The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (8 page)

Oporto's heart, that morning of 12 May 1809, remained under the hand of Marshal Soult, and with him the same force that had driven the British into the sea at Corunna less than four months before. Despite the hour, Soult was still asleep after a night of dictating orders, while his staff was settling down to a leisurely breakfast. On the northern outskirts, General Mermet was gathering a convoy of wounded, wagons and artillery, getting ready to evacuate the city.

Soult had pulled back into Oporto when the British had come up from Lisbon, a movement Wellesley began in April. In order to improve the strength of his river line, the French commander had blown up a bridge that connected Vila Nova to the rest of the city. Upstream, he had scuttled the ferry boats. Downstream, he had posted dozens of lookouts from Franceschi's cavalry. The marshal thought Wellesley more likely to attack downstream, between the city and the Douro's exit into the Atlantic, since it was natural for the English to exploit the sea, where they would enjoy so many advantages. For all the marshal knew, the British might use naval transports to sail past the river's mouth and land troops on the coast north of it, so turning his flank. The French cavalry had been deployed to give early warning of any such project. The marshal
understood his force was smaller than that of the redcoats and their Portuguese allies, but he relied on the deep dark waters of the Douro to protect him. If things went well, he would catch his enemies in the act of landing and crush them before they had achieved a critical mass. And if things went badly? The river would ensure that he still had a couple of days for a smooth evacuation.

Wellesley's staff was deeply nervous as they watched a small party of soldiers and locals bringing four barges from the northern quay to where British troops were waiting, still apparently undetected by the French. Their general, they were discovering, was as good at hiding his emotions as any man could be: he wore the mask of command, possessing that inscrutibility so vital for a leader in war. But they, who had so much to gain or lose from their master's good opinion, chatted nervously, lit the long brown cigarettes smoked by so many of the local people, and waited for Wellesley's audacious orders to unfold. There was probably much conversation about the previous day's affair at Grijó a few miles away. A squadron of the 16th Light Dragoons had been ordered to charge the French as they fell back to Oporto. The ground, studded with trees and divided by stone walls, was most unsuitable for cavalry. But a figure familiar to Scovell and the other staff veterans of Corunna had then become part of the equation. Major General Charles Stewart, who had used his influence to secure the post of Wellesley's adjutant general, had insisted that they charge, even though he was not in command of the cavalry and had not seen the difficult ground in question. The 16th had gone in and lost many men while the French had retired in good order. Things would have to go better today.

Down on the bank, men of the 3rd Foot, the Buffs, were climbing into the barges. They were usually used for ferrying port wine, that ruby red commodity that lubricated the Anglo-Portuguese relationship. But the barges that carried casks of the stuff down the Douro toward John Bull's table were being pressed into service ferrying troops—thirty men in each. The first wave set off at about 11
A.M
. This was the moment of maximum danger, for if the French shot at them in the boats they would be almost defenseless. The Portuguese bargemen skillfully sailed them over, set them down and turned back to the south bank for the next wave.

Until this moment, the British might as well have been invisible, but
crossing the Douro in broad daylight they had to be spotted, and they were. Reports began to arrive at French headquarters. Troops in red were crossing the river barely one mile away. Were they Swiss? The Swiss troops under French command also wore red coats. Perhaps some of the sentries were panicky too. Marshal Soult was woken.

As the Buffs formed up on the quay, the few French troops in the area ran to sound the alarm. The British quickly found a steep road that runs up the side of the northern bank. Almost on all fours, weighed down by their equipment, they ran up the flagstones, struggling against the steepness of the gradient. A hail of musketry might engulf them at any moment, so the Buffs' commander raised his men's spirits by getting them to give three cheers as they went. At the top of the slope, the Buffs burst into the Bishop's Seminary, a complex of buildings with the heavy construction of a fortress, and began barricading themselves. At last the French realized what was happening. The seminary was a critical place, since it guarded the landing point down on the quayside where further waves of troops were starting to arrive in rapid succession.

