The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (19 page)

In the meantime, Marmont took the field with his reorganized army and prepared it to march shortly before the end of May. Wellington had been busy trying to find a way to continue besieging the French garrison of Badajoz. When Don Julian's scouts near Salamanca detected the French preparation to go south, Wellington did not believe that Marmont's exhausted host could possibly be ready to march. But he knew that his
siege of Badajoz would have to be abandoned if he was wrong and Marmont did march south to join Soult.

Uncertain of the value of the intercepted dispatches he continued to receive, Wellington relied heavily at this moment on his exploring officers. In particular, Colquhoun Grant, a young captain of the 11th Foot, who sent in valuable reports based on reconnaissance he carried out inside the French lines. Grant had begun this secret work a few months earlier, while the army was still inside the Torres Vedras lines. He operated in uniform, alone or with one or two comrades, and relied on the speed of his hunter to gallop clear of any pursuing enemy. Like Scovell, Grant loved Spanish culture and language, using his excellent grasp of it to win the confidence of locals up and down the frontier. “His knowledge of the enemy's army was exact,” wrote one officer at headquarters, “he knew not only the regiments, but the character of every superior officer.”

The presence of men like Grant deeply unsettled the French. Sometimes a column of infantry marching across a dusty Estremaduran plain would see the glint of a telescope on a nearby hillside and then catch sight of a silhouetted figure on horseback. One Army of Portugal staff officer recorded:

Although many French felt powerless to stop Wellington's exploring officers, their trade was in fact a most hazardous one. Lieutenant Colonel Waters, an officer who had played a vital part in the Douro crossing two years earlier, was captured in April 1811. Another lieutenant colonel, confusingly also called Grant (first name John), disappeared in Estremadura while observing Marmont's advance.

On 10 June 1811, Wellington was finally in possession of enough
reports from his exploring officers and spies to realize that the Army of Portugal was moving south and that his plans to take Badajoz would have to be abandoned. In any case, the artillery's attempts to batter breaches in the town's defenses had achieved only limited success. There was no time for further attempts; Wellington ordered his army to retire behind the Guadiana River, on the Portuguese frontier.

Ten days later, Marmont and Soult's united force of sixty thousand men stood opposite Wellington's army, consisting of forty-six thousand troops, of whom only twenty-nine thousand were British. These were odds that the British general would be most reluctant to fight with, although he had posted his troops in strong positions. And this was not all, for Wellington was becoming apprehensive for the safety of Badajoz's Portuguese counterpart, Elvas. A series of tetchy orders were fired off, ordering supplies thrown into the place and the governor told to put it in a state of defense. For Wellington was anticipating that he might have to fall back across the Alemtejo plain and leave the Elvas garrison under an enemy siege. This was a tense period, during which Wellington outwardly displayed his usual sangfroid and businesslike calm to his staff and soldiers. But his anxiety that an onslaught by Soult and Marmont's combined forces might force him all the way back to Lisbon was very real, revealing itself in a letter to his brother on 21 June: “Matters are in a very critical state just now; but I think I shall carry them through.”

Charting the campaign's progress, Wellington had learned a worthwhile lesson during those summer months of 1811. He could not be in two places at once and he could not rely on others to act according to the letter of his orders. Moreover, if French generals cooperated rather than bickered, as they had on the plain of the Guadiana, his calculations would all be ruined.

He knew that for as long as he was one man trying to guard two routes into Portugal from invasion by two or three French armies, communications would be paramount. His would have to be impeccable and those of the enemy needed to be harassed, intercepted and their secrets revealed. The success of all future operations depended upon this and his superintendent of communications, George Scovell.

Wellington as field marshal and duke at the end of the Peninsular Campaign in 1814.
(Credit: The V & A Picture Library, London)

King Joseph, Napoleon's brother, sent to rule Spain. Despite the artist's attempt to present Joseph as a military leader, Joseph did not share his younger sibling's genius for war.
(Credit: The V & A Picture Library, London)

The somewhat romanticized image of a French general on campaign conveys the vital importance of the written dispatch in military operations and the expectation triggered by a messenger's arrival.
(Credit: The V & A Picture Library, London)

A section of King Joseph's deciphering table. The gender or case of many code numbers was dependent on context, hence the alternatives listed in some places.
(Credit: The Trustees of The Wallace Collection, London)

George Scovell sketched on campaign in 1813 by Thomas Heaphy. The distinctive headgear belongs to the Staff Cavalry Corps.

FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington's military secretary for much of the Peninsular War and a friend of Scovell's for life.

Sir George Murray, quarter master general of the Peninsular Army. Diligent, persuasive, and highly effective, he was Wellington's “chief of staff” long before the British army officially recognized that term.

Wellington, also drawn in the summer of 1813, in a study that captures his intense, sometimes intimidating presence and does not flatter him in the manner of later heroic pictures.