The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

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The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes Page 8

by Mark Urban


  2 ‘The 16th had gone in and lost many men’: details of this bungled engagement come from William Tomkinson (one of the officers injured) in The Diary of a Cavalry Officer in the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns 1809–15 (published in 1894 in London and reprinted by Spellmount in 1999) and Edward Cocks, an officer of the same regiment, whose letters and diaries were expertly assembled by Julia Page in her book Intelligence Officer in the Peninsula, published by Spellmount in 1986. My occasional references to Cocks’s views all refer to the original materials reproduced in her book.

  – ‘Marshal Soult was woken’: the French side of this story comes from Captain Fantin des Odoards, already mentioned, and General Maximilien Foy. Maurice Girod de L’Ain published many of the general’s letters and diaries as Vie Militaire.

  3 ‘Scovell penned a letter to Colonel John Le Marchant’: this is in the Le Marchant Papers at Sandhurst, dated 27 May 1809, LMP packet 13a, Letter 1.

  4 ‘the Portuguese military commandant of Braga came to the Headquarters, asking to see Wellesley’: this incident is covered in Scovell’s journal and the letter to Le Marchant mentioned above.

  5 ‘They saw any argument for reform’: Le Marchant’s proposals for the formation of a General Staff, written in 1801, contained a proposal that the Staff should be chosen on the basis of ability. It was one of several reasons why this extraordinarily forward-looking document (a copy of which is kept at the Sandhurst Library) was suppressed by the Quartermaster-General at Horse Guards.

  – ‘It is well understood by the Government’: this letter from Le Marchant to Colonel William Stewart of 18 June 1806 may be found in the letter-books of the RMC, part of the papers currently kept at Sandhurst.

  – ‘it had taken the experience of the Corunna campaign to convince him finally of the Army’s desperate need for reform’: Scovell said explicitly that he had been converted to Le Marchant’s views on reform ‘since I left Wycombe’, in a letter to Le Marchant of 23 November 1808, LMP Packet 12, Item 3.

  6 ‘These are in fact the description of officers who have revolutionised other armies’: this quotation of Wellesley/Wellington’s comes from a letter to Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Taylor of 11 April 1821 and contained in Military Correspondence of the Duke of Wellington. Although written some time after the Peninsular campaigns, Wellington stressed in the letter that this is what he had ‘long thought’. Certainly, the general’s disdain for low-bred officers from the scientific arms (artillery and engineers) was remarked upon by a number of diarists at Peninsular Headquarters; for example, Sir James McGrigor.

  7 ‘Scovell had been lobbying for his scheme’: his ideas for auxiliary cavalry are mentioned in the same letter to Le Marchant of 23 November 1808 mentioned above.

  8 ‘Anxiously, Scovell went on to explain himself’: he repeated the arguments he had made in the interview in his journal, the letter to Le Marchant of 27 May, and years later (1854) in an interview with an unnamed officer who was tasked with forming a Corps of Guides for the Crimea. The memorandum prepared as a result of that interview is in the British Army Museum library manuscript collection. These sources state, for example, Scovell’s belief that Murray promised him promotion in return for taking on the job.

  * Literally, a brothel, but the term has been used by French military men through the ages to describe the un-military gaggle of women and beasts following their troops.

  † There is frequent mention in the Napoleonic period to ‘coups d’éclat’ or ‘actions d’éclat’, meaning brillant feats. France being the world leader in military science at the time, the term was one of many widely borrowed in British military parlance.

  1. 249. 1076. N. T. 1082. 365. 622. 699. 655. 699. 439. 669. 655. 1085. 398. 326. 13. 309. I. 1085. 655. 249. 481. T. 980. 985. 186. T. 843. 688. 2. 718. 249. 1297. 536. 174. 1085. 1024 … 713. T. 980. 854. 655. 326. 536. 700. 699. 171. 1015. 1003. 13. T. 980. 1015. 131. T.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  From Oporto to Abrantes

  At about 4 a.m. on 4 June, the soldiers of the Guards, the Buffs and numerous other regiments were woken by drums and bugles sounding ‘reveille’. Men picked themselves up, stretched their stiff limbs, rolled blankets, groped around in the darkness for their coats and slung their muskets. In dozens of places around the south of Oporto, the bleary-eyed bloodybacks of Wellesley’s Army fell in, the men forming themselves into files. They gathered at company alarm posts, some simple landmark near the bivouac where the captain in command of the company checked the names of his men against his roll, ready to send the word ‘all present’. And then the tramping of feet would begin, punctuated by the occasional cursing growl of sergeants and tapping of drums keeping time. It would still be dark when the companies had been sorted into their battalions, aligning themselves ready to march in a preordained sequence. So, in that murkiness of dawn in the Douro country, the Army began composing itself from the bottom up. Companies – anything from forty to a hundred men, such were the vagaries of manning a battalion in the face of disease and French fire – assembled, ten at a time. When each battalion was complete, it sent word to its major of brigade that it was ready to march.

