by Mark Urban
The risks of taking this roundabout route through atrocious country were all part of Rowland Hill’s unconventional plan. The soldiers had nicknamed this ruddy-faced general ‘Farmer’ or ‘Daddy’ Hill. These friendly sobriquets arose from Hill’s even temperament, diligence and paternal concern for his soldiers’ welfare. Notwithstanding his benign reputation, Hill had given orders ‘that every person in the village of Almaraz should be put to death, there being none but those belonging to the enemy in it’. As the troops neared their target, they received the order ‘Fix bayonets’.
Marching to Almaraz had taken two days, moving to the assault position a couple of hours, but the Highlanders’ rush under the guns of the fort was over in minutes. The French were able to fire once or twice before they heard the shouting of British soldiers just a few feet away, at the base of their ramparts. Heavy stones and grenades were hurled over the parapet. Not for the first time, the stormers found an unexpected problem at this critical juncture. Their ladders were too short. After a few moments, they found a way of lashing them together in pairs and soon they were climbing up and pouring into the fort.
Seeing the British success, the men on the other side of the bridge turned their ordnance on Fort Napoleon, trying to dislodge the British from their new prize. The French cannonfire failed to turn the tide, however, and the attackers soon set about destroying the pontoon bridge, torching supplies and breaking up the rest of the stores that the French had gathered there. Most of the defenders, despite General Hill’s earlier order, were able to flee into the surrounding hills.
Hill’s men would have lingered around the Tagus for longer, but an alarm spread by Major-General Lumley, the cavalry screen commander, led them to pull back quickly. Because of this, the secondary objective of destroying stores around the crossing-point was only partially achieved. Wellington’s main task had been accomplished: any attempt by Soult or Marmont to reinforce one another would now take a week or even ten days longer.
*
News of the Almaraz operation was greeted with satisfaction in Fuente Guinaldo. The perfectionist Wellington dwelt long on Major-General Lumley’s panic, ‘taking alarm at the least movement of the enemy’. Equally, those about Guinaldo knew that Hill was almost the only man in whom Wellington would place his trust on an independent mission of that kind and that he had shown himself worthy of that distinction once more. The news of Almaraz and the general appreciation that some great project was about to be launched created an air of expectation about Headquarters. The comings and goings of messengers and ADCs had reached a new level of intensity and conversation around the commander’s table each evening was decidedly animated.
There was much of import to discuss, after all. The prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been assassinated in the House of Commons. There was much speculation that the killing might be the work of Radicals or even French agents, but it turned out that the assassin was an insane bankrupt. Nevertheless, this violent act produced a great deal of manoeuvring by two of Lord Wellington’s correspondents, his brother Lord Wellesley and the secretary of war, Earl Liverpool, to see if they could form a new government. Having been born and bred to this kind of Tory intrigue, Wellington, behind his customary mask of inscrutability, awaited the outcome of this new campaign at Westminster just as keenly as he did that of Napoleon’s expedition to Russia.
Napoleon’s Polish war (for the emperor referred to it as such, scarcely imagining he would have to go as far as Russia itself) was an altogether safer topic for table-talk than London politics. Major Cocks, who had dropped in for dinner before setting off to his tailor’s in Lisbon, felt the Russians would be able to draw the French deep into their country and do them all sorts of mischief. D’Urban believed the emperor intended ‘amid the blaze of a successful Russian war to throw the Peninsula and his defeats there into the shade’. Wellington, of course, would have had the last word in these ruminations and his view was that whatever the outcome of the eastern campaign, it had precipitated a weakening of forces in Spain, a situation that was to his advantage but could not go on for ever. His thinking in 1809, prior to Talavera, had been similar, but this time he had far better intelligence about the numbers and movements of French forces; in particular, the withdrawal of two divisions of the Imperial Guard from northern Spain that had left the Army of the North running from one rebellious conflagration to another. This disorder was once again requiring some of Marmont’s troops to move northwards, weakening his central deployment in the plains around Salamanca.
