by Mark Urban
It was this faith in his army’s abilities, particularly of manoeuvre, that conditioned Marmont’s approach to his confrontation with this Vilainjeton. He would send divisions this way and that, try to outflank the English, conduct night marches, whatever: the aim would be to open a gap between two British corps so that they could not support one another. Or he might disorder some formation by forcing it to turn about in some rough country, perhaps before a river. At this point he would fall upon them, trying to bring a local preponderance of force to bear and break one or two of Wellington’s outlying divisions, just as he had nearly succeeded in doing at El Bodon in September 1811.
‘I will manoeuvre about Salamanca in such a way as to divide or set in motion the English army and profit from that,’ as Marmont summed up this strategy in a letter to King Joseph.
On 20 June, at about 4 p.m., Marmont marched into sight of the San Christoval position. There was a flurry of activity atop the ridge as British officers scrambled for their telescopes. They could see three columns on parallel tracks marching towards them. The sandy soil crumbled under the weight of these tramping feet, sending a pillar of ochre dust into the sky behind each phalanx.
Wellington’s Staff galloped about, trying to seek a better vantage-point, conferring with one another. How many regiments do you make it, Somerset? Do you see that officer, followed by his suite on the left there? Is that Marmont?
The British general looked down, understanding that battle could be joined very quickly indeed. Some cannonfire into the heads of the French columns to disorder them, followed by a brisk movement downhill from half a dozen allied divisions, should set things in motion. He might catch the French before they’d even had a chance to deploy from their lines of march, hammering the columns at the front, and sending broken battalions fleeing backwards, breaking up the formations behind.
The Staff looked to their chief, waiting for him to start scribbling directives and send them galloping to every corner of the Army. Wellington kept his counsel. No attack was ordered. Only a very few men, De Lancey, Somerset and Scovell among them, could have guessed the reasons for his hesitation, for only they were versed in the secret business of Headquarters. Wellington could not believe that Marmont was offering battle with what seemed to be no more than 30,000 men. There must be two or three divisions unaccounted for. The general knew from intercepted letters that they must be with Marmont soon. Even if Bonnet had been delayed by Spanish attacks, Wellington had to assume his and the other unaccounted-for troops would be on their way. Might they suddenly appear on one of his flanks, at some point that might even threaten the British line of communications?
As the French began deploying from column of march and taking up positions, in places no more than 500 yards in front, their batteries began sending shot into the British lines; some dragoons were sent somersaulting backwards off their mounts, dead before they’d hit the ground. Another ball whizzed over the heads of the 79th Highlanders, causing one ambitious young officer to note drily, ‘a round shot, 8lbs, went very near Major Lawrie who stands in my way for promotion!’ At the foot of the ridge, a sharp fusillade between skirmishers began: the British were being forced back. Some green troops of the 68th were forced out of a village at the right of the British position. Wellington summoned his generals.
With the light fading, the divisional commanders clustered around their chief; Cotton in his outlandish hussar’s uniform, Baron Alten, the German commanding the Light Division, Picton (whose disregard of dress regulations meant he usually wore a top hat and civilian coat and carried an umbrella), Leith and Cole. Wellington stood with his map, outlining the enemy dispositions and the action to be taken should Marmont attack at one point or another. Seeing this group, the French gunners could not mistake the tempting target. With a bang and a whoosh, they started sending cannonballs towards them. Wellington and his generals heard that distinctive ripping sound they all knew only too well. ‘Very little confusion was occasioned,’ noted one of those present, ‘his Lordship moved a few paces and continued his directions.’
Coolness under fire was one thing, but had Wellington got the mettle to fall upon the army that Marmont had laid open in front of him?
At dawn on 21 June, the artillery fire and skirmishing were rejoined. The British troops had slept on beds of flattened corn, their muskets by their sides, ready for anything that might happen in the night. In the light of day, their officers could see that the French had barricaded two villages at the base of the ridge, turning them into strongpoints.
