The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  Scovell would have studied Saornil’s package with some excitement. Since the end of the campaign there had been a dearth of information about what was going on inside the enemy camp. Before setting off for Cadiz, Wellington had complained to London, ‘I have not yet any intelligence upon which I can rely of the exact position of the enemy’s armies.’

  The letters spread out in front of him were one from Joseph to the emperor, two from the king to the minister of war (General Clarke) in Paris and one from Marshal Jourdan to the same official. The letters had dates ranging from the last week of November to 10 December, underlining the severe difficulties with French communications. They contained many passages in the now familiar grand chiffre and were written on fine parchment watermarked with the French imperial eagle.

  Among the enclosures was an en clair return for the Army of the Centre that detailed the location even of its battalions, their strength and who was in command. This document alone would prove a most useful starting-point for piecing together enemy dispositions prior to the next campaign.

  Joseph’s letter to Napoleon trumpeted his achievement in the latter part of the campaign, declaring, ‘the enemy’s hopes since the 22 July [Salamanca] are today vanished, people have been disabused about the power of a united army’. Scovell’s knowledge of the cipher was pretty much complete but his annotations on the letter revealed one or two remaining uncertainties. He underlined places where he had resorted to pure guesswork, one sentence reading, ‘I hope that the Army of the South will not delay in gathering in Murcia, the whole country will then soon be reoccupied.’ He was right about Murcia, but the phrase ‘whole country’ should actually have been deciphered as ‘all centres’.

  This letter of Joseph’s had been superseded by events, for in it the king had asked his brother for reinforcements as part of his plan to re-establish control over the country. The Russian disaster in fact meant that Napoleon, far from providing fresh cannonfodder for Iberia, would soon be looking to the veterans serving in Spain to replace his vanished cadres of experienced men.

  Jourdan’s letter to General Clarke in Paris, however, was much more up to date. The marshal seems to have recognized that reinforcements were out of the question and therefore launched a sort of pre-emptive strike on the minister, laying out the desperate situation in Spain. Instead of Joseph’s empty boasts, this message painted a vivid picture of the miserable conditions prevailing in the army.

  Jourdan noted that Marshal Soult’s Army of the South was occupying a line close to the British and that ‘only Monsieur the Duke of Dalmatia can know the positions occupied by the English army, but since he had not made any report to the king on this subject, it is quite impossible for me to give Your Excellency any information’. Jourdan also criticized Suchet for failing to send reports and noted that no mails from Paris had got through to Madrid for weeks. Clearly the situation in the Pancorbo and elsewhere on the route from France was most dangerous.

  The marshal’s tale of woe showed that the Armies of the South and Centre had almost run out of ammunition, most units had lost all their transport wagons, there was widespread guerrilla activity and pay was months in arrears. Jourdan’s letter left little doubt in the minds of those who read it that the French armies in Spain would be unable to undertake offensive operations against the allied field armies for months. The initiative therefore rested in the hands of Lord Wellington.

  As to the direction of an allied thrust, that would depend on further intelligence about French dispositions and a greater understanding of their scheme of operations. This was precisely the information contained in a further letter from Joseph to the emperor and dated 22 December 1812. Scovell’s knowledge of the grand chiffre had improved during many quiet hours of reflection in Frenada to the point where, in his own words, ‘I had it so complete at the end of the campaign of 1812 as to decypher a very long letter of Joseph to his brother of which the whole even to the date was in cypher.’

  Joseph’s letter of 22 December was perhaps the most important message that Scovell worked on. Certainly, it ranked with the king’s dispatch to Marmont of 9 July 1812 in having the greatest consequences for Wellington’s overall strategy. In it, Joseph gave his candid assessment for future operations.

