The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (47 page)

The army was also more numerous than ever before. Drafts and reinforcements had taken the total of the Anglo-Portuguese main army
to more than eighty-one thousand men. Several divisions of Spanish troops were now placed under Wellington's direct command. His host was about to enter battle with a much stronger cavalry arm too, a brigade of hussars and the heavies of the Household Cavalry having joined the army.

Bringing this great force to bear would require a level of organization not seen before. Thomas Graham and Rowland Hill would each lead a column of several divisions, and at that level the troops would be officered by the likes of the dependable Picton, Pakenham and Lowry Cole. Perhaps Wellington's greatest comfort was that he would have Major General George Murray at his right hand once more as quarter master general. And it was to Murray that he looked to draft the complex orders directing these assembled divisions through the rough border country and into the place where they would discomfit all of King Joseph's calculations.

At last Wellington launched his army. One British body moved through Salamanca, and that seemed to position them to march in a great diagonal across northeast Spain toward Valladolid and Burgos. This was what Marshal Jourdan had planned on, and as Wellington knew from intercepted letters, it was the axis around which all of the French divisions could easily concentrate.

Just north of Salamanca, on 25 May, the British caught up with General Villatte's rear guard. Four guns of the Royal Horse Artillery opened on the French infantry regiment marching across open ground. The crack and whoosh of the British six-pounders did nothing to disconcert the French march and Scovell marveled at their steadiness. For a footslogger, it was an unpleasant business to be moving along with two brigades of enemy cavalry trotting behind and beside you. Any mistake in the alignment of companies or the execution of a turn might create the opening that the enemy horse were waiting for. If that happened, it would all be over in minutes and those
messieurs en rouge
would be carving you up with their sabers, as they had those wretched battalions at Arapiles the previous July.

As Scovell watched the French marching along he started to meditate on how the column could be attacked more effectively by the British cavalry. Every time the horse artillery stopped firing to allow an attempt at a charge, the French battalions slowed up a little, closed ranks and
prepared to receive what they knew was coming. He saw a division of the Royals gallop forward. It was the same result again: faced with a steady phalanx of men presenting their muskets, the heavies had pulled up fifty yards away and turned about. What they
ought
to do, he thought, is deploy a small body of cavalry hovering about the French flank who could sweep in whenever they saw an irregularity of formation. Only when this charge was about to strike home should the horse artillery cease firing.

This game of cat and mouse continued across the plain for a couple of hours before the British broke it off; it had cost the French around 100 dead and 150 prisoners. Scovell admired them for escaping without greater losses. He felt for the conscripts, each struggling to keep up and turn on the right command, lest any mistake produce their ruin. And these feelings produced anger that their general should have put his men through this trial, Scovell writing, “General Villatte ought to be punished for keeping his Infantry in Salamanca so long.” Scovell scribbled down these reflections on how the engagement might have been better managed in his journal as soon as he found a moment. That record had, by the summer of 1813, expanded into its third volume. At the head of a body of British horse, Scovell could not stop himself thinking like a cavalry commander. Little matter that he had left the 4th Dragoons seven years before. Now he had the Staff Cavalry formed up behind him and, unlike the Mounted Guides who were cast about the country in their small packets, these men had been prepared to act as a single unit if the need arose on the battlefield.

Wellington remained with the force advancing north of Salamanca for a couple more days. His presence was intended to deceive French spies. At the same time this column was marching precisely along the line that the enemy expected, General Thomas Graham's force of forty thousand was moving through hill country well to the northwest, making its way toward the Esla valley. Lieutenant Colonel Gomm was riding with Graham's column, containing five infantry divisions and two brigades of cavalry. Thus, Wellington made sure the French were pinned to the Douro River line; Graham's force was making that barrier irrelevant.

At French headquarters, there was the customary lack of good information. Marshal Jourdan had seen to it that silver was broadcast around the border region for months in advance hoping to attract some good spies, but he noted, “Despite the care taken by the Chief of Staff [himself] to the secret service, and despite the money put into this service, it always failed to obtain precise intelligence on the Anglo-Portuguese army. The reports received were so contradictory that instead of clarifying matters they increased uncertainty.” Worst of all for the marshal, a patrol of dragoons in the Esla country failed to spot Graham's column at first, creating a false sense of security for some days.

On 28 May, with the advance continuing rapidly, Scovell received a most welcome order. He was to take the Staff Cavalry Corps and report to the Light Division to act as the light cavalry for that famous body. Lieutenant Colonel Scovell's dream of leading mounted troops in the advance guard was suddenly quite real.

For the next few days the Staff Cavalry performed as the reconnaissance screen of the Light Division. Its men moved forward in small numbers by day to scan the country for any sign of the enemy, and manned the outposts needed to warn of any surprise attack by night. Scovell's delight at this small but significant role was only exceeded by the pleasure of his commander in chief when it became clear that the French had abandoned their defensive line, beginning a headlong retreat from the Douro line on 2 June.

Everything at French headquarters was confusion and recrimination. Their attempts to concentrate forces were just taking too long. Breathless messengers arrived with reports of each new sighting by reconnaissance parties of Graham's column. There was a council of war in which Jourdan suggested advance rather than retreat, a notion that was immediately dismissed by King Joseph, who recited his brother's orders like a catechism: communications with Bayonne must be maintained at all costs; no conquered provinces should be given up; it would be dishonorable to concede to Wellington without offering to give battle.

But where could His Catholic Majesty rally his scattered host? A decision was made to collect at Burgos. Joseph still had not concentrated
the divisions of the Army of Portugal that had been sent to fight guerrillas in the northern sierras. Without them, he had half as many men as Wellington and could not offer battle without inviting nemesis for himself and what remained of French rule in Spain.