And still Wellington was wondering: was Brenier up? Where was Bonnet? He was also still deeply concerned that the Count D’Erlon, with his corps of 15,000, might appear somewhere to his rear. That extra French corps had been occupying positions further south, opposite Lieutenant-General Hill in Estremadura, but Wellington worried that D’Erlon was under orders to move north and might appear suddenly at some unwelcome point.
Later that day, two French deserters were brought in and interrogated. Bonnet was expected at any moment with 8,000 men, they said. The general became surer of his resolution: he was not going to attack Marmont. Moreover, he even became concerned by the possibility of an unexpected French appearance on his flanks or rear. He pulled the Light Division out of this position and sent them back a couple of miles to secure a line of withdrawal, one of the fords over the Tormes. This reluctance to attack, especially on the 20th, when less than half of Marmont’s force had shown itself, disappointed many officers in the Army, including Scovell, who wrote, ‘had it taken place, I have little doubt of the event, as we have since learned they had but 15,000 [sic] Bayonets in the Field, nor do I think their Columns could have deployed before we should have been upon them’.
As the second day of this impasse ended, Marmont convened a meeting of his own generals. The marshal’s old classmate General Foy was among them and recorded this council of war. As Wellington had anticipated, one of the main arguments was about the need to rescue hundreds of the Army of Portugal’s troops in the Salamanca forts a few miles away. Marmont intimated that they must try to force their way through, but sought the opinions of others. Foy kept his counsel and waited to see what the others would say. Most of them seemed to second their chief’s resolution. Then it was Clausel’s turn. Anyone who had been at Busaco, where Massena had come unstuck in 1810, knew the folly of attacking Wellington on such a strong defensive feature, he said. They did not have the numbers to defeat him. They would be exposing themselves to an inglorious defeat. The mention of Busaco was enough to turn the mood of the meeting; Maucune and Foy had both taken bullets there. Foy recorded his own contribution:
I thought that just because we had left a garrison of 400 in the Salamanca Fort, there was no point getting 6,000 killed and hazarding the honour of our arms to get them out … the marshal was unhappy; he thought the generals were conspiring against his plans.
However displeased Marmont really was, he had to affect this attitude if for no other reason than that it would have seemed callous to abandon the garrison of the fort.
When all was said and done, Marmont, Foy and the other divisional generals knew that a substantial reinforcement was needed to guarantee victory. They understood well enough to expect nothing from the ‘Sultan of Andalucia’, as they disparaged Soult. The Army of the North would have to help, perhaps also that of the Centre, although Joseph’s force could only deploy a few thousand troops.
Wellington and his Staff went back into Salamanca as heavy guns were set up and steps prepared for the battering and storming of the fortified San Vincente convent. For the general, there was an opportunity to receive his secret correspondent, Father Patrick Curtis, and show him the respect due to such an invaluable spy. Some officers questioned the wisdom of this, for once the hysteria of Salamanca’s liberation calmed down, it became apparent that a pro-French party still existed among its people and they would surely get to hear of Curtis’s visit. Many of the Staff simply collapsed into bed, having spent d
ays on the San Christoval position with, according to the complaint of one of them, never more than four hours’ sleep a night.
As Marmont had come forward to challenge his enemy, Don Julian’s guerrillas had once more made their way around the flanks and rear of the French army. More captured messages were brought into town. Wellington resolved that he must obtain the services of the best decipherers in Britain to join the attack on the Great Paris Cipher. Accordingly he wrote off to London on 25 June, enclosing Scovell’s early results and copies of three letters in the grand chiffre.
A few days in Salamanca had allowed Scovell to push his calculations forward considerably. He was working from dozens of dispatches, some of them running to twenty pages, and it was probably in some smoky billet in this Spanish university town that he was able to draw together for the first time all of the discoveries he had jotted on his scraps of paper and deciphering table.
