa ‘s guerrilla band had evolved into a well-organized three-thousand-man force able to launch raids using either guerrilla skirmishing tactics or the kind of formal evolutions carried out by infantry of the line. Longa's skill at creating this force had been rewarded with a colonel's commission in the regular Spanish army and he had also evolved a close relationship with the British, through Commodore Sir Home Popham. The British supplied him with weapons and in return he began to relay intercepted documents or other more delectable trophies. In May 1812 he had captured a convoy of King Joseph's servants bearing a thousand bottles of fine claret, which he sent to Wellington, where it lubricated the headquarter's
table for the remainder of the campaign. Although Longa's men were well disciplined by the standards of many bands, they remained ferocious in action; William Warre testified in July 1812 to an ambush where “an intercepted mail from Paris to Madrid which was taken by Longa, who killed 400 men who escorted it except 12, who, he says, did not show so strong an inclination to leave their bodies there.”

It may well be possible that the courier bearing King Joseph's letter to his brother of 28 January had fallen into Longa's hands in the Pancorbo pass. The precise details of what happened are lost. Whether it was a Spanish collaborator or some French staff officer, and whether he was tortured or simply shot through the brain at point-blank range, the messenger and his precious cargo were separated.

The further details of how the papers made their way to British headquarters are also unclear. It seems likely that having been handed to the Royal Navy, the papers bearing the mysterious numbers of the Great Paris Cipher were then sent around to Portugal and headquarters at Frenada. Scovell would only have to have read the first line to see both the importance of the message and the fact that it was in the cipher he had already cracked:
Pour l'Empereur
—for the emperor.

Scovell would have folded out the deciphering table that he had attached to his copy of Conradus. Two other papers were enclosed with the king's dispatch, including the infamous Soult letter. It was copied onto cartridge paper bearing the Royal Navy watermark. The whole bilious correspondence documenting months of French cabal and intrigue thus ended up on Wellington's desk.

There can be little doubt that these letters provided Wellington a precious insight into the enmities of the Army of Spain command. There were always rumors and reports from spies, but it was laid out before him in two or three letters captured that winter in the same words that Joseph had intended for the emperor. The feud between Soult and the king would have harmed the morale of French forces; as always when subordinate officers were forced to choose sides in such intrigues, suspicion, hostility and division were natural. This climate was a further consideration in assessing how the king's forces might react to a British attack in 1813.

For King Joseph, the early months of that new year brought one ghastly revelation after another. His brother's public explanation of the Russian failure, the twenty-ninth
Bulletin,
published in Paris on 3 December, reached the English secretary of war's desk in London on the twenty-first and finally arrived in Madrid on 6 January 1813. Since so many sons of Picardy or the Languedoc lay dead in the Russian snows, this announcement required a certain amount of candor on the emperor's part: most of the
Grande Armée
was lost.

The
Bulletin
reported that the onset of heavy frosts after 6 November had killed thousands of horse. By the fourteenth, “the men seemed stunned, lost their gaiety, their good humor and dreamed only of misfortunes and calamities. The enemy seeing on the roads the traces of this terrible calamity that was striking the French army, tried to profit from it.” Since the phrase “to lie like a
Bulletin”
had entered common currency in Paris years before, such admissions from a notorious propaganda sheet caused deep forebodings in Madrid.

Unofficial reports of what had happened began to circulate at King Joseph's court. The most important of these came from none other than Colonel Desprez, who, having ridden right across Europe to acquaint the Emperor with Marshal Soult's seditious letter writing, was then caught up in the retreat from Moscow. On his return to Paris, Desprez had written to Joseph: “We lost prisoners by the tens of thousands—but, however many the prisoners, the dead are many more. Every nightly bivouac left hundreds of frozen corpses behind. The situation may be summed up by saying that the army is
dead.”
Joseph, Jourdan and all other officials were deeply shocked by the estimate that of half a million men, only twenty thousand men had marched out of Russia alive.

As if all this were not bad enough, Desprez also shed some light on the emperor's views of the king's tiresome quarrel with Marshal Soult. Napoleon had celebrated the marshal as “the only military brain in the Peninsula,” a clear insult to anybody else who presumed to direct the French armies there. It came as cold comfort to His Catholic Majesty that a letter from General Clarke received in the same mail finally recalled Soult to France, not of course for the reasons Joseph would have wanted but as part of the recall of fifteen thousand veterans needed to begin the reconstruction of the French army. He may have been
relieved about the duke of Dalmatia's departure, but at the same time he could scarce afford to lose those experienced soldiers.

