The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  These Guides were to be entrusted with tasks of the highest sensitivity: guiding the army through unfamiliar territory and carrying the commander’s dispatches. Little wonder that Colonel Murray had made clear in writing the previous summer: ‘the officers are to be very particular as to the character of the men’ (original emphasis).

  Wellesley understood that there were risks in entrusting his sensitive dispatches to the Guides. He refused a French émigré a commission in the corps, fearing he might be a double agent and telling the British minister in Lisbon: ‘I should wish, however not to employ him, as he would have opportunities of acquiring and conveying to the enemy much useful information.’ General Wellesley and the QMG believed that the loyalty of their messengers was best bought with silver coin, promptly paid and in good quantity. It was a mercenary troop and the general was under no illusion about the type of men who formed it, listing the qualities required of its officers as ‘intelligence, some honesty, and a knowledge of the Spanish and Portuguese languages and English or French’.

  Scovell, for his part, was responsible for transforming these men of ‘some honesty’ into a reliable, smart, self-confident corps. This would require training, uniforms and weaponry. It was in search of the arms and accoutrements for his Guides that he was travelling to Lisbon. Just one month after writing to Le Marchant in despair, Scovell was throwing himself into his new project with vigour. After years of fruitless graft in the garrisons of Lewes, Derby and Wycombe, he was thrilled to be overcoming the many practical difficulties that faced his corps. Reclining in his packet boat, he gazed at the lush countryside of the Tagus littoral and his spirits lifted. Even if Captain Scovell believed his new task was his last hope of achieving something in the profession of arms, he relished it, particularly as it simultaneously satisfied his passions for travel and culture. He described the passage to Lisbon as ‘a most delightful voyage’.

  His river boat looked much the same as in Roman times. A great lateen sail hung from the mast, just like that used by the Phoenician galleys. A flat bottom ensured the craft had the shallow draught needed to clear the river’s sand bars and banks. It was an ancient rig, but it answered well enough for navigation of the Tagus. It sped Scovell the eighty miles downstream in nineteen hours. He disembarked from this shady packet into the radiant light and pungent stench of an early June morning on the Lisbon quayside, ready to prosecute his mission.

  *

  While Scovell was in Lisbon, three French officers were embarking on an infinitely less pleasant odyssey. On 25 June, not far across the Spanish border near Tordesillas, they were making their way towards a river ferry. General Jean Baptiste Franceschi trotted along on his fine charger, accompanied by his two aides-de-camp. Franceschi was carrying vital dispatches from Marshal Soult to Joseph, King of Spain. He was not a mere messenger, though. Franceschi had commanded Soult’s light cavalry division throughout the pursuit of John Moore to Corunna and during the previous month’s near-disastrous campaign in northern Portugal.

  In many ways, Franceschi personified the unusual qualities of Napoleon’s officer corps. As a young man, he had never wanted to be in the Army: quite the opposite, he had been an artist, a sculptor. When thousands of patriotic French had answered the cry of ‘la patrie en danger’ just after the Revolution, Franceschi had volunteered for the Paris ‘Artists’ Company’ and gone to the front to fight the armies that had been dispatched to throttle the Republic at birth. Bobbing along in this sea of revolutionary ferment, he had progressed from infantry soldier to artillery lieutenant, hussar officer and then aide to Soult in just five tumultuous campaigns.

  Franceschi’s flamboyant temperament made him well suited to the French cavalry. Among these men, the hardships of campaign and the possibility of death were borne with humour, fatalism and a sense of honour. He had evidently considered that he would be no safer riding with an escort across this rebellious land. Marshal Soult was anxious, in any case, that King Joseph should learn as quickly as possible of the terrible state of the army that had escaped the British in northern Portugal and crossed the Serra da Geres. It would seem that a Spaniard who had seen Franceschi during a stopover had passed word of the important traveller on.