  The business with Marshal Soult was slipping into history and the British general was setting his armament on a new trajectory: south. The task of letting each brigade commander know his place in the order of march, and how far away the next night’s stopping-place would be, was that of the Quartermaster-General’s department. The march was not simply a matter of improvisation for Colonel Murray. There were rules and conventions; the order of brigades on the line of march preserved the hierarchy of George III’s Army. The Guards went first and the other brigades followed according to the seniority of their commanders. Some newly made-up major-general, or colonel acting the part, formed up at the back. Within each brigade, the senior battalion, the one with the lowest regimental number, generally led off. In this way, even the daily routine of campaigning reminded the officers and men of their place in the scheme of things. This sense of order was most comforting to someone like Sir Arthur Wellesley.

  Colonel Murray and his acolytes had drawn up plans to move the Army down to Abrantes in central Portugal, where they would encamp, pending further orders. General Wellesley had freed the north of the country, but knew that several French corps d’armée (under Marshals Victor and Ney as well as General Sebastiani) lurked somewhere in Spain.* They could combine to form a much larger force than Marshal Soult’s and then fall upon the British or Spanish. The next stage of the campaign had to be planned with great caution, for Wellesley knew that Britain’s Army was small, fragile and still showing every sign of being unprepared for a general action. Any severe upset against the French would result in the end of the Peninsular mission.

  A wise general measured the marching of his troops carefully. March them too far, too fast, and you wore out the soles of their boots. March them further still and you started to wear out the men themselves and they would begin falling by the wayside. For this reason, Wellesley and Murray tried to maintain a measured pace as they redeployed, with stages of three leagues, or ten to eleven miles, each day. During each day’s tramping along the dusty tracks that passed for Portuguese roads, there would be three or four rest stops. But even this carefully regulated progress was working the Army hard enough to bring every kind of problem seeping to the surface.

  The first symptoms had shown themselves quickly enough. Boots made cheaply by the contractors who clipped the taxpayer started falling apart. Uniforms had split at the seams and had to be patched with local grey or brown cloth, for red could not be found. Some soldiers had replaced their boots with the espadrille sandals made by the locals. Others paid the cobblers found within their ranks to mend their footwear.

  Men weary of stumbling along under 60 lbs of equipment began to straggle behind. Others fell into despair, racked with regret at having taken the king’s shilling at some county fair or inn back in England and now facing every privation of a campaign, awaiting their f
ate as cannonfodder. It wasn’t just the feeble and the dejected; stout-hearted men fell behind too, particularly in the heat of an Iberian summer. Sometimes they fainted, struggling not to fall behind their mates; sometimes they even dropped dead of heat exhaustion.

  As the troops marched down through Coimbra towards Abrantes, the same daily routine of muster, march, halt and bivouac was repeated. Wellesley, Murray and the other staff watched them closely. There was much sloppiness. Too many officers had no idea of their duties. One captain in the Buffs, for example, confessed in his journal that he knew nothing of the military profession despite having been in the Army for two years. Each night’s bivouac was accompanied by scenes of disorder. Supplies were sporadic, and the want of organization as much as anything often meant the men went hungry. Sentries were improperly placed, allowing the men to go off and plunder the Portuguese. Sergeant Cooper of the 7th Fusiliers described it all vividly:

  no sooner was the day’s march ended than men turned out to steal pigs, poultry, wine, etc. One evening, after halting a wine store was broken open and much was carried off. The owner, finding this out, ran and brought an officer of the 53rd, who caught one of our company, named Brown, in the act of handing out the wine in camp kettles. Seizing Brown by the collar, the officer shouted, ‘come out you rascal and give me your name’. Brown came out, gave his name Brennan, then knocking the officer down, made his escape and was not found out.

  Brown was a lucky man, for, if caught, he would have been hanged for striking an officer, but such was the state of discipline on the march to Abrantes. The threat of flogging or even the gallows had not yet become effective. Too many men were stealing and getting away with it to be deterred.

  With each episode of plunder, the anger of the peasantry grew and, with it, the chances of confrontation. One officer of the 14th Light Dragoons described an incident in which he and some troopers were stoned by Portuguese peasants who thought the soldiers were about to plunder their orchard. The cavalrymen gave chase and administered a ‘sound thrashing’ to the locals.

  As the march went on, Wellesley became more and more vexed by these incidents. If the rabble under his command carried on in this way, the peasantry might become as inflamed and hostile towards them as they had been to the French. Many on the Staff had been shocked by the attacks on enemy wounded that they had witnessed during the pursuit of Marshal Soult in the north. And indeed, lone British soldiers threatening the Portuguese began to fall victim to the farmers’ knives and staves; at least three were killed on the march to Abrantes.

  The British commander issued a General Order denouncing ‘the conduct of the troops; not only have outrages been committed by whole corps, but there is no description of property of which the unfortunate inhabitants of Portugal have not been plundered’. As the Army approached its temporary resting place in the centre of the country, Wellesley, Murray and the rest of the Staff busied themselves, trying to put right the many problems they had noticed during their brief campaign in the north and on the march down. Orders had been fired off as they went: on 31 May, for 6,000 pairs of shoes to be distributed to those who had worn them out on the march; on 1 June, concerning the use of mules to carry stores with the regiments; on 2 June, about the need to supervise those left behind sick; and on 3 June, requiring units to carry three days of rations with them on the march.

