The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (21 page)

When Joseph finally left Rambouillet in his carriage, he had been promised that the French exchequer would fund the expenses of his court to the tune of 500,000 francs each month. Furthermore, he carried a note dated 17 May summarizing their agreement in the military sphere. Before setting off for Madrid, Joseph went to see his wife, Julie, at their estate in Mortefontaine, were she spent most of her time to avoid the looking-glass world of her husband's court and its empty flattery. She thought Joseph much changed and could not understand his euphoria about the meetings with Bonaparte. Joseph's “frivolity was inconceivable and his self-confidence was equally inexplicable,” she wrote, “he was surprised that we did not look at him with great admiration, so convinced was he that he had performed great deeds.” Queen Julie, it seems, was a better judge both of her husband's impossible situation and of the emptiness of the promises made at Rambouillet, and with each league of his journey back to Spain, Joseph should have seen himself that the 17 May memorandum was worthless.

It began promisingly enough from Joseph's point of view: “The King of Spain, as the Emperor's lieutenant, commands the French armies of Spain and Portugal in accordance with the direction he receives from the Emperor, through the Chief of Staff the Prince of Neufchatel.” Joseph would be assisted in these duties by a military figure, “responsible for the details of the overall direction of troops garrisoned in the provinces.”

But just a few paragraphs on, the body of this Rambouillet accord then proceeded to undermine line by line all that had been so confidently stated at the beginning. Marmont's Army of Portugal and Soult's Army of the South would “correspond” with Madrid, a clause which those two
Commanders took to mean keeping the king informed rather than accepting any commands from him. The armies of the North and Catalonia would be run under different arrangements: military governors appointed by Napoleon ran administrative matters, and he also supplied their operational orders. A small Army of the Center, operating around Madrid itself, would be the only corps directly controlled by the king.

One week after their meetings at Rambouillet, Napoleon began to rethink even his limited concessions. Above all, the emperor was loath to appoint a single marshal as
primus inter pares
*
directing operations from Madrid. However logical that might be militarily, it carried all sorts of risks to the emperor's personal authority. Writing to Berthier on 27 May from Normandy, Napoleon revealed the extraordinary depth of his own egotism: “I cannot give away that supreme command, because I do not see any man capable of managing the troops … it is in the nature of things that if one Marshal were placed in Madrid, and directed all operations, he would want to have all of the glory along with all of the responsibility.” The emperor added lamely, “I want to do all that I can to give the King a new prestige on his return to Spain.”

Berthier, as chief of staff, had to make sense of this sibling rivalry and emotional insecurity masquerading as military directive. As Napoleon's right-hand man for more than a decade, Berthier was propelled by nervous energy. When contemplating some conundrum of army administration, he paced up and down in his office and gnawed at his fingers until they bled. This situation was a dilemma to really make his digits suffer. The emperor wanted to dictate the overall direction of the war, that was clear. These gentlemen, Marmont, Soult and the like, wanted to decide the actual details, and Berthier knew what difficult customers they could be. Now, on top of all this, he needed to make Joseph feel important, when in fact he had been given almost nothing. The king of Spain must be kept informed, that was vital, because the note agreed to at Rambouillet would lead Joseph to expect a constant flow of letters from the provinces. Berthier understood that this increased communication carried great risks. If Marmont and Soult were writing to Madrid as well as to him in Paris, there would be sensitive bits of parchment flying all over the Iberian Peninsula. How could Joseph be satisfied while protecting the Army of Spain's secrets? A
Grand Chiffre,
that was the answer. That was prestige, all right, a Great Cipher for a Great Monarch.

Restored to his palace in Madrid, Joseph resumed his courtly life. He had vented his frustrations at Rambouillet and, for the moment, felt better for it. A military chief of staff was to join him soon. Reports began to arrive from the far-flung armies. There appeared to be some hope of concerting military operations with his plans for the edification of the Spanish nation. Once he could dedicate more lycees, eradicate the superstitious influence of the Church in matters of law and trounce a few of those guerrillas, then things would begin to turn.