  The king had positioned 100,000 troops along the lines of the Duero and Tagus rivers. This deployment formed a sort of diagonal line from north-west to south-east, ending just south of Madrid. Since these troops were quite spread out, for reasons of supply, they had assumed their defensive line some way back from the Portuguese border. Outposts would be manned in places like Salamanca, well forward of the Duero–Tagus line, in order that the main defensive cordon should have early warning of any British advance. Joseph believed that with such dispositions of the Armies of the South and Centre, he could ‘combine their divisions as events dictate’. If things went wrong, this defensive line was positioned in such a way as to shield the main line of communications back to France via Burgos.

  In the letter Joseph also made some ambitious political proposals: for example, to ‘declare Burgos the royal seat until there’s peace and take all archives and other attributes of the capital and establish my government there’. This idea, which relegated Madrid to the status of a sparsely garrisoned outpost, was to find favour with the emperor, although the removal of government from the capital took far longer than anticipated.

  When Wellington returned to Frenada on 25 January, little time was wasted in briefing him on the latest intelligence and handing him deciphered copies of the captured correspondence. The general found Joseph’s bombast in his letter to the emperor of 21 November particularly amusing. Near the end, the king had written that the Spanish had formed a very negative opinion of the British during their brief occupation of Madrid and that ‘the inhabitants prefer the orders of a sovereign of your house to the theories of the Cortes’.† The general was so pleased with this nugget of political intelligence (since he considered it displayed Joseph’s delusions and painted some of the wilder orators of that Spanish assembly in an unflattering light) that he shared it with Don Andes de la Vega, a prominent Spanish politician, in a letter of 29 January:

  I enclose an extract of a letter from King Joseph to Napoleon which was in cipher and which we have de-ciphered, which is well deserving of your attention and that of your friends in the Cortes. It is in few words but contains a text upon which much may be written. I am not an advocate for King Joseph’s judgement or for his veracity; but, although we rarely find the truth in public reports of the French government or of their officers, I believe we may venture to depend upon the truth of what is written in cipher.

  In his last remark, Wellington had given his strongest testimony to the value of deciphered French communications and therefore to Scovell’s work. The only curious thing was that he put this vital labour at risk by sharing with a Spanish politico the information that Joseph’s cipher was being read at Frenada. Cadiz, after all, was a playground for all sorts of spies, charlatans and intriguers. Matters of political intelligence sometimes excited Wellington so much that he let his guard down. It was just as well that he had been much more careful about mentioning the invaluable product of code-breaking since the summer of 1811 in his many dispatches to London.

  The general had also eagerly consumed the military detail in Joseph’s later missive. In a letter to Earl Bathurst written on 10 February, he indicated for the first time that his plan of action for the 1813 campaign would involve defeating Joseph’s river line by going around its northern extreme. Wellington began preparations to send his battering train of siege guns around to Corunna, where it would be kept while he decided where exactly in northern Spain it might be used in the coming campaign.

  All of this vital knowledge came at a price, and in the first place this meant Wellington had to honour Colonel Campbell’s promise and sit down to dinner with that notorious ruffian Saornil, who had been loitering about Frenada for weeks. Those invited to share this experience inclu
ded Colonel Campbell, Francis Larpent and General O’Lalor, one of the Spanish Staff that had grown around Wellington since his appointment as generalissimo of that country’s armies.

  This dinner began, as usual, at about 5 p.m., and Saornil arrived, ‘looking like a dirty German private dragoon in a smart new cavalry jacket’. The guerrilla had demanded a seat at Wellington’s table and, for the quality of those intercepted dispatches, he received it. Staring down at his place setting of silver cutlery and gleaming crystal he became quite confused. It was an awkward moment for this one-time convict. Larpent recorded that ‘the Spanish General O’Lalor treated [Saornil] like a child, told him what to do and eat; but he had, I conclude dined long before, for he ate little or nothing’.

  Following Saornil’s visit, more captured dispatches were received at Frenada that allowed Wellington to learn about the unedifying struggle between Soult and Joseph. On 8 January 1813, Joseph wrote to his brother, ‘it is an absolute impossibility for me to work with [Marshal Soult]; I demand his replacement’.