Records suggest that the Assistant Quartermaster-General had entered values for about 450 of the 1,400 cipher numbers by the end of June. Even though a small number of Scovell’s suppositions were actually wrong, this was solid progress, and represented rather more than one third of the code, since there were a few score vacant numbers, particularly in the series 1201–1400.
With his knowledge of the earlier ciphers he had worked on, Scovell would have known that a code number which did not appear in messages was not really worth worrying about. There were perhaps one hundred entries in the cipher standing for places or terms irrelevant in Peninsular warfare that fell into this category. Vacant code numbers did get written into some of the messages, but Scovell would already have spotted many of them.
On the other hand, viewed from the perspective of someone who was not a specialist decipherer and a perfectionist to boot, Scovell’s fold-out crib showing his decoding efforts contained a disturbing number of blank spaces or crossings out. Wellington felt it was time to share Scovell’s work with London. The general felt that much of the grand chiffre still remained a mystery to him and thought that Whitehall would find it useful because ‘it is the same cipher used by the emperor’s ministers, and the discovery of the key, therefore, may be important for other objects as well as for our operations’. In this last suggestion, the general showed his limited knowledge of French secret writing, for the grands chiffres being used by Napoleon in eastern Europe, for example, were based on sheets of the 1750 diplomatic table made up with completely different ciphers.
Since the commander of forces had enclosed Scovell’s work to date, we have an excellent insight into what the Staff were able to make of the dispatches brought in to Salamanca by the guerrillas at the end of that second week of the campaign. A tiny scrap of paper concealed in the clothing of a Spanish messenger revealed Marmont’s thoughts as he marched from the San Christoval position:
I do not believe I should have attacked yesterday without knowing the results and my observations convinced me 145.69.918.718.58.168.713.919.566. 1168. 173. 58.614.170.402.53.314.58.1185.862.13.773.713.843.1015.637. 1122.64.906.504.62?.530.521.217.1122.424.402.566.134.212.69.1252.722 .1127.1137.1111.314.164.874.81.74?.217.1122.1171.320.1079.741.691. 864 in a state to undertake anything 40.2.1111.920.267. 862.753.168.711. 58.467.132.13.1388 in such a way 2.906.238.617.691.906.51. 1214.164.2. 906.891.907.290
Using the codes already discovered by Scovell, this became:
I do not believe I should have attacked yesterday without knowing the results and my observations convinced me as long as I do not have forces at least e 53 es to theirs, I must play for time awaiting the arrival of the forces of the North that 1252 promised and that if 74?. arrive 1079 will put me in a state to undertake anything 40. at that moment 862.753. rai around Salamanca in such a way as to get the English army moving and to 891 iter.
The first unknown construction, ‘e 53 es’, is not that difficult to guess, the code 53 standing for ‘gal’ and making the word ‘equal’ in English. Similarly, 1252 seems to be the commander of the Army of the North. Although the last sentence contains some unknowns, the sense of this passage emerges: Marmont was telling his superiors that he would avoid battle until he was reinforced. These partial decipherings may have irked Wellington, but he was sufficiently confident of what had been discovered to tell London on 30 June, ‘I know from intercepted letters, that Marshal Marmont expects to be joined by a division of the Army of the North.’
*
The stalemate between Marmont and Wellington was broken on 27 June, when the defenders of the San Vincente convent capitulated. The British had started firing red-hot shot at the roof of the massive building and succeeded in setting it on fire. Even though they had survived one attempted storm and the British siege guns were making little impact on their walls, the defenders therefore had no choice but surrender. The forts having fallen, the Army of Portugal no longer had any reason to be lingering in such a dangerous and exposed location as the plains of the Tormes, particularly as Wellington would be free to bring his entire armament into action.
So Marmont ordered a withdrawal about forty miles north to the line of the River Douro (which, in this higher part of its course, is called Duero by the Spanish). Wellington’s troops swiftly followed them.
