The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  Looking up at the defences, the stormers could see the glow of the French linstocks, burning slow matches ready to be touched to some mine or cannon which would shower them with grapeshot. The first over the top of the trench would be picked volunteers who would lead the way to the base of the breach. This work was so dangerous that these groups were called Forlorn Hopes. At seven, the bell tower atop the cathedral chimed the hour and those leading stormers broke cover and began running across the open ground. General Picton’s 3rd Division was taking the main breach, Craufurd’s Light Division the lesser one and three other columns were heading for other sections of the defences with scaling ladders.

  Immediately, the whizz and whine of musket balls intensified into an incessant cacophony in their ears. With the first men dropping, the Forlorn Hopes had first to negotiate an earthen rampart that went all the way around the town, protecting the walls themselves. The first promotion-hungry man of the 3rd Division to mount this obstacle was, appropriately enough, Major Ridge.§ Once on top of it, they hurled bags of straw and fascines down into the ditch behind it and, using these objects to break their fall of fifteen feet or so, jumped in and groped their way towards the breaches. One Light Division soldier wrote, ‘as we neared the breach, the shot of the enemy swept away our men first. Canister, grape, round-shot and shell, with fireballs to show our ground, and a regular hailstorm of bullets came pouring on and around us.’

  The first men looked up into the great breach and could see the mouth of a cannon aimed right across the big gap in the wall. Its crew was waiting to cut them down, but the big gun had been rolled just a little too far forward, for men could hug the side of the breach as they scrambled up and be invulnerable to its fire. As the first men appeared atop the ramparts, a great cheer rose from the 3rd Division stormers.

  The Light Division, meanwhile, assaulting its own gap in the wall, heard the jubilant shouting of the 3rd and ‘this had a magical effect; regardless of the enemy’s fire and every other impediment, the men dashed over the breach carrying everything before them’. At this moment of triumph, though, the Light Division paid a hefty price. Its commander, ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd, was standing atop the rampart, urging his men on, but he had only been there a few moments before he fell in a puff of red mist, mortally wounded by a musket ball. Further to their right, as the 3rd Division soldiers mounted the walls, they came under intense fire from their flanks and from French sharpshooters in buildings behind the breach. One after another, soldiers scrambling over the ramparts were cut down. One eyewitness noted the heavy losses suffered by Picton’s men at this key moment: ‘in this small space they suffered a tremendous loss of nearly 500 heroic officers and soldiers. During the fighting, their dead and wounded were piled on top of the other. The wounded cried out in agony as they were trampled upon.’

  With the two breaches carried and other storming parties scaling the walls elsewhere, resistance crumbled. A group of officers and men ran into the city’s central plaza and planted their regimental colours there. Triumph soon turned to riot, however. Those who had survived the storm soon sought to profit from it, breaking into houses to loot and drink themselves senseless. Many hours passed before order could be restored.

  At Wellington’s Headquarters there was celebration. The operation had been successfully concluded not in twenty days but in twelve. The British had suffered about 1,000 casualties, the French had lost twice as many men (1,700 being taken prisoner). Not only had the battle delivered one of the frontier’s key fortified places, but the Army of Portugal’s own siege train of heavy guns had been inside Rodrigo when it fell. No less than 153 cannon had fallen into Wellington’s hands and the loss of these would mean Marmont would be powerless to retake the town or pose any serious threat to the security of northern Portugal.

  Wellington’s victory dispatch to the secretary of war, penned on 20 January, contained much praise for the officers and men who had carried the city. The engineers and gunners central to such an enterprise were given their due as well. It would not have been good manners to trumpet his own personal achievement too loudly in the official record, but Wellington made sure that his partisans in London understood what a remarkable feat it had been to seize the fortress in twelve days. In a private letter to the Duke of Richmond, he noted, ‘we proceeded at Ciudad Rodrigo on quite a new principle in sieges … The French, however, who are supposed to know everything, could not take this place in less than 40 days after it was completely invested.’

  The speed of what had happened did indeed cause complete bewilderment in French headquarters. Marmont had expected to bring his forces together to relieve Rodrigo on 29 January, but this plan was fully nine days too late. Captain Cocks noted in his journal, ‘Lord Wellington’s correctness in choosing this moment for the siege proves the exactness of his calculations. I would not be Marmont’s aide de camp to report the event for a year’s allowance.’

  And how would Marmont ‘report the event’ to his master in Paris? It had happened, after all, because Napoleon had diverted three of the Army of Portugal’s divisions towards Valencia, sent one more northwards and ensured that the best troops of the Army of the North had moved away from the frontier too. Marmont’s command had been left too weak and spread out to do anything. Clearly it would be quite impossible to send a report to Paris along the lines of ‘Sire, it was all your fault for trying to direct this war at a distance of 300 leagues’. The marshal himself had erred in thinking he had until late January to get a relief column up to the border. Despite the reports, by Portuguese and Spanish collaborators in his pay, of siege supplies being built up by the British in Almeida the month before, Marmont had shared Napoleon’s assessment that the British were too sick and lethargic to do anything during the winter.