  When the general and his two companions were nearing the river, they were ambushed. The guerrilla party responsible was not large – some accounts say just eight men, led by a local nicknamed El Capucino, ‘The Friar’. Any struggle was short-lived: perhaps the guerrillas succeeded in dismounting their victims before offering the choice of death or captivity. The offer of quarter was rare enough for these people, but El Capucino had evidently realized that this senior officer was a considerable prize.

  Franceschi was initially taken to Zarza la Mayor, close to the Portuguese frontier. In Zarza, several days after his capture, Major-General Charles Stewart arrived with a small escort. The Adjutant-General was charged with handling prisoners and, in Stewart’s view, tapping them for intelligence. Since Franceschi was a captive of the Spanish, formalities had to be observed. Stewart could not remove the general from their custody, although he left this account of their interview:

  He appeared dreadfully out of fortune with his evil humour, repeatedly ejaculating, ‘Oh! how sad it is for a general of hussars to be taken by a Friar!’ Yet Frenchman-like he met all our advances with the greatest frankness and candour.

  Stewart remarked in his later history of the war that the French captive had been capturing important dispatches. Whether he discovered this at the time of their melancholy conversation but could not induce the Spanish to part with them, or whether he did not even think to ask is unclear. What is certain is that he returned to Wellesley’s camp in possession of nothing other than his insights into the French national character. The two long letters to King Joseph that had been in Franceschi’s care were sent to the Spanish war ministry in the south. Protocol being what it was, these messages had to be copied before they could be handed to the British minister there. The Anglo-Spanish alliance was still tinged with mutual suspicion, for the two countries were old enemies that had been fighting as recently as 1807 and it was only Napoleon’s invasion of Iberia that had led them to set aside their differences in the face of a common foe. The British representative relayed the copies of Soult’s letters to Wellesley on 9 July, describing them as ‘infinitely curious in various respects’, and the commander of British forces actually received them several days later, almost three weeks after they were written.

  Marshal Soult’s dispatches to Napoleon’s brother, King Joseph, ran to dozens of pages and were indeed packed with insight. One painted the bleakest picture of his operations in north-west Spain, noting the many factors that led to ‘an increase day by day in the number of our enemies, and make the war in this country most murderous, infinitely unpleasant, and without any end in sight’. Soult needed huge sums of money to provision his army and cover the many expenses of occupation. He also told the king that he was moving south-east, closer to Wellesley’s next intended area of operations. Even so, the time taken to get hold of the dispatches and the limits of Soult’s own knowledge about wider French deployments meant this ‘infinitely curious’ mail could not dictate Wellesley’s next strategic moves.

  The British commander shared Stewart’s sympathy with the plight of the captured French general. They could do nothing, however, to prevent his maltreatment by the Spanish. Animated by patriotic fervour, Britain’s allies had treated their prisoners lamentably, where, indeed, they had consented to take them. The Spanish had broken an agreement to send home the corps captured at Bailen the previous year, confining the unfortunate French troops to prison hulks or barren islands in the Bay of Cadiz where epidemics carried them off in their thousands. Wellesley considered that the rules of war and civilized behaviour should have dictated a different attitude, particularly towards Franceschi, and tried by various methods to arrange his exchange, send him money and alleviate his situation. The Spanish, however, kept him in a series of dark dungeons
, subjected him to regular beatings and provided only measly rations. The following year Franceschi became ill with yellow fever and died in captivity. This kind of event contributed to the increasingly grim reputation of Spain among French troops. In other campaigns, they had marched across Italy or Austria to be greeted by deputations of local worthies who, anxious to avoid too much unpleasantness, even presented them with the keys to their towns. In Spain and Portugal they had found many townspeople would rather fight to the death than yield to the invaders and the countryside was awash with bands of murderous brigands. One French general wrote: ‘I shall always remember how I was afflicted with great anxieties; every day saw the murder of several Frenchmen, and I travelled over this assassin’s countryside as warily as if it were a volcano.’

