The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  3 ‘the officers in the lower branches of the Staff are sharp-set’: this quote comes from Francis Larpent, later Judge Advocate in Wellington’s HQ. Although he is referring to the atmosphere during the Staff’s second winter in Frenada (1812/13), this passage beautifully sums up a situation that study of journals and letters shows was apparent long before.

  4 ‘On 19 November, Napoleon started firing off a series of terse orders’: these are drawn from the official record of volume 23 of his Correspondance and volume 8 of Du Casse, Correspondance du Roi Joseph. In most cases, they consist of his notes to Berthier to pass on to the relevant generals, which is why I have written the passage in this way.

  5 ‘Berthier informed Joseph’: this message is reproduced in Du Casse.

  6 ‘Jourdan’s arrival seemed to take the number of marshals in Iberia towards some sort of unstable mass’: the evidence for this will become clear in the following chapters. Jourdan, in his Memoires, said he believed Soult, his most implacable enemy, never got over the snub of not being appointed himself to this top job.

  – ‘The enciphering table arranged words, syllables, phrases or letters alphabetically’: Scovell copied out the enciphering table in WO37/9.

  7 ‘the person deciphering would use the other table, one in which the codes were listed in numeric order, each followed by its meaning’: King Joseph’s personal deciphering table can be found in the Wellington Papers, WP 9/4/1/6. Close examination of the document reveals the way the last two columns (giving ciphers 1201–1400) have simply been glued on to a standard 1750 table.

  8 ‘It was a code of such strength that Napoleon considered it safe to send letters about matters of the utmost importance in the hands of some local peasant’: I am paraphrasing the emperor’s actual words in a letter to the Duke of Taranto during the 1812 Russian campaign and contained in volume 24 of the Correspondance.

  – ‘In sending out the tables, Marshal Berthier urged recipients’: this comes in a letter from Berthier to Marshal Davout written on 18 March 1812. I found it in the Russian State Military Historical Archive in Moscow in Fol 440/1/348. Berthier’s letter and the instructions for the use of the grand chiffre had been captured by Russian troops when they seized Marshal Davout’s baggage at Krasnoie in November 1812, during the retreat from Moscow.

  9 ‘“During this march,” one of its young officers recorded’: this was John Cook of the 43rd Light Infantry.

  – ‘Wellington reported to one of his colleagues’: a letter to Lieutenant-General Graham on 5 January and contained in Dispatches.

  10 ‘That night, the infantrymen had worked away feverishly in the darkness with picks and shovels’: the account of the Ciudad Rodrigo siege is based largely on the testimony of three eyewitnesses: Private Edward Costello of the 95th, Lieutenant John Cook of the 43rd, and Sergeant William Lawrence of the 40th. Happily for the modern reader, all three of these valuable journals have been reproduced by Eileen Hathaway’s Shinglepicker Press (28 Bonfields Avenue, Swanage, Dorset BH19 1PL). Mrs Hathaway has done an invaluable service in collating the accounts of other eyewitnesses and using them to confirm or amplify details given by these three soldiers. The result is a very strong historical record in each case. Some additional details (for example, the number of siege guns opening up on the 15th) come from Scovell’s journal.

  11 ‘In a private letter to the Duke of Richmond’: see Wellington’s Dispatches.

  12 ‘After a few days in Paris, Jardet wrote a twenty-eight-page letter back to his commander in Spain’: happily, this original document survives in WO37/1. Although it is clear that Scovell deciphered messages before March 1812, it is only those after this date that (mostly) survive in his papers in the Public Record Office.

  * This lady being the same Duchess of Richmond who threw a ball in Brussels in 1815, the night before the Battle of Waterloo. She and Wellington were rumoured to have become lovers.

  † Francisco Mina and Juan Longa were two of the most effective guerrilla chiefs operating in northern Spain. Their operations ranged from the Cantabrian sierra, overlooking the Bay of Biscay in the west, to Pampluna in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the east.

  ‡ ‘In clear’, i.e. uncoded. A term still commonly used by today’s code-breakers.

