The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  With the disastrous business of Almeida still souring Wellington’s mood, he resolved to move south quickly to reinforce Beresford, who had two British divisions with him and was also cooperating with Spanish troops. Their aim was to besiege the fortified town of Badajoz. Intelligence reports led Wellington to suspect that Marshal Soult, the old enemy of Corunna and Oporto, was about to fall upon Beresford’s allied force.

  Wellington sent two divisions heading south on 15 May and followed them with a small suite of staff officers, including Scovell, the next day. But as they rode down in hard stages through the hilly countryside, ominous news reached them. Soult had attacked Beresford at Albuera on the 16th and it had been a sanguinary affair.

  On the afternoon of 19 May, Wellington rode through Elvas’s place d’armes† and into the centre of this, the greatest Portuguese fortress. The town sat in a place of exceptional natural strength, its whitewashed buildings occupying the crown of a hill. To Wellington’s party, riding down to Elvas from the north, one of the most striking things about the town was the vast, three-tiered aqueduct built into it in the sixteenth century. Each of the natural routes around the town was in turn dominated by two great outworks. Its defences were so strong that Marshal Soult never felt the confidence to put them to the test.

  Wellington’s party clattered through the narrow streets and established a Headquarters in the town centre. There, he received reports of what had happened a couple of marches across the border on the 16th. At about 4 p.m., he jotted a note to Lieutenant-General Brent Spencer, who was in command of the divisions left behind to guard Portugal’s northern gateway. ‘I do not yet know the particulars of the action, nor the extent of the loss; but it is certainly very severe.’ He then began to compose a letter to Beresford. He had driven Soult off all right; the reports were clear about that. The British infantry had fought with magnificent determination, but their ardour had carried one brigade into disaster. It had been caught in the flank by French cavalry and in five ghastly minutes 1,250 out of its 1,570 men had been killed, captured or wounded. The other British brigades had taken a heavy pounding, too. Perhaps four out of every ten redcoats in Beresford’s army were dead or wounded.

  Wellington knew that when word reached England about the scale of this loss, it might look very bad. All those carping Whigs and Radicals would be on their hind legs in the Commons, denouncing the ministry’s war policy yet again. As these concerns swirled around his head, Wellington jotted a sympathetic note to Beresford: ‘you could not be successful in such an action without a large loss; and we must make up our minds to affairs of this kind sometimes, or give up the game’. The next day, Wellington fired off orders, telling the hospitals in Lisbon to prepare for 2,000 wounded and ordering more gunners up. The attempt on Badajoz had cost the British dear at Albuera, but it had cost Soult dearer still and his army was withdrawing, leaving the French garrison inside that fortress to face the inevitable siege. Having paid this awful price, Wellington was determined to prosecute his attempt on the city and was ordering heavy guns and supplies forward.

  On the 21st, Wellington left Elvas and rode a dozen miles across the plain of the Guadiana river to direct operations himself. He decided to look over the battlefield of Albuera and Scovell followed in his suite. They found the ground strewn with thousands of corpses. Wild dogs and carrion birds were already making a meal of them. Here and there, remarkably, five days after the slaughter, plaintive voices cried out for mercy or deliverance. The allied medical services had broken down completely. In some places, Wellington could see an orderly helping a canteen to the blood-caked face of some French hussar or Portuguese chasseur. Wellington wrote to Beresford, ‘I don’t know what to do about the French wounded at Albuera. We must remove our own in the first instance.’

  For Scovell, the field held its own particular horror. One of the four battalions in the brigade that had been ridden down was his own, the 57th Foot. After touring the battlefield with Lord Wellington, Scovell noted in his journal that ‘our people had buried till they could work no longer, and there still lay an immense number that never could be interred. Of about 7,000 British not one half remained fit for duty, and only two officers of my Regiment the 57th came out of the field unhurt. The left Centre Company had only two men left.’ The colonel of the 57th had told his men to ‘Die Hard!’ as the Polish Lancers and 2nd Hussars rode down on them. The moment entered Army mythology, and the CO’s order its language.

  Wellington returned to Elvas, where he reviewed Beresford’s official account of the battle. It had been tainted by Beresford’s state of mind: he had gone to pieces and sunk into a deep depression. This will not do, Wellington remarked as he read the dispatch: write me down a victory. The document was redrafted to be more upbeat. To ram the point home, the commander of British forces added in his covering note to the secretary of war in London, Earl Liverpool, ‘after a most severe engagement, in which all the troops conducted themselves in the most gallant manner, Sir W. Beresford gained the victory’. In letters to London and to the political authorities in the Peninsula, he blamed the Spanish at Albuera, saying they were incapable of manoeuvring to defend themselves.