  It had not taken long for the French footsloggers to begin repaying brutality in kind. Punitive missions against villages where there had been attacks on imperial columns soon assumed a vicious character. One Frenchman, conscripted in the summer of 1809 and bound for Spain, noted this reception from veterans at his military depot in Angouleme:

  they painted a picture of Spain in such sombre colours and spoke of the excesses committed by the two sides in such a grave tone that we became deeply sad. Unable to believe in such barbarism, I thought the speaker was acting the poet, in fact, as I was soon to discover, he was nothing but an accurate historian.

  He marched off to war, leaving a wailing mother and forlorn friends, remarking, ‘even then, Spain was called the tomb of the French’.

  The poisonous character of the conflict between the Iberians and their invaders was firmly established, even early in 1809, and defined the battle for information. Messengers, as Franceschi’s saga demonstrated, could not move unescorted without the risk of becoming targets for popular wrath. The situation rapidly became so acute that Madrid or Paris might hear nothing from an expeditionary corps in some corner of the Peninsula for four, five, even six weeks at a stretch. Under these circumstances, there were great difficulties in coordinating the operations of different corps around Spain. Although the French discovered some sympathizers in the towns, among the poorer sort of professionals or artisans, the peasants in the countryside were generally unwilling to provide King Joseph’s scouting parties with information on the whereabouts of their enemies. The guerrillas or British, on the other hand, usually found plenty of willing collaborators.

  Of course, Franceschi was not the first French messenger to be taken, but his capture did galvanize the court of Napoleon’s brother in Madrid to think more seriously about its basic difficulties of communication.

  Small detachments of troops were positioned in fortified blockhouses at regular intervals along main routes like the one from Madrid to the French frontier at Bayonne. In this way, messengers could spend the night in safety and would never be too far from help if ambushed. Inevitably, this level of security could only be provided on a small number of routes, since it consumed troops by the thousand.

  Similar considerations prevented the introduction to Spain of the optical telegraph relays used in France. As in so many matters of military science, the French had pioneered this momentous development in communication. Chains of telegraph stations (each one had to be visible to the next) were used to send messages from Paris to the eastern frontier or the south at previously unthinkable speeds. To have done so in Iberia, however, would have required scores of stations, exposing the operators and messages alike to the constant risk of guerrilla attack.

  Instead, the tried and tested method of pen and paper had to suffice. Where the safety of some urgent communication was in doubt, two or more copies were sent. Increasingly, dispatches would arrive bearing the words ‘Duplicato’ or ‘Triplicato’ at the top. The French were not yet ready to protect the contents of their military messages, even though in some sensitive diplomatic correspondence the emperor did use secret ciphers. Such code tables allowed words, letters or phrases to be converted into numbers. One hundred years earlier, under Louis XIV, France had been the master of this kind of secret writing. French diplomats had perfected ciphers of ever-increasing complexity during the century leading up to the Revolution. An early cipher, of Louis XIV’s day, for example, might allow the transcription of a message into numbers from one to six hundred. By 1750, though, French ministers were being equipped with an enciphering table of 1,200 numbers. As the complexity of the transcription increased, the task facing any would-be decipherer became even more difficult.

  The French Revolution had created much turmoil in the diplomatic service, stocked as it was with gouty aristocrats. However, the knowledge of codes and ciphers had not been lopped off with their venerable heads, since this kind of esoteric know-how had always been the preserve of a certain type of petit-bourgeois administrator, who came through the Revolution unscathed. Copies of the 1750 ciphering table remained in the drawers of the foreign ministry. There were other, more exotic codes, too, involving hieroglyphs. All were intended for use by ambassadors, ministers and secret informants; people whose situations made it imperative that they take the time to encipher and decipher messages.

