The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  ‘nothing Sir, but Major Cocks is killed’. One man actually argued the matter with me. A little further were my own men and some of my friends, condoling over my fate. The surprise on their faces was very whimsical and it was not a little gratifying to observe how one’s death took.

  As the siege progressed into attempts to batter the citadel itself, responsibility for directing this work in which death was so commonplace rested with the Staff. Wellington’s direction of the siege caused deep divisions, most importantly with his principal specialist adviser, Major John Burgoyne of the Royal Engineers. When officers gathered in huddles to discuss the operation, Scovell was naturally inclined to take Burgoyne’s part. Siege warfare, with all its calculations about trajectories and the weight of shot needed to open breaches, was regarded by most officers of the time as the ultimate expression of scientific generalship. But following the great success at Ciudad Rodrigo nine months earlier, Wellington fancied that he had a pretty good idea of how to take a fortress more swiftly than the ‘experts’. The stage was set for conflict.

  Major Burgoyne’s main criticism was that his commander’s lack of confidence about success caused him to throw men away with a series of half-measures. After one operation, Burgoyne wrote home bitterly that failure was the result of ‘the miserable, doubting, unmilitary policy of small storming parties’. During this row, Wellington did not apparently display the scorn which some witnessed on other occasions for low-bred officers of the technical arms. However, members of the Staff who came from such backgrounds were well aware of the general’s prejudices. Wellington believed the experience of France showed that artillery and engineer officers were potential revolutionaries, given that many came from bourgeois families and had, as he would have put it, ‘no connection with property’. He distrusted them, as he distrusted some Wycombites, because intelligence and education had been the main criteria in granting them an officer’s commission.

  In the case of the general’s Assistant QMG and commander of the Guides, the usual tensions had been exacerbated by a rebuke Wellington had given him during their advance to Madrid, when communications with Lieutenant-General Rowland Hill’s detached corps had broken down for a single day on the march. The general did not let a mention in dispatches get in the way of his annoyance with Scovell. Having received his dressing down, relations between the AQMG and his master soon returned to their usual pitch of formal correctness.

  Scovell, however, did not forget the incident, for it gave him an intimation that his devoted service to Headquarters during three and a half dangerous years had not been enough to overcome Wellington’s personal prejudices. Scovell had done vital code-breaking work; his organizational skills had also made him quite indispensable in running the Army’s communications: dozens of new messengers (most of them Don Julian’s guerrillas) had been taken on to help cover the greater distances between the Portuguese frontier and Burgos, for each dispatch had to be carried along of chain of posts where Guides would provide fresh horses and record the messenger’s progress. By late 1812, Scovell was directing hundreds of men in this task and, adhering to the principle that prompt payment was the best defence against treachery on the part of the messengers, spent £22,477 in little over one year on it. None of this, though, seemed to count as much as a noble pedigree in the eyes of his master.

  Scovell’s resentment, usually carefully kept off the pages of his journal, emerged openly during the bad-tempered conflict between science and intuition in Headquarters at Burgos, where he repeated Burgoyne’s criticisms almost to the letter. On 22 September, for example, he wrote in his journal after one attack, ‘it failed and the cause, in my humble opinion, was the taking of men by detachments instead of at once taking a regiment’. Although the use of bands of volunteers from different units was common in storming operations, it evidently struck many of the Staff as a bad idea at Burgos. Specifically, Burgoyne felt that any Forlorn Hope of picked volunteers needed to be backed up by a full regiment acting in support: Wellington refused to commit men in this way. When the final assault failed, on 19 October, Scovell wrote, ‘I have little doubt that a well supported attack would have carried the place.’

  It had soon become apparent that the small train of heavy guns marching with the main Army was quite inadequate to the task of battering Burgos. More than once, these eighteen-pounders were established in some battery, only to be overwhelmed by fire coming from within the fortress. Gun carriages were smashed and men ripped apart. Wellington did not have the time to bring up the large train he had used earlier in the year and which, by some uncharacteristic oversight, he had neglected to call upon when he first meditated the siege of Burgos. One member of the Staff suggested that they ask the Royal Navy for help. A messenger could reach the Biscayan littoral in just a few days and would then be able to ask Commodore Sir Home Popham, who commanded the squadron that cruised there, for the use of heavy naval guns. For ten days, Wellington did not accept this very wise advice and when he did finally accede to it, the guns could not be brought over the Cantabrian sierra fast enough to alter the issue.

  While Wellington was tackling these myriad difficulties at Burgos, Scovell was trying to cope with some quite new problems of communication.

  *

  It had become clear that the Army would march closer to the Biscayan coast of northern Spain, and consequently there would be closer cooperation with Commodore Popham. This officer was a fire-eater of the type that became famous in his service: in 1806 he had interpreted a vaguely worded set of orders from the Admiralty so liberally that he launched an invasion of South America on his own initiative. He combined audacity in action with great diligence in matters of Staff work and was something of a savant on the matter of codes; indeed, as far as the Navy was concerned, he had written the book on the subject. Popham’s treatise, Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary, had made communications by flag between warships more efficient and secure. In August, as the Army moved north-east, deeper into Spain and closer to the Biscay coast, the commander of the Royal Navy squadron there wrote to Wellington suggesting that communications between them across no man’s land ought to be protected by a cipher.