  Among the staff officers milling about outside Headquarters in Elvas, the affair of the 16th generated much gossip. Wellington’s aristocratic young military secretary, FitzRoy Somerset, wrote home, telling his brother that he would not find the truth about Albuera in the official dispatch and confiding, ‘Beresford does not appear to have managed the battle with much skill.’ Beresford had fallen into indecision during the battle itself. At one point, the marshal had fought for his life with a Polish lancer and clearly been shaken by the experience. Shortly afterwards, Beresford had lost all hope and ordered a general retreat. The victory, if it could really be called one, had been won only when one of his staff officers had galloped forward on his own initiative and ordered forward the reserve, a brigade of fusiliers, to attack the faltering French. The word was that Hardinge had saved the day. A twenty-six-year-old staff officer had shown the character and presence of mind that Beresford lacked. Anxious lest he be eclipsed, Hardinge’s superior, D’Urban, let it be known through his own partisans that he had given the fateful order to bring up the reserves and that Hardinge had merely been his errand boy. Wellington preferred not to choose between them, and both, it would later become clear, earned his gratitude for their presence of mind.

  If Hardinge and D’Urban were to profit personally from the carnage of Albuera, so, too, was Scovell. He may have been disappointed after the battle of Fuentes, but on 24 May his friend FitzRoy Somerset set pen to paper with good tidings. Scovell was promoted at last to major. The slaughter of the 57th at Albuera had left most of the regiment’s commissions vacant. After years of trying to impress generals with his enthusiasm, plans and extra labours, Scovell had got his advancement by the traditional way during war: by stepping into dead men’s shoes.

  ‘The Commander in Chief having been pleased to direct Lord Wellington to recommend such officers for brevet rank as may have particularly merited his notice and approbation’, Somerset’s letter to Scovell began,

  I have much pleasure in being the channel of communicating to you that his Lordship has taken the opportunity of recommending you for the rank of Major and I beg you to accept my congratulations on an occasion naturally gratifying to your feelings.

  If the losses of the 57th had created vacancies, those who worked most closely with Wellington – Murray, De Lancey and Somerset – had also impressed him of the candidate’s virtues. The Staff had come to know Scovell’s restless energy well. He was always jotting observations about the campaign in his journal, darting about on his beloved horses, comparing notes with others before sitting down again at some rough-hewn peasant’s table to make further observations. During the winter, inside the lines of Torres Vedras, Scovell, finding his occupation with communications was taking up too little of his time, set his mind to inventing something. He had seen that every cavalry reg
iment in the Army had trouble with the carts used by its blacksmiths. The animals used to draw these wagons had frequently been worked to death on the Portuguese roads that were little better than tracks. Scovell therefore designed a portable forge that could be broken down and packed on two mules who might walk anywhere a regiment’s horses could. In time, this invention would be credited with saving dozens of horses.

  The importance of the corps of Guides had increased greatly once the Army had emerged from the lines of Torres Vedras, early in 1811, and gone out to the open border country again. The general’s scheme of operations for taking Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz involved dividing the Army, and this meant successful operations were vitally dependent on timely communications between these two wings.

  Wellington had seen Scovell’s corps of Guides at work and had been impressed. He believed they were better at their job than British soldiers ever could be, as he explained in a letter: ‘our English non-commissioned officers and soldiers are not very fit to be trusted alone, and out of view of their officers, in detached stations at a distance from the Army, as the soldiers of the Guides are for months together, without occasioning any complaint’.

  Later that summer, Scovell and his Guides were tasked with establishing a daily post between the two halves of the Anglo-Portuguese force. It soon became a service that Wellington virtually set his watch by. The journey between the two headquarters was completed in stages of ten to twelve miles, with the progress of each packet recorded on its accompanying ticket. The messengers ‘rode post’, picking up a fresh horse at each of the wayside halts and leaving their tired mount to recover. Scovell later said, with evident pride, ‘there was no instance of any of these orderlies betraying his trust’.

  By August 1811, Scovell was fulfilling his duties so effectively that Wellington considered putting the entire civilian and military post of Portugal under his control. If the job of postmaster seemed rather a long way from Scovell’s early ambition to lead a regiment of cavalry, the newly made major understood very well that dreams of glory do not satisfy one’s creditors. The myriad tasks he took on in Wellington’s HQ each carried its own pay or allowances; by accepting them, he was making himself a prosperous officer. In the end, the reform of the entire Portuguese postal service did not fall to him personally, but nevertheless Wellington announced by General Order:

  Major Scovell is appointed to superintend all the communications of the army; and the post master sergeants, at headquarters and at Lisbon, will place themselves under his orders, as likewise Senhor Oliveira, the Director of the Portuguese posts. The messengers, likewise, will receive their orders from Major Scovell.

  These many tasks also included supervision of the telegraph system in the country. Prior to Massena’s invasion, the Portuguese had maintained links of signalling stations up to Elvas and Almeida on the frontier. These had been destroyed by the allies as they fell back to Torres Vedras. By the summer of 1811, Scovell was trying to reconstitute some of these links, although they never attained the same strategic importance as his daily post between Wellington and the officer in command of the allies’ southern wing, Lieutenant-General Rowland Hill.

  With these duties, Scovell more than doubled his earlier pay. The promotion from captain to major was worth almost five shillings more each day. He had also moved from Deputy Assistant QMG to Assistant, which also carried a rise in pay of several shillings per day. Once he became Superintendent of Military Communications he was given extra pay of £50 per annum, which was soon increased to £80.