  § Wellington’s Army also contained an engineer called Lieutenant Trench; a Major Cimitière (‘cemetery’ in French) who was put in charge of a hospital; a river-crossing expert named Sturgeon; and Pine Coffin, an officer who went home for health reasons.

  1. DONT. 1082. 365. 622. WE. W. 439. 669. E. 1085. 398. 326. 13. 309. I. 1085. ED. 481. T. 980. 985. 186. T. 843. 688. 2. N.D. 1297. 536. 174. 1085. 1024 … 713. T. 980. 854. E. 326. 536. 700. W. 171. 1015. 1003. 13. T. 980. 1015. 131. T.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Storm of Badajoz

  On 17 March 1812, the bands struck up the tune of ‘Saint Patrick’s Day’ and the battalions bivouacking around Elvas were uprooted to begin their tramping through the murky dawn towards the River Guadiana and the Spanish border. There were thousands of Irishmen in Wellington’s Army; it was their patron saint’s day and the music was intended to cheer them up as they marched towards their rendezvous with Badajoz.

  By the afternoon, the Light Division was following the 3rd and 4th over a pontoon bridge across the Guadiana, breaking step so that their marching did not cause the floating span to bounce up and down too much. One young officer of the 95th Rifles hoped that the Light Division’s heroic work at the storm of Ciudad Rodrigo in January might mean ‘others would have the pleasure of the trenches of Badajoz, but … we were soon undeceived. We were destined for duty, to our mortification, for soldiers hate sieges and working parties.’

  As these men progressed around the fortress, staying about one and a half miles away to remain out of artillery range, they could see a French tricolour fluttering from the large tower that crowned the city’s medieval keep. Every man knew this siege would be a bloody business. There were 5,000 defenders, for one thing, and the layout of the walls and gun batteries was much stronger than Rodrigo’s. What was more, the main belt of defences surrounding the city was itself buttressed by strong outlying forts on the only bits of high ground that commanded the works. La Picurina and Pardeleras, satellite positions on the south-western approaches, Wellington’s chosen axis of attack, would have to be reduced before the serious business of breaching the city’s defence belt might begin. This could be no twelve-day wonder like January’s siege. It would take weeks, and somehow, throughout that time, the French had to be prevented from making mischief.

  The Storming of Badajoz

  Just as at Ciudad Rodrigo, the troops moved into position just before dusk; a full day’s march, followed by a night of back-breaking graft with pick and shovel to throw up the first parallel trench. Their nocturnal labour was followed, as it had been in January’s siege, by a furious bombardment from the French garrison the following morning, once they had seen the great scar on the ridge that told them their fight to the finish had begun.

  Other divisions moved into place to blockade the city and to stand ready to repulse any French attempt to break this stranglehold. Wellington had deployed almost all of his effective forces for the task: eight British infantry divisions, one of Portuguese and several brigades of cavalry. He had brought his main army the 160 miles down from the Almeida–Ciudad Rodrigo area, leaving those two places garrisoned by Spanish and Portuguese brigades. Of his own troops, just a single regiment of hussars, the 1st of the King’s German Legion, had been left behind with them, to face Marmont’s Army of Portugal. It might seem like a huge risk, but everything had been calculated quite precisely, using the excellent intelligence at Wellington’s disposal. This told him that Marmont’s lack of supplies would cripple him the further he went into the barren Portuguese highlands.

  *

  Wellington’s plan at Badajoz could be upset by attacks from either of two directions: a move south by the Army of Portugal; or a move north by Marshal Soult from his
bases in Andalucia with a large reinforcement for the corps he already had in Estremadura. Either of these events might be enough to hamper his siege work, since he would have to stop his men digging and unite them on the battlefield to defend themselves. If Marmont and Soult acted together and united anything up to 80,000 men, as they had in June 1811, then not only would the siege be over, but he would be forced on to the defensive.