  Once they had stopped in the fields outside Abrantes, the troops set about the local pines with axes and billhooks, lopping off branches to make huts for themselves. This far-from-perfect shelter was their best refuge, since the administrators in London were so indolent and parsimonious that it took three years for them to send tents to the Peninsular Army. Having established this new cantonment, battalions were drilled and supplies brought up as their commander contemplated a move into Spain.

  While the Army gathered its strength, Wellesley tightened his grip on its laxness. He formed the brigades under his command into four divisions, larger bodies that could combine infantry and guns in self-contained elements that trained, marched and fought together. The adoption of divisions, incidentally, had been recommended to the Duke of York by Colonel Le Marchant eight years earlier and one that had long been in use with the French army.

  General Wellesley sought political authority from London to enter Spain. The British commander believed that the eruption of war between Austria and France that spring meant that Napoleon’s forces were divided and circumstances were ripe for cooperation with the Spanish in seeking to bring some part of the French force to battle. Although British enthusiasm for the Spanish patriotic cause had lessened somewhat after the Corunna expedition, the ministry in London still sensed a popular desire to help this nation in its heroic struggle against Bonaparte’s legions. The commander of forces in the Peninsula, sensitive to the wider European struggle, thought that Napoleon’s other difficulties in Europe provided a window of opportunity. In fact, Wellesley’s enthusiasm for striking across the border was based on false assumptions about the degree to which the French emperor had reduced his Iberian garrison. Just like John Moore the previous autumn, Wellesley’s lack of good intelligence was about to endanger the whole Army.

  However, the memory of the Corunna campaign and the disappointment of their failure to trap Soult that May left Colonel Murray in no doubt that he must improve his knowledge of the situation awaiting them. Sir Arthur had made it clear that he expected such an improvement. Scovell’s Guides were central to this, but the QMG needed much more information than they alone could provide. Murray dispatched his Assistants and Deputy Assistants to explore all points of the compass. He needed intelligence to insure against embarrassment in the future. This did not mean recruiting some spy in the French court; it meant knowing how many horses might graze in a particular valley, or where the bridges were on the Guadiana river. Even in 1809, Spain and Portugal were poorly surveyed and the best maps available to Headquarters were fifty years old and inaccurate. Murray’s envoys were to make sketch maps wherever they went, detailing the distances between villages, how many men might be quartered in each, the state of the rivers, bridges and so on. When he had run out of members of his own staff, he started sending regimental officers.

  The Royal Military College graduates had been schooled in military drawing and thought they were the masters of this art. But Murray did not have time for map-making perfection. One of Colonel Le Marchant’s correspondents in the Peninsula wrote back tetchily to him in Wycombe:

  Colonel Murray, with all his knowledge of ground on the spot, understands very little of it from a military plan and De Lancey privately told me he was most completely ignorant of what a military plan should be … the great object with him is to gain an accurate report of a country, its roads, soil, rivers etc and the means it possesses of affording shelter for the army. He employs everybody at this.

  Scovell was sent on these missions too. His engraver’s craft had been further improved at Wycombe, so his maps were models of neatness and precision. There was a spareness to his map-making too: no unwanted contours or detail, just the pattern of settlements and the roads connecting them. Above each route, he indicated the distance to the next village; below it, the number of hours required to march it: ‘3 Leagues, 4 Hours’ and so on.

  As the Army lay in encampments around Abrantes, Murray had other work in mind for Scovell. On 15 June, under the QMG’s orders, the captain made his way down to the quayside of the River Tagus in Abrantes. He picked up one of the river boats that plied Portugal’s great river. For half a dollar, they would convey you to Lisbon, comfortably seated under the shade of a canopy.

  Scovell’s Guides were to be formed with the help of the Portuguese army as well as the British. He needed the assistance of the Ministry of War in Lisbon, a task he approached with a grim realism. ‘Colonel Murray has persuaded me again to take the Corps of Guides, with a promise of endeavouring to procure me promotion,’ Scovell wrote to Le Marchant at the end of May. ‘I give you my word I do it with great r
eluctance … if I get disappointed this time I think I shall give over soldiering and come home.’

  Certainly, the challenge facing Scovell might have seemed suited only to an incurable optimist or a fool. The Italian and Swiss remnants of his previous Guides were back in Portugal and were joined by some Portuguese smugglers, Spanish ne’er-do-wells and Irish soldiers of fortune. Murray had made much of the fact that Scovell would have the assistance of eight junior officers in this new endeavour. But the lieutenants and cornets he had been promised to supervise this polyglot parcel of rogues turned out to be a team of callow youths from Coimbra University. They started arriving in Abrantes before he set off for Lisbon. They were men of good Portuguese and Spanish families, no doubt about it. They could speak French fluently and most had some English too. But they did not have the slightest idea about soldiering and would rely on Scovell to educate them.

 

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