  Wellington relied on Popham to coordinate actions by guerrillas on the coast and support them, but did not feel that ciphers were justified. He wrote back to the Commodore:

  I beg to observe to you that I have no cipher in which I could correspond with you: and unless the Spaniards in the north are very different from those I have seen elsewhere, or the enemy opposed to you more active than those I have met with, you have no reason to apprehend that your letters will be intercepted. Those to whom they may be entrusted may not take the trouble of carrying them; but they would prefer death to delivering them to the enemy.

  In other words, he did not believe their communications were in jeopardy. This reply might be seen equally as a back-handed compliment to Scovell’s system of Spanish messengers, a significant comment on the lack of a common code between the two services, or indeed an example of the kind of froideur that rendered professional intercourse between Army and Navy so unsatisfying to both partners.

  When it came to communications with the Army’s expeditionary corps in eastern Spain (which had finally landed after Lord William Bentinck’s procrastination earlier in the summer), Wellington took a different line; he was quite certain that he wished to encode his thoughts. Messages going between the two armies could either be sent back into Portugal and thence by boat around to Catalonia, or by Spanish messengers across central Iberia; either way, there was a risk of them falling into French hands.

  Wellington’s attempts to furnish the armies with a common cipher had initially been almost as badly managed as King Joseph’s first experience of the grand chiffre in 1811. A diplomatic cipher had been sent out, but there had been problems with making sure both sides had the same table and then with the spelling out of words not contained in the tables.

  Scovell’s solution to the problem was most ingeniou
s. He made sure that both headquarters had copies of the same edition of pocket dictionary and used this tome as the basis of his code. So, to quote an example given by him, the code 134A18 could be deciphered as follows: 134 was the page number; A is the column; 18 is the number of words or letters from the top. This type of code is extremely strong, and it successfully protected communications with the Catalonian expeditionary corps. It was his experience with breaking French ciphers that gave Scovell an understanding of the power of this ‘two book’ system. Although the British need for such codes was obviously less than that of the French (with their need to coordinate operations across a bandit-infested country), it is remarkable that the man in charge of Wellington’s communications arrived so quickly at what was a virtually impregnable solution.

  *

  As the siege of Burgos progressed, it was becoming more and more apparent how difficult an undertaking it really was. The trenches needed to approach the walls under cover proved very hard to dig. The ground was rocky and the slope so steep that French sharpshooters on the ramparts more than 100 feet above were often able to fire down on the working parties. Attempts to batter the walls with gunfire proved so ineffectual that Wellington and Burgoyne decided to try blowing them up instead. The first blast of this kind, on 29 September, hardly inspired confidence. As Scovell noted wearily, ‘recourse was had to a mine which in my humble opinion was made at the opposite place to where it ought to have been formed’.

  One day of frustration followed another. Morale sank among the rank and file and tensions rose in the Staff. For the general and his staff officer, Burgos was made all the harder by the loss of a trusted friend. Just twelve days after he had written home about the exaggerated rumours of his own demise, Edward Cocks was cut down defending the British trenches against a French sortie. Scovell noted simply in his journal, ‘my firm friend Cocks was finished in this business’. Cocks’s daring scouting missions in the early days of the war had made him a particular favourite of Wellington’s, who wrote, ‘he is on every ground the greatest loss we have yet sustained’.

  After four weeks of grim struggle, Wellington ordered a storm at dusk on 18 October. It failed. A series of costly attacks brought the British close to the inner defences, but did not carry them. By the time Wellington gave up, 509 men had been killed and more than 1,500 injured. The soldiers cursed the bloody place.

  The failure at Burgos left Wellington horribly exposed. He was hundreds of miles from the Portuguese frontier and knew that the time when Joseph could assemble a large army was fast approaching. He had also discovered that Clausel’s corps had been reinforced from France and was ready to advance against him. Soult had, at last, evacuated the south and was in a position to combine forces with the others.

  The decision on 21 October to fall back towards the frontier had important political consequences. British troops relinquished the Spanish capital, to the taunts of its distraught citizenry. The Army faced a long withdrawal back to the Portuguese borderlands; inevitably, opinion in London would see this as a costly reverse and the campaign, with its glorious episodes of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and Salamanca, would end on a sour note. As Wellington’s men began their march, driving rain lowered their spirits further.

  *

  With Wellington checked at Burgos, the French command found itself considering the consequences of Marshal Soult’s scurrilous dispatch of 12 August. His objective in writing it, namely his desire to hang on in Andalucia, had been superseded by events, but the reverberations caused by that ill-judged letter had been gathering force in the French headquarters.

  It did not take Marshal Suchet, the French commander in Catalonia, long to send Soult’s treacherous letter on its way. Unfortunately for Soult, his habit of picking quarrels had also made him an enemy of Suchet. By coincidence, Suchet was presented with an unusually rapid opportunity for retribution since King Joseph was visiting Valencia, close to his own headquarters. Soult’s message was forwarded to the man it had accused of treason.