  With all this extra money came responsibility for, among other things, codes and ciphers. Major Scovell was handed a small notebook containing a handwritten copy of a most unusual text: Cryptographia, or The Art of Decyphering by David Arnold Conradus. The origins of this tract are obscure. It is possible that Conradus may have been a monk, for men of the cloth were pre-eminent among the secret servants who made codes or deciphered them for the princes and great captains of Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  Anyone in possession of Conradus, a detailed knowledge of French and a good brain could attack the kind of simple ciphers that had appeared that summer in Spain and do so with a good chance of obtaining results. That was what Hardinge and D’Urban had done with Latour Maubourg’s letter before the Battle of Albuera. Conradus had evidently spent many years studying the principal languages of Europe and his little book consisted of propositions and rules. The first section, headed ‘General Theory’, began:

  Proposition 1: The art of decyphering is the explanation of secret characters by certain rules.

  Prop 2: Every language has, besides the form of characters, something peculiar in the place, order, continuation, frequency and number of the letters.

  Rule 1: In decyphering regard is to be had to the place, order, combination, frequency and number of letters.

  Rule 2: In decyphering nothing is to be left to conjecture, where the art shews the way of proceeding with certainty.

  Prop 3: In a writing of any length, the same letters recur several times.

  Rule 3: Writings of any length are most easy to decypher from the frequent recurrence and combination of the same letters.

  Conradus then explained the peculiarities of the main European languages that might show themselves in ciphers. Chapter V concerned French and contained many vital pointers: that e was the most commonly used letter; that words ending in double letters most likely ended in ‘ee’; that ‘et’, meaning ‘and’, was the most common word; that there were only thirty-nine two-letter words in French (which he helpfully listed); and that a single letter on its own was an a, y or a consonant with an apostrophe.

  Anyone using Conradus could attack a message in simple cipher in a methodical way. If he counted up the code numbers, the most frequently occurring was likely to be e, the second most frequent was i, and so on.

  The approach contained in The Art of Decyphering was, long before 1811, clearly understood by those who made codes. Among diplomats and royal princes ciphers had been growing in size and complexity: the Spanish had introduced a 500-character cipher in the late sixteenth century; King Charles I had used one of 800 characters during the English Civil War; Louis XIV had a Grand Chiffre or Great Cipher of 600, but distributed several different sheets to his ministers overseas, allowing choices as to which particular coding table had been used. All of these steps were designed to defeat the basic approach contained in Conradus, which was to draw conclusions from the frequency of different code numbers. In the summer of 1811, such great ciphers had not appeared in the French Peninsular army, which, fortunately for Scovell, gave him time to cut his teeth on simpler codes. Change, however, was afoot.

  *

  On 7 May, two days after Fuentes d’Onoro, Marshal Massena had been superseded in command of the Army of Portugal. His replacement was Marshal Auguste Frederic Marmont, Duke of Ragusa. Massena had embodied the swashbuckling verve of the revolutionary armies; he was a man who believed in himself so completely and was so comfortable with risk that he had many a time clinched victory in an apparently hopeless situation. Marmont, on the other hand, was altogether more methodical, more scientific, an artillery officer who knew the business of tangents and trajectories back to front. Marmont had shown himself an able administrator, reorganizing the artillery throughout the army. Whereas Massena cursed in his Piedmontese dialect, the Duke of Ragusa was a cultivated man, a savant; someone who knew about science, art and philosophy. And while Massena had kept his mistress at Headquarters during the Portuguese campaign, Marmont, although reputedly one of the most handsome men in Paris, brought no Venus to the field of Mars.

  Marmont was a man of energy too, thirty-six when he took over the Army of Portugal; fifteen years younger than the marshal he replaced. It was the kind of radical change the emperor wanted, and Marmont revelled in his reputation as one of Bonaparte’s closest confidants during his epic campaigns in Egypt and Italy. It was only natural, though, that, arriving with such
a reputation, Marmont should excite jealousy in some quarters.

  Although Massena had coaxed it into battle on 5 May, the Army of Portugal was still utterly exhausted by its expedition across scorched earth to Lisbon and back. Upon assuming control, Marmont began a thorough reorganization.

  Napoleon had grown sick of the constant bickering between Massena and the commander of his three corps d’armée: Marmont disposed of this layer of command and consolidated his troops in six strong divisions, all under his own hand. Napoleon thought it absurd that 100,000 French troops in western Spain could be kept in check by 40,000 British: Marmont understood that the solution lay in close cooperation with his neighbours, the Army of the North, and Soult’s Army of the South. In order to do this, there would need to be prompt and effective communication. He knew enough about codes to be sure that the kind of simple ciphers appearing in his own and Soult’s armies were inadequate. Marmont had an advantage over the others. He had used ciphers in the Balkans while in command of Napoleon’s Army of Dalmatia in 1807. This code had been a hieroglyphic form of petit chiffre, or small cipher. It was not very strong and its complex symbols made it hard to use in the heat of battle.