The man responsible for defending this sector of Oporto was General Maximilien Foy, a gifted artillery officer whose career was to become intertwined with that of the British, and he would be present at almost as many of Wellesley's battles as men like George Scovell himself. Foy was sharp enough to know that disaster could only be avoided by swift action. He ordered three battalions into attack formation and sent them forward at about 11:30.

Foy's advance was precisely the counter-stroke anticipated by Wellesley. In the gardens beside the Serra monastery on the other side of the river, three batteries of artillery—eighteen pieces—had been wheeled into position. The gun captains bent down and squinted along their barrels, calling final adjustments to the men with spikes levering away at the rear, so the cannons' mouths would be in perfect position to hurl death across the gorge. At the back of each British cannon, one man stood holding the linstock, a smoldering porte-fire that, when the order was given, would be touched to the hole at the rear of the gun to ignite the powder and begin the barrage. The gunners' eyes followed the columns of Frenchmen they could clearly see moving toward the seminary four hundred to five hundred yards to their front. They could hear
them as well—gruff voices echoing across the Douro gorge
“en avant!,”'
“à
l'attaque!,”
*
the familiar cries of the emperor's victorious legions.

A crackle of musketry opened from within the seminary, puffs of smoke drifting from the firing points. The French, too, wanted to bring artillery to bear and were wheeling guns down by the riverbank on the northern quay. If they could cannonade the British as their barges came ashore, they could do great slaughter, for the redcoats would be caught packed together as they disembarked. Wellesley, though, had no intention of allowing them to give the first blow.

One of the British pieces, a howitzer, fired at the French guns on the quayside, hurling one of the new exploding shells designed by Major Shrapnel. It was not solid, like the six-pound shot fired by most of this battery, but packed with explosive powder that would send shards of its metal casing in all directions. Its target was a team of French gunners who were trying to unhitch their cannon from the horse-drawn limber used to tow it into position. As the British shell went off, it cut down every single one of them, perhaps a dozen men. This was not the first time that the Shrapnel shells had been used in battle, but it was the most dramatic effect many of the Royal Artillery officers had ever seen. The other guns began hitting the French attack columns on the ridge above.

At Marshal Soult's headquarters, the cacophony indicated that a serious battle had been joined in the heart of the city. Reinforcements were ordered up to join Foy's brigade. The evacuation of French stores and guns assumed a desperate speed. Orderlies were stuffing papers into trunks, wagons loaded with spoils, waiting to leave.

As the guns were thundering overhead, many more boatloads of redcoats had crossed the Douro. Men of the 48th and 66th had joined the Buffs up in the seminary. The French withdrew their last men from the quayside to reinforce those fighting on the heights above. As this happened, dozens of Portuguese emerged from their houses to launch fishing boats and more port barges into the river. The trickle of British troops crossing was soon a flood.

After three failed attempts to break into the seminary, the morale of the French troops was beginning to falter. Reports that another Anglo-Portuguese force was about to assault them in the flank were making the
French officers jittery; Foy broke off the attack. By midafternoon a general evacuation of Oporto was under way, with French troops pressing quickly along the roads.

A cavalry attack on the rear of a broken force could yield devastating results, but the ground to the north and east of the city was just as unfavorable as that in Grijó had been the day before. Major General Stewart once again took personal command of a squadron of light dragoons and ordered a charge. Once again, it was carried out with some losses and little positive effect.

Stewart's charge, though, did not spoil the positive results of the day's action. For trifling casualties (125 killed, wounded and missing), Wellesley's force had killed about 300 French, captured about 1,700 prisoners, many of whom had been abandoned in hospitals during the French retreat, and six cannon. The British army had seen its new commander in action and could not fail to be impressed. Wellesley took over Soult's fine headquarters to discover that the Portuguese servants had prepared a dinner, expecting their French guests to return that evening. Instead, the victor savored his culinary spoils.