The emperor had also issued a screed of directives to his brother. The capital was to be made in Valladolid, rather than Burgos as Joseph had suggested, but the difference had little effect on defense plans; General Caffarelli was to be sacked for his failure to stamp out the guerrillas in the north and there was to be a major onslaught against those insurgents. The emperor seemed to have been reduced to a cold fury by the long interruptions in communications along the Bayonne
chaussée,
that arterial route that formed the main link with
la patrie.
Hearing of this further installment of trouble in the north must have delighted Wellington, who had been an enthusiastic advocate of sending more weapons to the guerrillas there.

For the staff in Frenada, February and March days dragged. They engaged in all their usual country pursuits. Officers armed with fowling pieces brought in plover and woodcock for Mary Scovell to roast to perfection. Often, usually every other day, Wellington rode one of his eight hunters to hounds. The principal object of the general's chase seems to have been maintaining his personal strength and skill at equitation, for in all these months it was said only one single unfortunate fox fell into the clutches of the Frenada hunt. On many a day officers scrambled down the rocky gorge behind the village with their fishing rods before casting into the inky waters of the Coa. This pursuit was perhaps more therapeutic than hunting, for the population of that river could provide them with intelligence as well as supper. For much of the year, very little swam up the rocky bed of that river, but the arrival of fish was linked by rain to the question of when they might march out of quarters and drive the French from Spain. It was only when the downpours of March and April had raised the level of the Coa that trout and the fish locals called
bogas
and
barbos
could migrate up from the Douro. Wellington was awaiting those same rains to nourish the fodder of Castille and Segovia. It had to be green and tall before he could set his brigades of cavalry on their trajectory to the northeast, and that year the seasons seemed a little late.

As in 1812, the officers of various regiments, notably in the Light Division, spent many a winter's day putting on theatricals. In January it
had been
She Stoops to Conquer,
February's production was
The Rivals.
Captain Hobkirk of the 43rd had the honor of playing Mrs. Malaprop, with fresh-faced young lieutenants taking the younger female parts. “It is impossible to imagine anything more truly ludicrous than to see Lydia Languish and Julia … drinking punch and smoking behind the scenes at a furious rate between the acts,” wrote one spectator. Wellington attended
The Rivals
at its makeshift playhouse in Gallegos, riding twenty miles there and twenty miles back to Frenada in the darkness. Officers of the Peninsular army went to great lengths to amuse themselves in those long winter weeks of 1813.

Of all the officers in Frenada, Scovell must have enjoyed the most pleasant evenings, for with Mary he had laughter, companionship and the pleasure of society. Having finally beaten the
Grand Chiffre,
however, he found himself with too much time on his hands. He began once again meditating a great new project, a scheme that might unite his own interest with that of Lord Wellington, Judge Advocate Francis Larpent and the good of the service: the formation of a Staff Cavalry Corps.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
T
HE
V
ITORIA
C
AMPAIGN,
A
PRIL TO
J
ULY
1813

I
n April 1813 each cavalry regiment in the Peninsular army received a request for volunteers. Men of good character and exemplary service were asked to come forward for the formation of a Staff Cavalry Corps, where they would be placed under a commandant and receive training in their new duties.

At Frenada, George Scovell threw himself into his new task with customary vigor. He had been appointed brevet lieutenant colonel and major commandant of the Staff Cavalry Corps.
*
A plan that he had first committed to paper in 1808 for an embryonic regiment of headquarters horsemen, able to turn their hands to a variety of duties, was finally coming to fruition.

Their commandant had long understood that special troops were needed to maintain discipline, particularly during marches, and even in 1810 Scovell had written of the need for a
gendarmerie.
During Wellington's retreat from the frontier to the lines of Torres Vedras in that year, Scovell had ridden through a riot in the town of Leira, recording: “A most disgraceful scene of Plundering commenced chiefly from the Stragglers, the Portuguese soldiery and the Women. It was not stopped until the unfortunate men were hanged on the spot by the Provost, and more than 100 flogged. Safeguards should always be put on towns when an army has to pass through or near. A sort of
Gendarmerie
such as the French has is absolutely necessary in all large armies to superintend the Police, arrest stragglers etc.” During the retreat from Burgos in 1812— some weeks prior to Wellington's angry General Order rebuking the army for its conduct—Scovell had again been scribbling ideas in his journal for how a new force of this type might work.

In April 1813 he had been given the task of making this plan a reality. Francis Larpent, the judge advocate and Scovell's frequent dinner companion, was an enthusiastic supporter of the new project. The men of the Staff Cavalry were all volunteers and many were veterans who knew well the tricks of stragglers and camp followers. By the end of the month parties of new recruits were arriving. Larpent recorded: “Officers do not take to it as yet, but very good-looking men have volunteered in general.” Those who answered the call to Frenada were given a smart new uniform. They had a red cavalry jacket with dark blue lapels and an elegant shako. In all, about two hundred men joined the Staff Cavalry. Men of the Household Cavalry held back. They let it be known that since they had been police at home (by which they meant the king's final defense against the mob), they had no intention of being police in Spain.