More and more, it seemed to Wellington that Marmont should be the target of his next operation. There were one or two months in which to take advantage of the season. An attack on Marmont, if successful, would eventually force an evacuation of Andalucia. If he struck Soult first, though, the Army of Portugal might move down to help him or just sit where it was, keeping its communications with Madrid and France open. On 26 May, Wellington sat at his desk in Fuente Guinaldo and drew all of these arguments together in a letter to the secretary of war. It concluded:
I propose, therefore, as soon as ever the magazines of the army are brought forward … to endeavor, if possible, to bring Marmont to a general action … I am of the opinion also that I shall have the advantage in the action, and that this is the period of all others in which such a measure should be tried.
This was a momentous decision. It marked the first time since his return to Portugal three years before that Wellington was going to try his hand at an offensive battle. Waiting for the enemy to come to him, at Talavera, Busaco or Fuentes d’Onoro, had worked very well, for it had always allowed him to choose the ground, and that was a judgement of which he was the master.
There was another reason for striking the Army of Portugal first and it was based on the information gleaned from intercepted correspondence. A further package of captured letters, dated 1 May, had revealed much about the relations between the senior French commanders. Whoever had prepared these dispatches was guilty of an unpardonable lapse in security. The king’s secretary had included in a letter to Dorsenne a copy of one sent by Marmont to Madrid in April – a copy, however, that was entirely en clair. Scovell must have treated the arrival of every subsequent messenger in Guinaldo’s little plaza with nervous excitement. Had some guerrilla commander intercepted and sent in an original of that same letter, one in cipher, then the French higher-command code would have been blown apart: the king’s enclosure to Dorsenne would have provided the key. Unfortunately for Scovell, who was devoting long hours to deciphering, the original never appeared. The cipher therefore remained a puzzle to which he could only produce a partial solution.
The en clair copy of Marmont’s letter did, however, provide a vital insight into the row that had broken out between Joseph and Dorsenne after Napoleon transferred command of his armies. Dorsenne was refusing to cooperate with any orders coming from Madrid. Whether by oversight or by some game of divide et impera, Berthier’s instructions to these two men had been different. The notice of the transfer of command sent to Joseph had included Dorsenne and his Army of the North, but the general himself had received no such order. Indeed, Napoleon’s note to Berthier prompting the change had not mentioned Dorsenne.
This new information would have helped Scovell open up much further Dorsenne’s sloppily ciphered letter of 16 April. Its second paragraph read:
In the letter of 16 March, 1207 announced 516.1264 was giving 703.1328 command of 409.1327.1333.210.249.523, but was making 1165.1060. 1238.820. Your Excellency will appreciate then 139.229.531.305.69.862. 605 to make the efforts required of me. 187.609 I would humbly assure 73.516.918 will not neglect any opportunity to 605 give a full account of everything that could interest 240.196 and that requires his attention.
Looking at the first sentence, early work already suggested two of the codes:
In the letter of 16 March, 1207 announced 516 [that] 1264 was giving 703.1328 command of 409.1327.1333.210 [and] 249.523, but was making 1165.1060.1238.820.
Reading the 1 May dispatches, it became fairly obvious that 1207 was Berthier, 1264 the emperor and 1328 seemed to be Joseph. It could then be deduced that 1327 and 1333 were Soult and Marmont’s armies (although not which was which: that 1333 was the Army of Portugal only became apparent when looking at some of Marmont’s letters). The phrase ‘but was making 1165.1060.1238.820’ then appeared to mean something like ‘but was making an exception of the Army of the North’.
