The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (46 page)

The new corps would fulfill all of Scovell's dreams of commanding a regiment of British cavalry and at the same time create the kind of HQ troops that John Le Marchant had proposed in 1802. Wellington, it is clear, wanted the Staff Cavalry for one purpose above all: to police the bloody-backed rogues of his army. So Scovell added the title of “father of the British military police” to those of assistant QMG, forge designer, chief Guide, mapmaker, postmaster, code maker and code breaker.

Ambition and circumstance threw Scovell into the role of Wellington's truncheon, a duty that did not necessarily sit well either with his
gentle temperament or his views on discipline. He certainly did not share Wellington's faith in generous amounts of flogging and hanging. Like many a reform-minded officer, though, the campaigns in Iberia had convinced Scovell that the British army contained a substantial element of criminals. Sir John Moore, a noted skeptic when it came to using the lash, had been shocked by the plundering and drunken criminality of his men during the Corunna campaign. Almost every officer who had witnessed the riot and rape in Badajoz in 1812 was repelled by it.

The British soldier was usually a volunteer and many fell into the hands of recruiters while penniless and longing for drink. When they sobered up in some garrison, many regretted their decision to join, but the gallows awaited any deserter who was caught. On the march, this army became a volatile assembly, one in which many men sought any opportunity to steal. Taking the possessions of a dead Frenchman was permitted, stealing from the peasants was not. Scovell was struck by the narrow section of British society dredged up by traditional recruiting methods and the higher quality of many French recruits who were products of the world's first properly organized conscription system. “It is quite wonderful to see the intelligence of these fellows when compared with our own,” Scovell wrote after interrogating a French deserter in October 1812.

Evidently some senior officers must have asked whether Scovell was really the right man to impose order, since later in 1813 he wrote to a colleague at Horse Guards, “You need be under no apprehension on the score of my good nature when the good of the Service is placed in competition with it. I should be very sorry to be accused of cruelty, but I do not see the keeping up the discipline of any army in that light. “Wellington at least had faith in Scovell to discharge his new responsibilities professionally and that was the key thing as they stood on the threshold of the 1813 campaign.

The word about headquarters was that Lord Wellington intended putting the army in motion on 1 May, so Scovell did not have long to turn the little detachments of five or six men who came from each regiment into an effective corps. It helped his task greatly, however, that all of these recruits were trained mounted troops, unlike the deserters he had introduced to horses when forming the Guides years before.

The first corps founded by Scovell, the Mounted Guides, was to continue in present form, and on 21 April he relinquished its command to Lieutenant Colonel Henry Sturgeon, an extremely capable officer with a background similar to his own.

These new developments did not excuse Scovell from his cipher work, though, and as Wellington made his final preparations for the 1813 campaign, some important new dispatches were captured. The most significant, dated 13 March, from King Joseph to General Charles Reille commanding the Army of Portugal, brought Wellington's understanding of the general scheme of French defensive operations up to date.

The new dispatch showed that a general offensive against guerrillas in northern Spain had begun, which was drawing half of the Army of Portugal north, a step that precipitated a redeployment of the armies of the South and Center. This was important news for British headquarters since the French were repeating their error of early 1812 in reducing their force opposite Wellington at precisely the moment that he was meditating an offensive. It meant those corps facing him would not be the 100,000 suggested in Joseph's letter of December, but more like 80,000. The king also informed General Reille, “I am counting on moving my headquarters to Valladolid at any moment.”

Shortly afterward, guerrillas in northern Spain also provided the British with a letter from Colonel Lucotte, one of Joseph's staff officers, to Madrid sent on 16 March. Lucotte spoke with authority about Napoleon's view because he was on his way back to Madrid from Paris, where the emperor himself had directed him as to how the campaign in Iberia should best proceed. Lucotte was not important enough to use the
Grand Chiffre,
but had resorted instead to a very curious cipher of hieroglyphs. It was different from others Scovell had worked on, as its encoding table involved lines of letters that would suggest the next few substitutions, not just the conversion of single characters one by one. Notwithstanding the application of this new principle, Scovell seemed to have regarded this new code as something of an insult to his intelligence, scribbling on the bottom, “Decyphered at Frenada with ease in 6 hours and immediately sent home by L. W.”

Lucotte described the collapse of security on the main road to France, noting, “Supplies are hardly guaranteed from one day to the next all along the line; and the Emperor believes it is of the most pressing
importance to take urgent steps to secure communications.” All of this confirmed the British general's view that the operations against Mina and Longa in the north would last for some time. Wellington passed the message on quickly to London, mainly because of its political content—Lucotte suggested that the emperor was expecting Austria to join the coalition against him at any moment. In forwarding this intelligence to Earl Bathurst, the general showed a caution absent from his own communication to Cadiz of 29 January, warning, “This letter was in cipher and it is desirable that its contents should not be published.”