On 12 July, Berthier wrote to Joseph, briefing him on the latest military developments. The letter was in a
Grand Chiffre.
Not the sort of thing the army had played about with in Italy or the Balkans, this was a complex code, a proper diplomatic cipher, that Berthier had obtained from Hugues Maret, the secretary of state, and his civilian opposite in matters of both routine and sensitive imperial administration.

The arrival of Berthier's missive caused consternation at Joseph's palace. Nobody could decipher it. The king's secretary, seeing the cipher for the diplomatic one that it was, sent for the
Comte
de Laforest, the French ambassador in Madrid. A few days later the reply came back that the embassy had no knowledge of this particular
Grand Chiffre.
On 27 July, Joseph had to write back to Berthier, “We are not in possession of this cipher.” Could the prince possibly send his message again, only this time “in the French ambassador's actual cipher, and send me one that can be used by the two of us in particular.” A couple of days after he wrote to the chief of staff in Paris, the thought seems to have occurred to Joseph that perhaps Berthier had slipped up in his dispatch of 12 July and accidentally revealed a cipher that Paris shared with the other army commanders but not with Madrid. Was this code, far from being a tool for his authority, something that was being used to circumvent it?

On 5 August, Joseph sent a messenger to the commander of the Army of the North with a letter about various administrative matters, which included, “Mr. Frochot will inform you about a mishap that prevents me understanding a dispatch that must be most important, judging by
the means in which it is ciphered. If you are able to let me know any more about it, you would give me pleasure.”

Five days later, abandoning his earlier coyness about the sender of the 12 July letter, the king wrote to Marshal Marmont, asking for enlightenment “on the contents of a ciphered dispatch that I cannot read.” On the same day, Soult was sent a letter also containing a copy of Berthier's original message and “hoping you might be able to shed light on the contents.”

By now, the arrival of the
Grand Chiffre
in Spain, despite Berthier's hopes, had become a farcical episode. By failing to ascertain exactly which deciphering tables were in the possession of the king or French ambassador, Berthier had simply compounded Joseph's insecurity rather than contributing to his confidence. Further months in which French military secrets might have been properly protected had been lost and Wellington had continued to receive intercepted high-level dispatches
en clair,
*
revealing much about the state of the French armies and their operations. The British staff had also learned something of the king's unhappiness over his powerlessness and his visit to Paris. “[We] greatly pity the poor King Joseph for I am convinced nothing but force could have made him return to this country,” wrote Wellington's military secretary.

As the delicate issues of granting Joseph a semblance of power and the introduction of a Great Cipher played themselves out, Marshal Marmont found himself operating once more in the plains of Leon and Castille, close to northern Portugal. Having returned from helping Marshal Soult in Estremadura, he put into effect his earlier plans to improve the security of his communications, something that had become all the more important as he faced new threats from the British and their allies. It was during the late summer of 1811 that Marmont's generals began cloaking their orders in the Army of Portugal cipher.

Ciudad Rodrigo, the fortified town on the River Agueda, had become the subject of Wellington's attentions. French troops still held this strong-point, which was in the border highlands, sparsely inhabited and studded with forests of black and pygmy oak. Around Rodrigo itself, to a radius of a couple of miles, was a verdant pasture, which allowed sufficient cultivation
and husbandry to feed the people of the town but could not sustain invading armies. A siege, or indeed a defense, of this place thus posed considerable difficulties of supply. Wellington understood that if an army of twenty thousand or thirty thousand troops was to canton the area around it for weeks while the engineers conducted their regular approaches, large amounts of food and ammunition would have to be brought up to them.