Marmont’s April letter may not have turned up in its coded original form, but the others in the 1 May packet reproduced some of its phrases. The commander of the Army of Portugal had evidently asked Dorsenne to send a division to Valladolid in support of his operations. In a partially encoded letter of 1 May from Jourdan to Marmont, the chief of staff in Madrid noted: ‘the general has just replied to me that this army is not under the King’s orders; HM cannot, as you ask, order General Count Dorsenne 13.577.264.90.1282.544.118.1045.514.2. 1202’. Insert the meanings of ‘2’ and ‘13’ and it reads: ‘order General Count Dorsenne to 577.264.90.1282.544.118.1045.514 to 1202’. In this scheme, 1202, it becomes clear, is Valladolid, 577 is likely to mean order or send and so on.
The impact of each of these discoveries became magnified when transferred to other contexts in different messages. By the end of May 1812, Scovell was beginning to get some real toehold on the slippery precipice of the code. As he worked away on the letters, Scovell jotted his hypotheses on scraps of paper – envelopes, official forms, whatever came to hand. He drew up a table about two feet wide and eighteen inches high, marked in columns of one hundred numbers, much like the deciphering tables issued to the French marshals themselves. When he had some confidence in the value of a number, it migrated from the bits of paper to his table.
As Major Scovell tried to attack the Paris Cipher, he was still expected to fulfil his other duties as commander of the Guides or as an AQMG on the Staff. Wellington might have been most anxious to receive the key, but it was not a reason to upset the regularity of the Quartermaster-General’s department and smooth running of Headquarters. Code-breaking was therefore an activity he had to pursue in spare moments, often by candlelight in his billet in Guinaldo. Bit by bit, though, he was building up the numbers on his table, scrawling them with his scratchy quill. Sometimes, when he saw a hypothesis handsomely confirmed, he would have the satisfaction of underlining the word on his table. This precious piece of paper was folded into his Conradus notebook and kept about his person. It was too early to celebrate the breaking of Joseph’s code. Although there were scores of entries on Scovell’s chart, there was still a great deal of the cipher that remained obscure to him.
These gaps in Scovell’s knowledge of the cipher perplexed Wellington. The Army of Portugal codes had been broken in a couple of days. A few good discoveries had usually sufficed to blow the whole thing apart. Yet here was Scovell, still plodding away with more than a dozen specimens of the Great Paris Cipher, unable to provide the key. With the Army preparing to march on Marmont, Wellington was impatient; it was imperative that progress be made quickly.
What else could be done? The Spanish had some decipherers at Cadiz, Wellington knew that. There was also the little office in London off Abchurch Street where the foreign secretary and prime minister retained a few fellows skilled in the black arts of secret writing. But sending a dispatch to England or Cadiz would take time; heaven knows when it might come back. There was risk too, for some minister might boast of the discovery and it would end up in the newspapers. Or if the key were intercepted on its return journey by some French privateer, then word would soon get back to Madrid and the whole labour of deciphering would be rendered nugatory. There were definitely advantages to keeping this work in his own Headquarters. He would allow Scovell more time, but his patience had its limits.
*
In Salamanca, Marmont was receiving reports from spies of his own, learning of Wellington’s preparations. The bringing forward of magazines announced in Wellington’s letter to London was becoming visible to the muleteers and itinerant lemonade sellers who journeyed back and forth across the frontier. Great Portuguese mule trains were coming up from Guarda towards Vilar Formosa on the border. Some British battalions were also in motion. On 1 June, Marmont wrote to Jourdan, ‘Lord Wellington remains at Fuente Guinaldo and the stores he has gathered there are building up in an incredible fashion. It seems certain that the campaign will begin here in ten days and that the enemy will march on Salamanca.’
The marshal’s intelligence, in both senses, was most acute. He and Wellington were beginning to understand one another and the potentially decisive nature of the contest that was about to start. Just to make sure that his adversary appreciated all of this, Marmont resorted once more to his expedient of leaving those words about Wellington’s intentions en clair. His message got through, for Marmont followed the usual procedures and sent duplicates. One messenger was detained by guerrillas and in less than one week the British general had read it and was soon telling London about his opponent’s good judgement.