  French staff officers murmured to one another about the événement funeste, the ‘disastrous occurrence’ at Rodrigo. Marmont had never experienced a reverse like this. His trajectory through the ranks of the Grande Armée towards the dukedom of Ragusa and coveted marshal’s baton had been comet-like. The loss of Rodrigo undermined his self-confidence, for he sensed for the first time that his reputation might be buried in the Iberian graveyard, just like that of his predecessor, Massena. Count Miot de Melito, one of King Joseph’s private secretaries, wrote:

  this beginning hardly inspired great confidence in the military talents of this young marshal who had not, up until that moment, exercised higher command, and who was not known for any brilliant act, and owed the post in which he had succeeded one of the great captains of that period [Massena] only to the blind favour shown by the emperor to one of his old pupils.

  Inevitably, the emperor’s response to the fall of Rodrigo, sent through the usual channel of Marshal Berthier, was what Marmont would have feared. Napoleon, Berthier wrote on 6 February, ‘is not satisfied with your direction of the war; you have a superiority over the enemy, and, instead of taking the initiative, you are always on its receiving end. You march your troops around and tire them out; this is not the Art of War.’

  Marmont sent his senior aide, one Colonel Jardet, to Paris to pick up what gossip he could about whether the Rodrigo episode had caused lasting damage to his reputation. After a few days in Paris, Jardet wrote a twenty-eight-page letter back to his commander in Spain, setting things out with great clarity and candour. Naturally, this message needed the protection of a cipher, since Jardet did not want anyone who handled it to become privy to such delicate matters. The colonel was not in the possession of the grand chiffre and anyway it made sense to encode it in one understood only in the Army of Portugal. He therefore chose one of Marmont’s 150-character ciphers to protect it. While this step may have secured the contents from the great majority of French officers, or indeed Spanish guerrillas, it could not do so from an attack by Major George Scovell, for it was on his desk that Jardet’s letter ended up.

  *

  In the weeks after the fall of Rodrigo, while Marmont worried about his fall from grace, Wellingt
on had considered his next step carefully. That he would have to make an attack on Badajoz, the last of the four great frontier fortresses still in French hands, was obvious. Just one week after the event, the general had sent off sixteen of the twenty-four-pounder siege guns on their long journey to the southern frontier. Wellington knew that once he had taken Badajoz, he could consider Portugal secure and would be able to launch his Army in earnest into the Spanish interior; perhaps even to the gates of Madrid itself. The move on Badajoz could not be rushed, though.

  Wellington had always anticipated that he would need to wait for the heavy rains of February and March to nourish the Estremaduran fodder and thus sustain the large force of cavalry needed on the plains around Badajoz. The correlation of forces had to ripen as well. If the disappointment of the previous summer was to be avoided, he had to frustrate any concentration of French divisions for several weeks while he prosecuted the bloody business of siegecraft. This would require inspiration, since Marshal Suchet had at last successfully concluded the siege of Valencia, freeing thousands of French troops for action elsewhere.

  Every insight into the deliberations of the enemy camp was vital, so Scovell had to attack the cipher used in Jardet’s letter with alacrity. The Colonel had begun en clair, describing his arrival in the metropolis and his interview with Marshal Berthier late at night in his office. As it moved to more serious matters, it switched into streams of digits. Jardet had used the cipher cleverly, inserting many blank codes and using parts of words en clair to cause confusion: for example, ‘loi’ appears at one point bracketed with numbers (25.17.loi.54.43. 19.17.me.58.18.2). While this might at first seem like a reference to law, ‘loi’ in French, it had in fact resulted from a canny encipherment of a longer word, l’eloingement.

  Whatever Jardet’s skills at this craft, the great length of his message and the limits of the Army of Portugal cipher meant there were several good places to start the attack. Berthier had evidently been in generous and self-effacing mood while pacing up and down in his office and holding forth to Jardet. The colonel noted:

  Ah my friend, he could not disguise that he 20.14.59.29 the 36.49.1. 12.63.14.17 of 6.28. 27.30.31.21.17.41.40.30.49.10.41.39.31.43.10

  The first section, as it switches into code, is vulnerable. Could the first four letters represent ‘était’? He was? No, since ‘était’ is a five-letter word. What about ‘est’, ‘is’? That is one letter too short, but of course blank codes could make coded words longer than the originals. Scovell was sufficiently versed in this type of cipher to know that higher numbers were often used as vacant codes. If 59 is blank, then 20 is e, 14 is s and 29 stands for t. Moving on to the next coded word or phrase, 36.49.1.12.63.14.17, it is sandwiched between two words en clair: ‘that he is the 36.49.1.12.63.14.17 of’. Here again, context reveals something. He is … the architect of, the instigator of, the father of? There were only so many possibilities. These had to be tempered by the suspicion that blanks might have been used again to increase the length of the coded word. Eventually, Scovell could have tried ‘the cause of’. He suspected in any case that 14 stood for s and if he knocked out the two highest numbers (49 and 63) as blanks, it would fit. This kind of assumption in a decipherer was obviously unscientific until it had been tested in other passages containing the same code numbers and of course the great length of Jardet’s missive gave him many other places to check his solutions. Eventually the passage above emerges as:

  Ah my friend, he could not disguise that he is the cause of the capture of Rodrigo.

