The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (13 page)

It had not taken long for the French footsloggers to begin repaying brutality in kind. Punitive missions against villages where there had been attacks on imperial columns soon assumed a vicious character. One Frenchman conscripted in the summer of 1809 and bound for Spain noted this reception from veterans at his military depot in Angouleme:

The poisonous character of the conflict between the Iberians and their invaders was firmly established, even as early as 1809, and defined the battle for information for both the French and the British. Messengers, as Franceschi's saga demonstrated, could not move unescorted without the risk of becoming targets for popular wrath. Rapidly, the situation became so acute that Madrid or Paris might hear nothing from an expeditionary corps in some corner of the peninsula for four, five, even six weeks at a stretch. Under these circumstances, it was increasingly difficult to coordinate the operations of different corps around Spain. Although the French discovered some sympathizers in the towns among the poorer sort of professionals or artisans, the peasants in the countryside
were generally unwilling to provide King Joseph's scouting parties with information on the whereabouts of their enemies. The guerrillas, or British, on the other hand, usually found plenty of willing collaborators.

Franceschi was not the first French messenger to be taken, of course, but his capture did galvanize the court of Napoleon's brother in Madrid to think more seriously about its difficulties of communication.

Small detachments of troops were positioned in fortified blockhouses at regular intervals along main routes like the one from Madrid to the French frontier at Bayonne. In this way, messengers could spend the night in safety and would never be too far from help if ambushed. Inevitably, this level of security could only be provided on a small number of routes, since it consumed troops by the thousands. Unfortunately for the French, similar factors prevented them from using one of the most revolutionary inventions of the country's brilliant military science. In France itself, high-level messages were regularly carried along optical telegraph relays. Chains of telegraph stations (each one had to be visible to the next) were used to send messages from Paris to the eastern frontier or the south at previously unthinkable speeds. In Iberia, however, the vicious enmity between French troops and locals would have meant a constant risk to the security of communications. Setting up telegraphs to link Madrid with the provinces would have required scores of stations, exposing the operators to the constant risk of guerrilla attack. And any successful assault on one of the relay stations might have delivered the code of signals into enemy hands, compromising the secrecy of the entire system.

Instead the tried and tested method of pen and paper had to suffice. Where the safety of an urgent communication was in doubt, two or more copies were sent. Increasingly dispatches would arrive bearing the words
“Duplicato”
or
“Triplicato”
at the top. During the latter part of 1809, the French were not quite ready to move to protection of the actual contents of their military messages, even though in sensitive diplomatic correspondence the emperor did employ secret ciphers, using code tables that converted words, letters or phases into numbers. One hundred years earlier, under Louis XIV, France had been the masters of this kind of secret writing, and, during the century leading up to the revolution, French diplomats had perfected ciphers of ever-increasing complexity. An early cipher of Louis XIV's day, for example, might allow the transcription of a message into numbers from one to six hundred. By
1750, though, French ministers were being equipped with an enciphering table of twelve thousand numbers. With each development of this kind, the complexity of the transcription grew and the task facing any would-be decipherer was made yet more difficult.

The French Revolution had created much turmoil in the diplomatic service, stocked as it was with gouty aristocrats, but it didn't endanger the knowledge of codes and ciphers—this kind of esoteric know-how had always been the preserve of a certain type of petit bourgeois
*
administrator who came through the revolution unscathed. In drawers of the foreign ministry there were still copies of the 1750 ciphering table, as well as other more exotic codes involving hieroglyphs. All were intended for use by ambassadors, ministers and secret informants, people whose situations made it imperative that they take the time to encipher and decipher messages.

As for Napoleon's army, it had tried using codes in some of its campaigns but they were quite simple, usually termed
petits chiffres,
or small ciphers, that might just transpose letters into numbers from one to fifty. While this was fast, it was also so easily broken that it could only protect the message for a few hours. Such codes might suffice if the letter in question was an urgent order for the movement of some body of troops. Napoleon and his staff knew that things had to be kept simple in the heat of battle. How complex could something be if it had to be used by some general's aide-de-camp while perched on the back of a horse, perhaps with the whiz of cannonballs overhead? A great table of the type used in the foreign ministry was the size of a large map, so its physical dimensions alone posed difficulties on campaign. There were other, more basic problems too. What was the point of enciphering your dispatch if you had no knowledge that the recipient could decipher it? The French armies in Spain had been continuously in motion since the summer of 1808, with no time to send each commander a set of code tables. Attempts to pass such a sensitive package through the bandit-infested countryside carried unthinkable risks. What if the British ended up in possession of one of the secret charts, or worse still were able to copy it without the French being aware it was compromised?