In Madrid, Joseph and his chief of staff awaited events with a sense of enraged impotence. Jourdan had drawn up a memorandum at the end of May, outlining what needed to be done to defend French interests in Spain; a document which showed that Jourdan remained a sound strategist, even if he had long forfeited the emperor’s respect. It went through the different armies under the king’s command, noting their poor state and the recalcitrance of their commanders before concluding, ‘the Imperial armies can undertake nothing other than the occupation of the conquered provinces: one can also see that if Lord Wellington … falls on the Army of the South or of Portugal, the army under attack will not be in a state to resist him’. Jourdan could see that, following the destruction of the Almaraz bridge, these two armies could do little to help one another rapidly. The answer, the king’s adviser believed, lay in the creation of a powerful central reserve under his own hand that could move to assist either army on the frontier and help defend the capital itself. This clear-sighted blueprint was sent to the minister of war in Paris, who showed his own powerlessness and intellectual timidity by replying with a restatement of the emperor’s beliefs: that no territory should be relinquished, that the French should maintain ‘an imposing attitude’ towards Wellington (an empty piece of Imperial braggadocio if ever there was one) and that the forces at Joseph’s disposal allowed him to do whatever the situation demanded.
If the two men nominally running the war in Madrid found that the minister left to mind the shop in Paris was incapable of understanding the gravity of the Iberian situation, the irritation it caused was minor compared to that engendered by plain disobedience from the different army commanders. Marshal Soult’s letters still placed his own command, in Andalucia, at the centre of all of Wellington’s designs. Jourdan remarked that by early June ‘it was clear to everybody, except the Duke of Dalmatia, that the danger was to the Army of Portugal’. Soult in turn argued that the entire defence of Spain should gravitate southwards, even if this meant giving up Madrid and, by implication, any overland connection with France. Soult’s letters ran so squarely counter to what all logic in Madrid (or indeed in Wellington’s own Headquarters) dictated that they left the king quite puzzled. It was decided to send an emissary to Seville to find out what on earth the duke thought he was doing. The choice fell upon Colonel François Desprez, a thirty-four-year-old officer of the engineers from Amiens. As the 1812 campaign progressed, Desprez found himself cast in the unhappy role of sherpa, trekking back and forth between the mountainous egos of the marshalate. His mission to Seville required him to travel down some of the most dangerous roads in Spain.
Antoine Fée, the young pharmacist to a dragoon regiment serving in Andalucia’s principal city, could have saved Colonel Desprez the journey. He had already become disgusted by Soult’s regime, recording:
The Marshal, commander of the Army of the South, seemed to be more the King of Andalucia than the emperor’s humbl
e lieutenant. No monarch surrounded himself with greater majesty, no court was more submissive than his … On Sunday, elite troops lined the route to the Cathedral, awaiting their general in chief. He was followed by the civic authorities and a distinguished staff. This whole gilded entourage wore smiles or a certain look; he rewarded one or the other with a cold and mannered dignity.
Soult had not only taken on the affectations of a monarch, but was also helping himself to the wealth of southern Spain. He had confiscated old-master paintings by Murillo and Velasquez that were worth a fortune. He was quite certain that he was not going to relinquish his domains, whatever that old fool Jourdan said in Madrid. Desprez discovered in his meeting that Soult bitterly resented Jourdan’s appointment as chief of staff, a job that he felt was his by right. The Duke of Dalmatia also made it clear that he had no intention of sending forces to help Marmont if he came under attack by Wellington.
As for Dorsenne and Suchet, they had already manifested a similar spirit in their letters. The commander of the Army of the North had made clear that he could not support Marmont. Suchet, in charge on the east coast, had refused a request to provide a division for Jourdan’s new central reserve.
Why were Soult and Dorsenne not sacked for insubordination? Jourdan wrote in his memoirs: ‘these chiefs were important personalities, secured in command by the emperor, who had his confidence and were in correspondence with him and his ministers: the king was reluctant to displease his brother and excite his jealousy or unhappiness by removing them from the army’. Little did Joseph appreciate it at the time, but his reluctance to displease was to be his undoing.