  A couple of weeks later, Joseph finally abandoned any restraint he had felt about revealing the full extent of Soult’s disloyalty and scheming. For months, Joseph had kept the contents of Soult’s letter to himself – probably because it was too humiliating to confess to his brother that eminent marshals had been plotting in this way. But on 28 January he wrote again to the emperor, finally setting out the marshal’s indiscretions in all their painful detail. He included a copy of Soult’s infamous letter of 12 August, accusing him of treason.

  Couriers running between Joseph and Paris had to make their way along the road from Burgos to Bayonne, on the French side of the border. Although this route was referred to as a chaussée, one with a wide, well-drained surface, it ran through some particularly inhospitable territory. A day after leaving Burgos, traffic had to climb into the Cantabrian hills towards the Pancorbo pass. This defile had become infamous among the bataillons de marche‡ and estaffettes who used the road, for its jagged sides soared out of the ground and high into the sky. In many places, the guerrillas were able to hurl boulders from its ledges down on to the French below. It was in Pancorbo that the guerrilla chieftain Francisco Longa hunted the French and their collaborators with impressive efficiency.

  Longa was a gunsmith from Rioja who had joined the patriotic insurrection in its early days. His band varied in strength between a few hundred and a few thousand. They had successfully evaded many attempts to wipe them out, including some by units of the Imperial Guard. Whenever things got too bad, they judiciously sought refuge in the high sierra. By late 1812 this guerrilla band had evolved into a well-organized force, 3,000-strong, able to launch raids using either guerrilla skirmishing tactics or the kind of formal evolutions carried out by infantry of the line. Longa’s skill at creating this force had been recognized by the award of a colonel’s commission in the regular Spanish army. He had also evolved a close relationship with the British, through the agency of Commodore Sir Home Popham. The British supplied him with weapons and he began to relay captured documents or other, more delectable, trophies in return. In May 1812, he had captured a convoy of King Joseph’s servants bearing 1,000 bottles of fine claret. He sent the wine to Wellington, where it lubricated the Headquarters’ table for the remainder of the campaign. Although Longa’s men were well disciplined by the standards of many bands, they remained ferocious in action. William Warre testified in July 1812 to an ambush where ‘an intercepted mail from Paris to Madrid … was taken by Longa, who killed 400 men who escorted it except 12, who, he says, did not show so strong an inclination to leave their bodies there’.

  So it was that the courier bearing King Joseph’s letter of 28 January to his brother may have fallen into Longa’s hands in the Pancorbo pass. The precise details of what happened are lost. Whether it was a Spanish collaborator or some French staff officer, and whether he was tortured or simply shot through the brain at point-blank range, the messenger and his precious cargo were separated.

  The details of how the papers made their way to British Headquarters are also unclear, but one likely route was that, having been handed to the Royal Navy, the papers bearing the mysterious numbers of the Great Paris Cipher were sent around to Portugal and Headquarters at Frenada. Scovell would only have to have read the first line to have been alive both to the importance of the message and to the fact that it was in the cipher he had already cracked: Pour l’Empereur – for the emperor.

  Scovell would have folded out the deciphering table which he had attached to his copy of Conradus. Two other papers were attached to the king’s dispatch, including the infamous Soult letter. It was copied on to cartridge paper bearing the Royal Navy watermark. The whole bilious correspondence ended up on Wellington’s desk.

  There can be little doubt that these letters gave Wellington a precious insight into the enmities of the Army of Spain’s command. There were always rumours and reports from spies, but here it was, laid out before him, in two or three letters captured that winter, in the same words that Joseph had intended for the emperor. The feud between Soult and the king would have harmed the morale of French forces, for when subordinate officers were forced to choose sides in such intrigues, suspicion, hostility and division were natural. This was a further consideration in assessing how the king’s forces might react to a British attack in 1813.