  The British commander knew from Colonel Jardet’s deciphered letter that Marmont would face severe supply difficulties in coming south and that moreover he was fearful of what might happen in his absence from Leon and Castile. Wellington played on these fears by inciting Spanish forces in Galicia and Asturias, regions north of Marmont’s bases around Salamanca, to begin attacking outlying French positions. But if the Army of Portugal remained in the north, might it not launch an attack into Portugal, threatening the gains of the previous year’s campaigning? Wellington needed to be confident that his hypothesis would hold up. If the French attacked across the Beira upland plateau of the frontier, they would have a march of several days without supplies. Wellington felt confident that if the Army of Portugal undertook such an expedition, its men and horses would soon start dropping from hunger.

  Jardet’s letter had also given the British an insight into Marmont’s conflicting orders. On the one hand, he had been told by Berthier to go to the help of Badajoz if it was besieged. On the other, the Army of Portugal was ordered ‘above all’ to remain in the plains around Salamanca, where they could threaten the British. What Wellington did not know was that these had been superseded by further orders from Napoleon on 18 and 20 February. In the first, Marmont had been explicitly directed that if Wellington went south, he should ‘no longer think … of going south, and march straight into Portugal’. The second letter had expanded on the emperor’s concept: ‘if Lord Wellington were to march on Badajoz, there would be a certain, prompt, and decisive method of recalling him, by advancing on Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida’.

  Napoleon’s ideas rested upon the misconstrued notion that northern Portugal was a land of abundance, full of trees groaning with fruit, lush pastures and well-stocked British magazines ready for plunder. His belief that Marmont might bring Wellington scurrying back by threatening to ravage the border fortresses of Almeida and Rodrigo was also a nonsense. The loss of the Army of Portugal’s entire train of heavy guns in January had nullified this threat. Marmont’s men would be able to do nothing more than hungrily wander up and down outside the towns’ massive walls, while the well-fed occupants hurled abuse and round shot at them. Marmont knew these ideas, dictated in Paris by a master who was spending eighteen hours a day organizing his vast expedition into Russia, were half-baked at best. His military instincts told him that if Wellington marched south, he should do the same, but Napoleon’s orders had now given him the less risky option of a limited foray into Portugal.

  For Marshal Soult and his Army of the South, Wellington had also prepared a diversion. At the end of January, Wellington had written to his brother Henry, Lord Wellesley, the British minister at Cadiz, ‘it is absolutely necessary that the whole of Soult’s force should not be brought upon us with impunity’. To this end, he had asked Lord Wellesley to enlist the services of General Ballasteros, the commander of a Spanish flying column in Andalucia, to threaten Soult’s base at Seville. Ballasteros was typical of the kind of fighting patriot whose faith in his own operations was inexhaustible, despite having suffered a catalogue of routs, drubbings and débandades. With a few thousand men, he would happily march around the south, causing nervous French governors in their outlying garrisons to panic and raise the alarm left, right and centre.

  Underlying these planned diversions was a sense that if Marshal Marmont or Marshal Soult did not want to take risks, even a small eruption of Spanish troops would provide them with the perfect excuse for staying put. And if one of them did not march, why should the other try his luck against the British single-handed? Jardet’s letter had confirmed, after all, that in Marmont’s Staff, the loss of Badajoz was viewed as a lesser evil than their master’s defeat and the ruin of his reputation.

  Into this psychological equation came a further variable, one that Wellington had not foreseen.

  *

  On the very day that Badajoz had been invested, Napoleon had scribbled a most important order to Berthier in Paris:

  Let the King of Spain know, by a special courier tonight, that I confide in him the command of all my armies in Spain, and that Marshal Jourdan will fulfil the functions of Chief of Staff … Write to Marshal Suchet, to the Duke of Dalmatia [Soult] and to the Duke of Ragusa [Marmont] that I am confiding the command of my armies in this Kingdom to the King … and that they must obey all orders that they receive from the King so that all of the armies pursue the same objectives.

  This directive, sent hurrying along the road to Bayonne and thence to Madrid with an imperial courier, would seem at first to be exactly what Joseph and Jourdan had been praying for. It ended the nonsense of command by a man in the Tuileries who worked with two- or three-week-old intelligence and whose orders then took a similar time to reach the field commanders. It acknowledged, as the emperor proposed to head east, that he could not personally control two wars at the same time and clearly the one against Russia had to take priority.