The landscape, with its tall fields of billowing corn, vineyards and orchards, seemed lush and wonderful to British soldiers who knew only the barren moorland of the Beira frontier. There were other pleasant surprises too. The local Villa Verde wine, made from a green grape rather like the whites of northern Portugal, was most refreshing. Officers riding to and fro with dispatches or on reconnaissance discovered that most villages had a café where they could buy a bottle of wine and soothe their parched mouths with lemon ice-cream.
For the rank and file, unable to fall out of their column of march to go in search of such delicacies, the heat became a severe trial. Most men had felt the backs of their necks, their noses and foreheads burn and blister. The hot, dry breeze chapped and broke their lips. In order to save his men from the effects of marching all day in this heat, Wellington brought the pre-dawn reveille forward. Major William Warre wrote to his father about the consequences:
Our mode of life has been latterly extremely harassing. On the march up we turned out at 3am and only marched part of the day … we usually rise at 1am and often, after either riding all day or broiling in the sun, on a position, which has not a twig to defend us from the sun, or a drop of water but at a distance, we do not get anything to eat or home till 9 or 10 at night, and rise again at one, so that we are all completely tired, and our faces so burnt that we cannot bear to touch them.
The Army of Portugal’s Staff noticed a new energy about their commander as they fell back to the Duero line. Many assumed he knew something about possible reinforcements, and it was evident also that this great natural barrier would give his army a measure of security. General Foy had a different explanation, for he believed the strain on his commander was becoming increasingly obvious. The marshal had been ‘cold and apathetic’ while close to Wellington, but as they put some distance between the two armies he was once more ‘ardent and enterprising’. The divisional commander wrote of Marmont, ‘he did not want to deal with problems and always looked for ways around them’. This tendency for the marshal to switch between introspection and bravado had its negative image in the way he ciphered his letters: proud defiance was broadcast en clair, real insights into his strategy were locked in code.
As he fell back towards his new field headquarters on the north bank of the Duero at Tordesillas, Marmont fired off letters to King Joseph and General Louis Marie Caffarelli, the new commander of the Army of the North (Dorsenne, his health broken, had gone home to France, where he died of tetanus). Marmont stressed the absolute need for reinforcements, particularly of cavalry. One of these messages, from Marmont to Joseph and dated 1 July, was captured. Once again, two copies had been scribbled on tiny pieces of paper and hidden on Spanish messengers. One of them had fallen into guerrilla hands. In taking up his new defens
ive line, Marmont explained:
it is from here that I will manoeuvre 68. 85. 1215. 131. 69 I will take the offensive 817. 1009. 318. 33.1168. 1015. 922. 311.215.601.968. 1153 . 122. 879. 1188. 1157. 692. 811. 465. 1345. 210. 1019. 617. 135. 692. 1102. 249. 441. 13. 23. 502. be able to operate 868. 497. 1122 .424. 62.1085.44. 1030. 1216. 533. the likelihood of success.
In the light of Scovell’s discoveries about the grand chiffre, the message read:
it is from here that I will manoeuvre to defend the Duero or that I will take the offensive as soon as the forces 33.1168.1015. 922. ont meet up. I need an additional 1157 one thousand five hundred 1345 and 1019 or six thousand infantry men 502 be able to operate 868 on 497 left bank of the Duero with the likelihood of success.
The first passage of code makes up ‘reinforcements’ and the code 922 that eluded Scovell stood for ‘au’ which joined to the next code (311, which he appears to have known) made ‘auront’ or ‘will’. It is quite likely that this context would have allowed a good guess at 1345, which meant ‘cavalry’. Marmont had in fact also asked for five or six thousand infantry, but this is where a previous deduction led Scovell into a mistake, albeit not one of enormous significance. The information sent to London on 25 June showed he thought the code number 135 meant ‘six’; in fact it meant ‘seven’.
Notwithstanding the gaps in the decipherer’s knowledge, this message would have given Wellington a clear sense of what kind of reinforcement Marmont needed to receive before he resumed the offensive. It was not entirely obvious from the letter whether by thousands of extra infantry he meant Bonnet’s long-expected division, but this was the assumption in Headquarters.