  *

  For King Joseph, the early months of that new year brought one ghastly revelation after another. His brother’s public explanation of the Russian failure, the 29th Bulletin, had been published in Paris on 3 December, reached the British secretary of war’s desk in London on the 21st and finally arrived in Madrid on 6 January 1813. Since so many sons of Picardy or the Languedoc lay dead in the Russian snows, this announcement required a certain amount of candour on the emperor’s part. In short, it had owned up to the loss of most of the Grande Armée.

  The Bulletin reported that the onset of heavy frosts after 6 November had killed thousands of horse. By the 14th, ‘the men seemed stunned, lost their gaiety, their good humour and dreamed only of misfortunes and calamities. The enemy seeing on the roads the traces of this terrible calamity that was striking the French army, tried to profit from it.’ Since the phrase ‘to lie like a Bulletin’ had entered common currency in Paris years before, admissions of this sort from a notorious propaganda sheet caused deep forebodings in Madrid.

  Unofficial reports of what had happened were also circulating at King Joseph’s court. The most important of these came from none other than the luckless Colonel Desprez, who, having ridden right across Europe to acquaint the emperor with Marshal Soult’s seditious letter writing, was then caught up in the retreat from Moscow. On his return to Paris, Desprez had written to Joseph:

  we lost prisoners by the tens of thousands – but, however many the prisoners, the dead are many more. Every nightly bivouac left hundreds of frozen corpses behind. The situation may be summed up by saying that the army is dead.

  Joseph, Jourdan and all other officials were deeply shocked by the estimate that only 20,000 men had marched out of Russia alive: half a million had embarked on the expedition.

  As if all this was not bad enough, Desprez was able in this private letter to shed some light on the emperor’s views of the king’s tiresome quarrel with Marshal Soult. Napoleon had described the marshal as ‘the only military brain in the Peninsula’, a clear enough insult to anybody else who presumed to direct the French armies there. Having read this, it would have come as cold comfort to His Catholic Majesty that a letter from General Clarke received in the same mail had finally recalled Soult to France. It happened not for the reasons Joseph would have wanted but as part of the recall of 15,000 veterans needed to begin the reconstruction of the French army. He may have been relieved about the Duke of Dalmatia’s departure, but Joseph could scarce afford to lose those experienced soldiers.

  The emperor had also issued a screed of directives to his brother. The capital was to be made in Valladolid
(rather than Burgos as Joseph had suggested, but the difference had little effect on defence plans), General Caffarelli was to be sacked for his failure to stamp out the guerrillas in the north and there was to be a major onslaught against those insurgents. The emperor seemed to have been reduced to a cold fury by the long interruptions in communications along the Bayonne chaussée, that arterial route that formed the main link with La Patrie. This further instalment of trouble in the north doubtless delighted Wellington, who had been an enthusiastic advocate of sending more weapons to the guerrillas there.

  *

  For the Staff in Frenada, February and March days dragged. They set about all their usual country pursuits. Officers armed with fowling pieces brought in plover and woodcock for Mary Scovell to roast to perfection. Often, usually every other day, Wellington rode one of his eight hunters to hounds. The principal object with the general’s chase seems to have been to maintain his personal strength and skill at equitation, for in all these months it was said that only one single unfortunate fox fell into the clutches of the Frenada Hunt.

  On many a day officers scrambled down the rocky gorge behind the village with their fishing rods before casting into the inky waters of the Coa. This pursuit was perhaps more therapeutic than hunting, for the population of that river could provide them with intelligence as well as supper. For much of the year, very little swam up its rocky bed, but the arrival of fish was linked by rain to the question of when they might march out of quarters and drive the French from Spain. It was only when the downpours of March and April had raised the level of the Coa that trout and the fish locals called bogas and barbos could migrate up from the Douro. Wellington was awaiting those same rains to nourish the fodder of Castile and Segovia. It had to be green and tall before he could set his brigades of cavalry on their trajectory to the north-east, and that year the seasons seemed a little late.