  The colonel’s skill in ciphering was impressive compared to many other staff officers whose efforts reached Scovell, but it could not overcome the basic limitations of the Army of Portugal cipher. In one passage, for example, Jardet wrote that Marmont could not ‘be responsible for the 36.49.10.50.45.28.18.53 41.20 of the Army of Portugal’. The section in code seems too long for the word ‘command’, but in fact Jardet had padded it out with the blank numbers 49 and 53. While this might seem ingenious, the cipher he was working with contained vacant codes only above 40, so the decipherer would soon be speculating about the relevance of those higher values.

  After many hours of work, the product of Berthier and Jardet’s lucubrations in Paris revealed itself to Scovell. Marmont’s operations, it was clear, were severely hampered by supply problems. Any future mission to assist Soult in defending Badajoz would require the Army of Portugal’s commander to stockpile supplies in the Tagus valley so that his men did not starve on the journey south.

  The letter, however, gave some reason to doubt that Marmont remained as committed to helping Soult again as he had been the previous summer, particularly since the Rodrigo business had shown him that all manner of mischief might take place on his patch if he divided his own army to help save Badajoz. Jardet revealed that each marshal was now just looking to his reputation:

  when Badajoz is taken it will not be a great misfortune since Marshal Soult will be obliged to evacuate Andalucia and all of the south and to fall back on Valencia, or to have to go there at another time, when the English go to Madrid. Eh bien! That will doubtless be a disastrous thing, but not as disastrous as you getting beaten.

  Jardet, it is clear, had explained to Berthier that Marmont had no desire to continue in his post under the current circumstances. Berthier, ever the conciliator, had tried to smooth things over. The emperor understood, of course, the rigours of Spanish service. He understood that the Duke of Ragusa did not have a magic wand with which to produce supplies for his hungry men and broken-down horses. Jardet’s letter continued:

  I saw that the Prince was about to end the conversation and I said to him: Mon Prince! the marshal cannot fulfil his task in the current situation; he receives orders from Paris that arrive, are impractical, because the circumstances are not those really pertaining here and on pain of avoiding a catastrophe the marshal is obliged not to follow them.

  This finally drew from Berthier what Marmont’s shaking confidence had craved: a frank reassurance to his emissary Jardet that the emperor did not bear a lasting grudge for the loss of Rodrigo.

  Jardet’s deciphered message caused considerable éclat at British Headquarters. It confirmed the high impression they already held of Marmont’s military judgement, for he had successfully forecast the move on Badajoz and even Madrid. But it also showed them that the senior officers now facing them felt helpless in the face of events. Lieutenant-Colonel D’Urban, the Portuguese Quartermaster-General, wrote in his journal that Marmont had sent Jardet to Paris ‘to represent his difficulties, to remonstrate, to solicit supplies and to beg to be relieved from his irksome and disgusting command’.

  This was intelligence of the highest grade, but now Wellington had to decide how to exploit it and the other information at his disposal to bring about a swift success at Badajoz. Scovell, in common with some of the other scientific soldiers at HQ, regarded this new target with foreboding. The Assistant Quartermaster-General could not share in any breathless sense of triumph at the storm of the 19th, noting somewhat grumpily in his journal: ‘Ciudad Rodrigo by no means a strong place.’ They knew from earlier abortive attempts to take it that Badajoz would certainly be another story.

  NOTES

  1 ‘A gentleman could hardly hope for better sport’: accounts of these activities are contained in Londonderry’s History and several journals, including Larpent, Cocks and Tomkinson. Although Scovell was revealed in later life as a keen huntsman, his journal makes no mention of him doing so in Beira.

  2 One of Colonel Le Marchant’s letter-writing alumni in the Peninsula informed those back at Wycombe’: Captain Tryon Still, 10 May 1810, LMP Packet 2a, Item 4.

  – ‘On hearing of Orange’s imminent arrival, FitzRoy Somerset had written home’: Somerset’s letter to his brother of 14 July 1811, BP, FmM 4/1/6. Wellington’s treatment of Orange provided one of the best examples of his favouritism towards blue bloods. Wellington mentioned the young ADC in his dispatch for the Combat of El Bodon i
n September 1811, and in a letter of 12 June 1812 to Whitehall asked that the prince should be given a special medal, ‘although he is not exactly in the situation which would entitle him to it, he has rank, and certainly deserves it, and would be highly flattered at obtaining it’. The contrast with his refusal to write similar testimonials to obscure officers who most definitely were in the situation to receive the favour (for example, Captain Norman Ramsay of the Royal Horse Artillery, who saved his guns in the desperate fighting of 5 May 1811) is striking.

  – ‘You may suppose the Puff’: Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Gordon in a letter to his brother, 27 November 1811. It is reprinted in At Wellington’s Right Hand, a book of Gordon’s letters edited by Rory Muir and published by the Army Records Society.