  The Duke of Dalmatia’s letter was an unhappy product of the system where different commanders had maintained their own direct relations with the emperor. Even since March, when the right to direct strategy had at last been ceded, this recalcitrance among his commanders still rendered Joseph’s job a grievous burden.

  By the autumn of 1812, southern Spain had been evacuated and almost everywhere the guerrilleros were gaining strength after the French humiliation at Salamanca. What vexed Joseph the most was that he still carried great responsibility but had very little power. His response to reading Soult’s letter was therefore to try to use it as a pretext to have the marshal sacked.

  Joseph picked his trusted staff officer, Colonel Desprez, to carry a letter to the emperor, demanding Soult’s dismissal. This officer set out from Valencia on 9 September and it was to become something of an epic journey, since, having travelled 300 leagues to reach Paris on 21 September, he discovered his imperial master was away in the midst of Russia. Desprez rode a further 800 leagues across eastern Europe until he finally arrived at Napoleon’s headquarters in Moscow on 18 October.

  While Colonel Desprez was making his way to an emperor who insisted on maintaining ultimate personal control over the Iberian struggle even though he was at the other end of Europe, Joseph was having to deal with Marshal Soult in person. Having quit Andalucia, Soult met Joseph, Suchet and Jourdan for a council of war in Cordoba on 3 October.

  ‘The ruler’s first interview with the marshal produced some lively arguments,’ according to Marshal Jourdan’s understated account, ‘they were conducted face to face. At all times Joseph, always generous, appeased him and showed himself ready to forget what had happened.’ A new battle plan was proposed in which Soult would be given command of a substantial column and move towards Wellington. Some of his Army of the South, however, would be needed by other commanders, a proposal that triggered an immediate outburst:

  the Duke of Dalmatia, having received his orders, instead of hastening to carry them out, pressed the King to make changes, gave him advice and suggested that he did not have the right to transfer from one army to another troops that the emperor had confided to his command … the King, deeply unhappy with this obstinacy, directed him to carry out his written orders, or failing that to relinquish command of his army to the Count d’Erlon.

  Soult was cowed into cooperation; the king argued bygones should be bygones. Neither was sincere and both decided to bide their time. Since Colonel Desprez was still continuing his odyssey along the highways of eastern Europe, Joseph knew that it would be some time before there was an answer to his request for the marshal’s dismissal, time in which it was essential that they act to retake some of the ground lost in this disastrous campaign.

  By 17 October, Joseph had cajoled his marshals into launching a new plan of war. Soult’s Army of the South and the Army of the Centre would attempt to link up with Clausel’s force to the north. It was this movement which sent Wellington scurrying back from Burgos to the comparative safety of the Portuguese border.

  When Joseph finally received the emperor’s response to his letter of 9 September, many weeks had passed. The missive itself must have been a bitter disappointment to the King of Spain. Joseph’s messenger, Colonel Desprez, had reached Napoleon on the very day that the emperor’s fortunes had turned. He had just resolved to abandon Moscow, having realized that holding Russia’s capital would not secure her capitulation. The emperor’s message was therefore terse, telling his brother to sort out his problems with Soult by himself.

  *

  The final chapter in the saga of Soult’s letter had not yet played itself out as Wellington’s Army marched from Burgos back to winter quarters on the Portuguese frontier. The straggling and desertion seen during Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna in 1808 or Wellington’s march back from Talavera the following year reappeared. The distances covered were large and as the British Army moved onwards, some of its members went in search of food, drink and p
lunder. Others, driven to distraction by the privations of campaigning and perhaps the horrors of Burgos, risked death by deserting their colours. Between 23 October and 29 November, some 4,900 men disappeared from the ranks.

  Joseph’s army tried to bring on a second battle near Salamanca, but pursued by the united armies of Portugal, the South and Centre, there was no chance that Wellington would ever have fought them. It was just after it had passed the site of July’s great victory, in mid-November, that the Peninsular Army’s supply system broke down completely.

  The privations of the 1812 march and the way they were shared by all ranks were brought home by Rifleman Edward Costello of the 95th Rifles, who wrote in his memoirs,

  on this retreat, Lord Charles Spencer, a youth of about 18 years of age, suffered dreadfully from hunger and fatigue. Trembling with cold and weakness, he stood … anxiously watching a few acorns which, to stay the pangs of hunger, he had placed in the embers to roast … the tears started silently from his eyes. He will not forget, I expect, how willingly the rough soldiers flew to offer him biscuits, which they could not withhold from one so tenderly and delicately reared … there are times when Lords find that they are men, and men that they are comrades.

  The campaign was effectively over by the third week in November. Wellington and his Staff settled once more into winter quarters in Frenada, the little village on Portugal’s upland frontier. One of Wellington’s first tasks on arriving was to pen an angry message, cursing the army for marauding and desertion: ‘from the moment the troops commenced their retreat from the neighbourhood of Burgos on the one hand, and of Madrid on the other, the officers lost all control of their men. Irregularities and outrages were committed with impunity.’ It will come as no surprise that this bad-tempered outburst caused deep resentment in the Army after a retreat in which men had dropped dead from exhaustion and officers of noble birth been reduced to eating acorns.