Breathless at this success, Scovell penned a letter to Colonel John Le Marchant, his old teacher at the Royal Military College: “I must give you a line if it only shows how delighted I am at having been able to pay off my old friend Soult a few of the old scores we were in his debt at Corunna. He certainly never bargained to have them returned so soon and with such good interest.” The staff officer had clearly been impressed with May twelfth's operation, telling Le Marchant “the passage of the Douro was certainly as gallant a thing as ever man did.” As for the French, “they appear to have been so taken by surprise at the boldness of the attempt as to have completely lost their
brain work”
(underlining in original).

The verdict of some of Soult's officers was not that different. Captain Fantin des Odoards, the light infantry officer who had also been present at Corunna, decided “Marshal Soult allowed himself to be surprised because of an overconfidence that only the French are capable of.” For Soult, the evacuation of Oporto had saved most of his troops, but it was the beginning of a greater crisis. He and his men (around twenty thousand) were on their own, with no other French troops to support them within one hundred or perhaps even two hundred miles. There were two main routes back to the comparative safety of Spain.
One ran north, close to the sea, but Soult did not want to use it, fearing that British naval superiority might endanger his withdrawal. The other road ran east, further inland, before turning north. This was his favored line of withdrawal, so Soult had already positioned one of his divisions, under General Loison, on this second route to protect it. After quitting Oporto, Soult therefore marched east to make his first night's bivouac. He needed to put some distance between himself and the English and that meant he could only allow his men a few hours' sleep.

Luckily for Soult, there was to be no British pursuit on the next day, the thirteenth, either. Wellesley had decided to give his men one day's rest after the hard marching of the preceding days, and to allow supply wagons to catch up. This failure to follow hard on Soult's heels immediately would have earned him the scorn of many a French commander. What Soult did not know, however, was that the British general had no intention of letting his enemy get away. Four days before, he had sent a column further inland under William Beresford, a British general who had been given the command of Portugal's army with the very grand (and rather French) sounding rank of Marshal. Beresford was a big, powerfully built man known in the army for his energy and intelligence. His career as a soldier had not always been a happy one, as three years earlier he had taken part in the disastrous expedition to the River Plate in South America and had been wounded, leaving his face badly scarred. Wellesley felt that the newly appointed commander of Portuguese troops was one of his more able generals and selected him for the vital task of cutting the very line of retreat that Soult hoped to take and had so prudently sent General Loison to secure.

In the early hours of 13 May, a messenger arrived at Soult's encampment. He bore a dispatch from General Loison announcing that he had been fighting some of Marshal Beresford's Portuguese, had failed to break through on the road toward Spain and was therefore marching back toward the main French body. It is not hard to imagine Soult's cold shudder on hearing that his line of withdrawal was cut off. He could not turn around and march back toward the sea, since the road through Oporto was in British hands. He was cornered, just like Dupont had been cornered at Bailen by the Spanish the previous year.

Everything Soult had earned by fifteen summers of hard soldiering was in jeopardy. It did not matter that he had shared in the glory of Napoleon's 1800 campaign in Italy, or led the key attack at Austerlitz.
Nor did it matter that France's conquering leader had created him duke of Dalmatia, endowed him with generous estates and substantial pensions. Dupont had been one of the favored too, but after Bailen the emperor had dubbed him
“le capitulard”
and stripped him of every honor and bauble. Napoleon even toyed with the idea of having this “capitulator,” this loser Dupont executed, but imprisoned him instead.

Soult understood that there was only one way to avoid this fate. If both of his two possible roads back into Spain were blocked, he would have to cross the land in between them, which consisted of inhospitable mountains. Three chains of high ground, like three giant hurdles, ran east to west, separating him from the Spanish province of Galicia. This was barren ground too, often sodden with water, particularly in May, but supporting little more by way of vegetation than pines, ferns and scrub. There were no proper roads across these mountains, but Soult had been at war long enough to know that there are always paths of some kind, even if they are no more than those tracks used by local herdsmen.