By 10 June it was becoming clear to the king that his hopes of gathering all his forces around Burgos had been unrealistic. Wellington simply kept pushing his army forward around the French right. Again the British had moved around the flank of the enemy position and their choice was stark: retreat once more or be cut off from France. Joseph issued orders for a concentration behind the River Ebro near the Basque city of Vitoria.

Leaving Burgos, the French detonated mines around the ramparts, a procedure that went disastrously wrong, sending masonry crashing onto the heads of hundreds of French troops who were marching through the town. British troops were not immediately aware of this, but they did hear the distant boom of the mines going off. Veterans of the failed siege of Burgos were heartily glad: “We were all delighted to hear of its fate. What a thing it would have been if it had never been attempted! The army would probably have wintered near Salamanca and Cocks would now have been with us, half mad with delight at our rapid and successful advance,” Captain Tomkinson commented.

As Wellington's troops marched into the hill country northwest of that city there was an intoxicating good humor about the army. The days were warm, but not oppressively so as they had been during the maneuvers around Salamanca the previous summer. The countryside was largely undisturbed by the war: “This enchanting valley is studded with picturesque hamlets, orchards of cherry trees, and fruitful gardens, producing every description of vegetation,” one diarist recorded. Crossing a bridge, the Light Division saw its bands lined up and heard them playing “The Downfall of Paris.” “We were much amused at their wit on this occasion,” remarked one officer, “and we had it followed by a national tune or two to remind us of Old England.”

The daily marches were a prodigious feat. Back in 1809, on the journey down from Oporto to Abrantes, even a stage of three leagues each day had left dozens of men straggling behind and committing every sort of outrage. In June 1813, the soldiers were frequently covering five leagues in a day and leaving few in their wake. Scovell, whose duties included collecting stragglers, noted, “Our Men are marching much
better than I ever saw them.” The provision of tents had made a big difference, for fewer soldiers were sick. Each divisional commander had also become adept at organizing his columns of march and Provost so as to make it harder for the malingerer to fall out of the ranks.

On the fourteenth, Scovell found himself invited to a picnic lunch in a nearby field. His hosts were the prince of Orange, General Alava (one of Wellington's Spanish staff), Judge Advocate Larpent and Lord Fitz-clarence, one of the young ADCs. Together they hacked pieces from a cold ham, tasted the rough country bread and sipped champagne brought by the prince's servants. It must all have been rather intoxicating to someone who had once believed his life held no more in store than long hours at the engraver's bench.

The plain of Vitoria is surrounded on all sides by highlands with access to low pasture afforded through a few passes. The city's position had made it a crossroads for centuries and King Joseph as well chose it as the place to rally his footsore army. They had been marching hard for three weeks and needed rest. Their leaders also required time to adjust to the fact that Wellington had just evicted them from a great slice of Spain, including its most fertile lands and great cities like Madrid and Valladolid, by maneuver alone.

It was a good place to rendezvous with the Army of Portugal's divisions that were straddling the main line of communications to Bayonne. With the Salinas pass on the Bayonne road to their rear, the French armies occupying the plain only had to plug the four other main routes into the plain to defend themselves effectively. Better still, any attacker wishing to use three of those passes—those to the east and north of the Vitoria lowland—would have to divide his forces on long, roundabout journeys through steep-sided valleys, thus opening themselves to defeat in detail as each of these columns appeared at its destination. This left just one obvious route into the city, the Puebla Gorge, where the main
chaussée
from Burgos arrived at the southeast corner of the plain. Jourdan and Joseph hoped that geography would equalize the balance of forces for them and allow them to fight to advantage.

Jourdan, it has to be said, did not expect a fight at Vitoria at all. “Lord Wellington had shown himself, from the opening of the campaign,
more disposed to force the retreat of his adversaries, by manoeuvring on the right, than to confront them head on to give him battle, we believed that continuing with this method, he would head for Bilbao … to force us to fall back in haste on Mondragon so as not to lose our communications with France,” the marshal noted. Prudence, however, dictated that Jourdan deploy the king's armies in earnest. General Gazan, Soult's successor in command of the Army of the South, was placed with twenty-six thousand men and fifty-four cannon to block the exit of the Puebla Gorge. Gazan's left was anchored on a steep-sided ridge, the Heights of Puebla, and his right on the River Zadorra. That stream curved around his position and stretched eastwards back across the plain. The position was less than three miles across Gazan's front, but the possibility that Wellington might use the three passes entering the plain from the north meant the French deployment had to be about seven miles deep, since any eruption from those northern gateways to the plain would leave Gazan with the enemy behind him. This curious characteristic of the French battleground, that it was deeper than it was wide at the front, led one British officer to observe caustically that the French position had two major defects, the first of which was that it was facing in the wrong direction!

Wellington's attack on the Vitoria position began on the morning of 21 June. An Allied column under Lieutenant General Hill was to make its way up the backside of the Heights of Puebla and onto the great ridge that commanded Gazan's left. Some Spanish troops led the way up the heights and were followed by Hill's 2nd Division. During their ascent they had one important factor in their favor: that the southern side of the ridge is a much easier climb than the scarp on Gazan's flank. As the French general saw the puffs of musket shots from his lookouts and heard the crackling of a fusillade, he was forced to send battalions up, almost on all fours (the gradient being one in one) to reinforce them. When they arrived at the top breathless, these Frenchmen found themselves being impaled on the bayonets of the 71st and 92nd Highlanders and 50th Foot.