  As for Napoleon’s army, it had tried using codes in some of its campaigns but they were quite simple, usually termed petits chiffres, or small ciphers. They might just transpose letters into numbers from one to fifty. This was fast, but it was also easily broken. It could only protect the message for a few hours. If, however, the letter in question was an urgent order for the movement of troops, that might be enough. Napoleon and his staff knew that everything had to be kept simple in the heat of battle. How complex could something be if it had to be used by some general’s aide-de-camp while perched on the back of a horse, perhaps with the whizz of cannonballs overhead? A great table of the type used in the foreign ministry was the size of a large map; even its physical dimensions posed difficulties on campaign. There were other, more basic, problems too. What was the point of enciphering your dispatch if you had no knowledge the recipient could decipher it? The French armies in Spain had been continuously in motion since the summer of 1808. There had been no time to send each commander a set of code tables. Attempts to pass such a sensitive package through the bandit-infested countryside carried unthinkable risks. What if the British ended up in possession of one of the secret charts, or, worse still, were able to copy it without the French being aware it was compromised?

  After Franceschi’s abduction, Joseph would have known that it would be quite impossible to send out copies of code tables quickly and safely. Speed was of the essence, because the French had learned of the advance of Wellesley’s Army into eastern Spain. On 3 July 1809, the British Army had crossed into the mountainous central sector of the frontier. The king and his military advisers knew that there was a Spanish corps under General Cuesta also lurking somewhere in this region. The combined force might move on Madrid. If Sebastiani and Victor joined together, they could block the allied advance. If Soult and Ney were also brought into action, they would have a hefty preponderance of force over the British and Spanish. Everything depended on a swift concentration of strength.

  The king was resolved to do something about the security of his dispatches. Franceschi had, after all, fallen into enemy hands because he was wearing the uniform of a French cavalry general and was accompanied by two finely appointed ADCs. Perhaps the answer lay in greater stealth. Why not make use of the afrancesados,† the natives who had welcomed the arrival of the French? If a Spanish spy could be given a message, he might make his way dressed as a shepherd or some itinerant pilgrim, whereas a messenger escorted by a squadron of dragoons would surely attract attention. Joseph resolved to use any method that might succeed as he struggled to get a message through to Marshal Soult in time to tip the balance in the imminent battle against the British.

  NOTES

  1 ‘soldiers of the Guards, the Buffs and numerous other regiments were woken by drums and bugles sounding “reveille”’: details of how the Army got under way are taken from the 1837
edition of Colonel Gurwood’s Selected General Orders (and reproduced by Charles Oman in Wellington’s Army) and of the order of march from a General Order during the Oporto campaign also in one of Gurwood’s volumes.

  2 ‘One captain in the Buffs, for example, confessed in his journal that he knew nothing’: this was T. Bunbury, in Reminiscences of a Veteran.

  – ‘Sergeant Cooper of the 7th Fusiliers’: his memoir, Rough Notes of Seven Campaigns in Portugal, Etc., frequently undermines the official account.

  – ‘One officer of the 14th Light Dragoons’: Peter Hawker, Journal of the Campaign of 1809.

  3 ‘One of Colonel Le Marchant’s correspondents in the Peninsula’: Captain Tryon Still, letter, LMP Packet 11, Letter 13.

  4 ‘Colonel Murray had made clear in writing the previous summer’: his letter is in the Scovell Papers, WO37, dated 26 September 1808.

  5 ‘He refused a French émigré a commission in the corps’: letter to Charles Stuart in Wellington’s Dispatches, 13 March 1810.

  6 ‘Stewart could not remove the general from their custody, although he left this account of their interview’: in his History of the Peninsular Wars.

  7 ‘One French general wrote, “I shall always remember how I was afflicted with great anxieties”’: this was General Matthieu Dumas (father of the novelist Roland).

  – ‘One Frenchman, conscripted in the summer of 1809 and bound for Spain’: Antoine Fée, Souvenirs de la Guerre D’Espagne, Paris, 1856.

  8 ‘Copies of the 1750 ciphering table remained in the drawers of the foreign ministry’: and indeed, there still are. An example of the 1750 type was kindly copied for me by Jerome Cras at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques in Nantes (it is catalogued as: Boston, consulat, serie A, carton 1), as was a copy of the instructions for the use of the cipher drawn up in 1750 (Rome-Saint-Siege, ambassade, 111).