After Franceschi's abduction, Joseph would have known that it would be quite impossible to send out copies of code tables quickly and safely. Speed was of the essence, because the French had learned of the advance of Wellesley's army into eastern Spain. On 3 July 1809 the British army had entered his kingdom in the mountainous central sector of the frontier. Joseph and his military advisers knew that there was a Spanish corps under General Cuesta also lurking somewhere in this region. The combined Anglo-Spanish force might then move on Madrid. If Sebastiani and Victor were brought together, they could block the Allied advance, and once Soult and Ney were also brought into action, the French would have a hefty preponderance of force over the British and Spanish. But everything depended on a swift concentration of troops.

Despite all the difficulties, the king was resolved to do something about the security of his dispatches. Franceschi had, after all, fallen into enemy hands because he was wearing the uniform of a French cavalry general and was accompanied by two finely appointed ADCs. Perhaps the answer lay in greater stealth. There were so many possibilities. Why not make use of the
afrancesados,
*
the natives who had welcomed the arrival of the French? If a Spanish spy could be given a message, he might make his way dressed as a shepherd or some itinerant pilgrim. Joseph resolved to use any means necessary to get a message through to Marshal Soult in time to tip the balance in the imminent battle against the British.

CHAPTER SIX
F
ROM
T
ALAVERA TO THE
E
ND
C
AMPAIGN
, J
ULY TO
O
CTOBER
1809

S
covell's stay in Lisbon had proven a fruitful and agreeable interlude. His business was transacted as swiftly as was possible with the Portuguese war ministry, but it nonetheless required him to remain there twelve days, time that Scovell spent exploring the city's streets. In 1809 Lisbon was a place of considerable bustle, color and adventure, with palaces, fine avenues and many narrow backstreets. A good number of the public buildings dating from the wealthy days of the previous century had been built in a Portuguese baroque style, with their impressive soaring colonnaded facades. Away from the pungent aromas of the river quay, visitors found themselves seduced by the more pleasant smells of strong coffee and fresh pastries.

One morning Scovell walked up into the Bairro Alto, the city's high quarter, and found his way to the church of Sao Roque. Its nondescript exterior concealed a magnificent interior adorned with mosaic works of such astonishing intricacy that they defied the observer's attempts to
distinguish them from paintings. Sao Roque's baroque altar is a masterpiece of decoration and proportion. “Nothing can be more beautiful or wonderful,” Scovell declared, marveling that the French had not pillaged the artworks during their brief occupation of Lisbon the previous summer.

Scovell was not the only red-coated captain to be found on the streets of Lisbon that June. During the past year the city had become used to the perambulations of visiting British officers: many were passing through on their way to or from the fighting, others belonged to that habitual class of shirkers to be found to the rear of any army engaged in operations. Captain Moyle Sherer of the 34th Foot had disembarked with his regiment, preparing to move toward the Spanish border, and like Scovell walked up to see Sao Roque, being struck not just by the beauty of the art but by the flirtatious glances of young Portuguese women peering out from their mantillas as they left the church followed by their Brazilian maids.

Men like Sherer and Scovell, who wanted to drink in the culture, sights and language of the Portuguese, were in a distinct minority. Sherer recorded returning to dinner that day with his brother officers, where he found that “some of our party had been very differently impressed with the morning's ramble to what I had been. They drew comparisons between London and Lisbon exultingly … they had only seen the heaps of dirt… a squalid beggar … or been saluted by some unfortunate puff of air, impregnated with garlic.”

One of the principal distractions for bachelor British officers, often raucously drunk, were nights at the opera. The Sao Carlos had been modeled on Milan's La Scala, and its program was mainly of Italian light opera. Although the air may have been close in this packed auditorium on a midsummer's night, the audience's behavior was anything but stuffy. The British officers made eyes at the Portuguese maidens up in their family boxes, tried to force their way into the stars' dressing rooms after the entertainments and were even sometimes to be seen caterwauling on stage. When he received repeated reports of misbehavior, Wellesley became so exasperated that he wrote with his distinctive blend of caustic disapproval and mordant wit to the senior officer in Lisbon:

After this letter, its recipient, Colonel Peacock, posted armed sentries at the stage door of the Sao Carlos. If this episode reflects something deeper than the perennial struggle to limit the discord between soldiers and civilians, it is the British commander's fear that many of his officers were as much of a liability in their dealings with the Portuguese or Spanish as the private soldiers who plundered the countryside. Wellesley was already quite familiar with the figure of the Briton abroad trying to make himself understood by repeating the same English phrase louder and louder until his perspiring face turned the same color as his regimental coat. He would later write to Colonel Peacock: “I am sorry to say that our officers are too much disposed to treat with contempt all foreigners.” When this subsequent row (concerning the use of a Portuguese barracks building) occurred, Wellesley recommended officers of the QMG's department as the only ones who could be relied upon to deal with the Iberian allies in a professional manner.