Marmont, on the other hand, was obliged by considerations of supply to keep his army in an arc that stretched down from the northern part of the province of Leon, through Salamanca, about forty miles to the northeast of Rodrigo and southward, toward the River Tagus (most of the way to Badajoz). Although the Salamanca plain had once been an area of agricultural abundance, the war had ravaged its farms, and the Army of Portugal had been left chronically short of the supply wagons. All the same, forces in Salamanca were still close enough to Ciudad Rodrigo for a movement of three or four marches to allow them to drive off any British force blockading it. Marmont had resupplied the fortress in July, but by August it was clear to him that Wellington was preparing to attack it.

The British general's plan involved a blockade by Spanish irregulars, British cavalry and light troops while heavy guns were moved slowly up to the frontier. If this cordon could be maintained the garrison might be starved out, or at least reduced in numbers and spirit. It was in the struggle to seal off Ciudad Rodrigo from resupply or information that the guerrilla chief Don Julian Sanchez came into his own.

Don Julian was a native of the lands between Rodrigo and Salamanca. He and many of his horsemen had grown up riding the borderlands, hunting in its forests. Their favorite chase involved the pursuit of
jabalies,
wild pigs, much enjoyed roasted as a local delicacy. These animals shot through the trees at a fearful pace, defying their pursuers to skewer them with their lances, or
picos.
In August 1811, the don's quarry was human, but his hunt was pursued with the same tactics and often with just as little mercy.

In the summer of 1810 his men surprised a company of about one hundred French dragoons. Eighty had been killed, the few survivors testifying to an attack of merciless ferocity. After this, one British officer noted in his journal, “the French promise to hang him and he in return gives them no quarter.” Sanchez had served as a noncommissioned officer in the Spanish army until the death of his father in 1803 forced him into civilian life. He had reenlisted in a volunteer cavalry regiment in
1808 following the outbreak of what the Spanish called their War of Independence against the French. He had then risen swiftly through the ranks. The don and his men sported curled mustachios, carried fearsome lances, tucked pistols into their gaudy red sashes and in general resembled the worst nightmare of every French convoy commander.

As a former soldier, the don was keener than many other guerrillas to give his men some semblance of uniform and order, but even so, one British officer drew this memorable pen portrait:

Sanchez had been brought under British pay in October 1810, receiving silver coin and weaponry from swords to light cannon. The following year his troops (perhaps 250 cavalry and twice as many on foot) had been attached to Scovell's Corps of Guides. They were vital as scouts and in collecting the secret intelligence scrawled on scraps of paper by agents in Ciudad Rodrigo or Salamanca.

In August and early September 1811 several dispatches were brought in by Don Julian and some other guerrillas in the peculiar new cipher of the Army of Portugal employed by Marmont and his staff. Wellington and Somerset looked them over, noting immediately that they were not the simple codes that had been used earlier in the summer. Scovell was brought in to help.

Marmont's code consisted of numbers from 1 to 150. An example from one of the messages sent by Marmont's principal aides-de-camp shows how it defeated the simple analysis prescribed by Conradus in Scovell's notebook.

A portion is written out in 711 code numbers. The great majority of
these figures represent a single letter, although with the 150 possibilities in this cipher some whole words like
Marmont
or
the enemy
could be written as a single coded number. The rules of French composition described by Conradus hold true to the original text, but the cipher succesfully hides them. Fully 131 of those 711 code numbers stand for
e,
the most frequently used letter in French, because the cipher allocates nine different code numbers to the writing of this most common letter. Other vowels each have several alternatives, obscure consonants only one or two. In this way the cipher balances out the patterns detected by earlier decipherers and conceals them.

Looking more closely at this particular letter, Scovell would have seen that the most common code was 14, which had been written thirty-five times in the 711 characters. Needless to say, it does not stand for a common vowel but for r. Little wonder that Scovell wrote on one of the facing pages of his decipherer's notebook, “The art of writing in cypher is so much improved since Conradus wrote as to render it next to impossible (when knowing the language made use of) to unravel what it conceals without being in possession of the key.”