The colonel also made clear that the emperor's desperate struggle to raise a new army meant Joseph's constant demands for cash were falling on deaf ears in Paris: “Sire, it is absolutely necessary to replace the money that is not coming from France with forced contributions in Spain and by drawing it from Valencia—Napoleon's needs are enormous.” The system of coercing localities to provide money for the army was a familiar feature of the occupation of Spain, but reports such as Lucotte's inspired a last great wave of formalized looting of cash and items of value from the locals. Lucotte told the king that he was hastening down as fast as he could, in company of Colonel Desprez. That officer, who had spent a few weeks in Paris restoring himself to health after the horrors of the retreat from Moscow, was showing admirable devotion to duty in returning at this juncture.

While Scovell was working on those latest intercepted messages, a letter that Wellington had sent to London eight months earlier finally received its reply. It was from Earl Bathurst and contained the report of the London government decipherers on the French correspondence that had been sent before the Battle of Salamanca. These experts in secret writing had taken all those months to add 164 new meanings (and they confessed their uncertainty even over some of these) out of the 1,400 numbers in the cipher. They added an exculpatory note: “With the few cyphers and consequently the slender materials which the decypherer had to work upon, it was scarcely possible to render this key more complete.”

Wellington was evidently unimpressed with this tardy reply and its contents. Had headquarters been dependent on London to crack the code, none of the results so critical for the Salamanca campaign and indeed the one he was about to launch would ever have been achieved. He could not resist the temptation to send them back a copy of Scovell's
deciphering table, which by that point had opened up pretty much the entire code. The general wrote back to London sarcastically:

It was significant that Wellington acknowledged Scovell's sole responsibility for this work in writing, for back in the summer of 1811 when simpler ciphers had first appeared on the Spanish border, other officers, such as Somerset and Hardinge, had also been involved in the decoding. The general's pleasure at reading his enemy's most secret correspondence was curtailed somewhat, however, during the early months of 1813. The flow of intercepted French messages had declined markedly. Those French divisions facing Wellington remained largely inactive, so there was little need for their commanders to communicate. The new French defensive line was more compact and some way back from the hunting grounds of that interceptor of mails par excellence Don Julian Sanchez, whose attentions were otherwise engaged, in any case. He was training his men to act as a regular force at the head or flanks of Wellington's column of march, leaving less time for long-range patrols in search of enemy messengers. The general's most reliable provider of reports from inside the enemy camp, Father Patrick Curtis, was also out of action. He had been banished from Salamanca by the French early in 1813, seeking refuge in Ciudad Rodrigo.

As the time neared to send his army into action, Wellington needed to be sure that his strategy of moving through the difficult country to the northwest of the French defensive line would work. To this end, several officers were sent out on reconnaissance during April. Among them was Lieutenant Colonel William Gomm, an assistant QMG, who had been campaigning, like Lieutenant Colonel Scovell, since Sir John Moore's expedition and had done equally well out of staff work. Unlike Scovell, he did not reside in the main headquarters but was attached to the 5th Division.

Gomm emulated the tactics of previous exploring officers, setting out with just a servant and a pair of horses to make sketches and check the levels of different water courses. Evading the cavalry patrols that the French sent into this no-man's-land, they made their way through the hilly country, crossing the Douro to the west of the main French line on the river. He worked his way up to the Esla, a tributary of the Douro that Wellington needed to cross if he were to bypass the French with his first great turning movement. During the last three days of April Gomm found himself getting drenched with rain. At last the downpours needed to nourish the fodder were doing their work.

The AQMG of the 5th Division returned unscathed and thrilled with the success of his mission, writing to his sister that “far from finding my employment irksome, I enjoyed it; and it became so much the more interesting from the probability of my being shortly called upon to lead my flock in the same direction.” Luckily for Wellington, the explorations of Gomm and others were not detected. Similarly, a train of wagons bearing pontoons destined to be used to bridge the Esla was brought up to northern Portugal without the French finding out.

By early May the elements of a grand scheme to advance on the French by a large and unexpected maneuver were nearing completion. Furthermore, Wellington's quest to perfect his army had resulted in improvements in all areas. A firmer discipline had been imposed, resulting in dozens of court-martials. Judge Advocate Larpent pronounced with grim satisfaction, “We have flogged and hung people into better order here.” Scovell's new Staff Cavalry Corps was ready to take to the field too.

All aspects of supply had been attended to. After years in the field, the troops had finally been issued tents. Their old, weighty, iron camp-kettles had been traded in for lightweight tin ones. Great magazines of supplies had been accumulated and were being brought upcountry by the mule trains. Many regiments had been issued with new uniforms. The old ones had literally become washed-out rags, held together by the locally procured cloth. For the heavy cavalry the new outfits were of quite a different style. The old bicorne that drooped on the head like a soggy croissant had been replaced with a handsome Romanesque brass helmet much like those worn by the French dragoons.