  Although this new order had been dictated by the emperor in a more genuine spirit than the Rambouillet note of the previous May, King Joseph would soon discover that it was not what it seemed either. For one thing, Napoleon had not ordered Berthier to place General Dorsenne and his Army of the North under command of Madrid. This seemed to be a continuation of the special arrangements of direct control that the emperor had established. It would be a potent source of difficulty for Joseph. Moreover, if one of his marshals were to seek the emperor’s advice while he was campaigning in Russia … Eh bien! How could he refuse?

  In fact, Napoleon did not leave Paris for several weeks. When he did, the grand chiffre of the armies of Spain was symbolically passed to General Clarke, the Duke of Feltre and Minister of War, who would be Joseph’s new liaison back in Paris. Nothing better sums up Napoleon’s desire simultaneously to be rid of Spanish affairs and to carry on meddling in them than his note to Berthier explaining these new arrangements. Clarke’s new role is set out in a brief and businesslike manner. But then the emperor cannot help adding this postscript: ‘don’t forget to send [Clarke] all of the ciphers; it might be a good idea for us to keep a copy, in case some letter from the king reaches us when we are with the Army’.

  Napoleon’s directive instituting the change of command, like almost all messages sent out by Paris, took its time getting to Madrid. Its arrival changed the whole system of communications. Joseph was now to be at the centre of the web. The volume of messages passing to and from Paris was to decrease, that going via Madrid to increase correspondingly. In many cases, this exposed the messengers to greater risk. Prior to the change, messages from Marshal Soult, for example, had often been conveyed from southern Spain to Paris by ships leaving Malaga or some other safe haven. If they were to go to the Spanish capital, they would have to run the guerrilla gauntlet of several groups active on the roads south of this city. Joseph’s need to bring General Dorsenne’s Army of the North under his operational control would also require many couriers and afrancesados to take their chances riding through the northern hills. Joseph and Jourdan felt they knew the answer to this problem: plenty of silver dollars to hire the services of cunning couriers; the regular sending of duplicate or triplicate messages; and the use of the grand chiffre to protect the contents. If every other thieving Spaniard who undertook such a mission were to convey his precious cargo to the enemy, it didn’t matter. The messages would be enciphered and everyone up to the emperor himself had complete faith in the code.

  *

  On 20 March, three days after beginning their siege at Badajoz, Wellington’s forces received an object lesson in the fickle nature of many messengers in French
pay. It had been raining heavily since work began and a sodden Spaniard rode up to the British lines. He was duly presented to the Staff, where he suggested a business proposition. He told them that he had been paid to take a message from the Governor of Badajoz, General Philippon, to Marshal Soult’s headquarters in Seville. The French, he said, had given him the princely sum of 512 dollars to execute this hazardous commission, but if the British matched it, he would extricate the dispatch from its most ingenious hiding-place. It does not seem to have crossed the minds of Wellington’s Staff that they could simply hang this rogue and subject his belongings to the kind of minute examination employed by Don Julian’s men. Evidently the war for information had already assumed a more sophisticated character than that. Instead of killing the Spaniard, the British agreed to his offer and paid him the additional 512 dollars. It was with some difficulty that he then removed the metal top soldered on to his riding crop and drew a thin sliver of parchment from within. General Philippon was not in possession of the grand chiffre, so the principal difficulty in making out his message consisted of reading its minute letters. The contents were what Wellington would have expected. Philippon raised the alarm that a British siege had begun and that ‘within these few days the English works have assumed a formidable appearance’. By paying the messenger additional money, Wellington had ensured that he would go on his way with every incentive to repeat a most profitable transaction. He had just earned himself 1,024 dollars, after all. The messenger could be allowed to continue his journey after a suitable delay so that he did not raise the alarm too quickly. In this way, he might prove useful in the future if the French employed him again on similar duties.

  The rain that had soaked the Spaniard was also making life a misery for the working parties. One young officer recorded,