The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (27 page)

This finally drew from Berthier what Marmont's shaking confidence had craved: a frank reassurance that the emperor did not bear a lasting grudge for the loss of Rodrigo.

Jardet's deciphered message caused considerable eclat at British headquarters. For one thing, it confirmed the high impression they already had of Marmont's military judgment, for he had successfully forecast the move on Badajoz and even Madrid. But it also showed them that senior officers felt helpless in the face of these impending events. Lieutenant Colonel D'Urban, the Portuguese quarter master general, commented in his journal that Marmont had sent Jardet to Paris “to represent his difficulties, to remonstrate, to solicit supplies and to beg to be relieved from his irksome and disgusting command.”

The intercepted letter contained intelligence of the highest grade,
but now Wellington had to decide how to exploit this and the other information at his disposal to bring about a swift success at Badajoz. Scovell, together with some of the other scientific soldiers at HQ, regarded this new target with foreboding. The assistant quarter master general could not share the breathless sense of triumph at the storm on the nineteenth, noting somewhat grumpily in his journal, “Cuidad Rodrigo was by no means a strong place.” He knew from earlier abortive attempts that to take Badajoz would certainly be another story.

CHAPTER TEN
T
HE
S
TORM OF
B
ADAJOZ
, M
ARCH
1812

O
n 17 March 1812, the bands struck up the tune of “Saint Patrick's Day” and the battalions bivouacing around Elvas began trudging through the murky dawn toward the River Guadiana and the Spanish border. There were thousands of Irishmen in Wellington's army; it was their patron saint's day and the music was intended to cheer them up as they marched toward their rendezvous with Badajoz. By the afternoon, the Light Division was following the 3rd and 4th over a pontoon bridge across the Guadiana, making sure to break step so as not to cause the floating span to bounce up and down too much. One young officer of the 95th Rifles hoped that the Light Division's heroic work at Ciudad Rodrigo in January might mean their regiment would be spared from undertaking a similar mission. “We were soon undeceived. We were destined for duty, to our mortification, for soldiers hate sieges and working parties.”

As these men progressed around the fortress—about one and a half miles away from it to remain out of artillery range—they could see a
French tricolor fluttering from the large tower that crowned the city's medieval keep. Every man knew this siege would be a bloody business. There were five thousand defenders for one thing (roughly three thousand more than garrisoned Rodrigo) and the layout of the walls and gun batteries was much stronger. What was more, that main belt of defenses surrounding the city was itself buttressed by strong outlying forts on the only bits of high ground that commanded the works. Only once La Picurina and Pardaleras—satellite positions on the southwestern approaches, Wellington's chosen axis of attack—had been reduced could the serious business of breaching the city's defense belt begin. This would be no twelve-day wonder like January's siege. It might take weeks, during which the French had to be prevented from making mischief.

Just as at Ciudad Rodrigo, the troops moved into position shortly before dusk; a full day's march was followed by a night of backbreaking graft with pick and shovel to throw up the first parallel trench. Their nocturnal labor was followed, as it had been in January's siege, by a furious bombardment from the French garrison the following morning. Once the enemy had seen the great scar on the ridge, they knew their fight to the finish had begun.

Other divisions moved into place to blockade the city and to stand ready to repulse any French attempt to break the stranglehold. Wellington had deployed almost all of his effective forces for the task: eight British infantry divisions, one of Portuguese and several brigades of cavalry. He had brought his main army the 160 miles down from the Almeida/Ciudad Rodrigo area, leaving those two places garrisoned by Spanish and Portuguese brigades. Of his own troops, only a single regiment of hussars, the 1st of the King's German Legion, had been left behind with them to face Marmont's Army of Portugal. While this might seem like a huge risk, everything had in fact been calculated quite precisely using the excellent intelligence at Wellington's disposal.

Wellington's plan at Badajoz could be upset by attacks from either of two directions: one southward by the Army of Portugal, or to the north by Marshal Soult from his bases in Andalucia with a large reinforcement for the corps he already had in Estremadura. Either of these events might be enough to hamper his siege work, since he would have to stop
his men digging and unite them on the battlefield to defend themselves. If Marmont and Soult acted together and united anything up to eight thousand men as they had in June 1811, then not only would the siege be over, but Wellington would be forced onto the defensive.

The British commander knew from Colonel Jardet's deciphered letter that Marmont would face severe supply difficulties in coming south and that moreover he was concerned about what might happen in his absence from Leon and Castille. Wellington played on these fears by inciting Spanish forces in Galicia and Asturias, regions north of Marmont's bases around Salamanca, to begin attacking outlying French positions. But if the Army of Portugal remained in the north, might it not instead attack westward into Portugal, threatening all of the gains of the previous year's campaigning? Little did the British know, but this was precisely the course of action that Napoleon had urged upon Marmont.

Although none of the messages from Paris ordering such a diversionary attack by the Army of Portugal had reached Wellington, it had occurred to him that the French might take advantage of his temporary absence from the area around Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo. If the French attacked across the Beira Baixa upland plateau of the frontier, they would have a march of several days without supplies. Wellington felt confident that if the Army of Portugal undertook such an expedition, its men and horses would soon start dropping from hunger.

The best insights into Marmont's possible strategy that were available to the British general came from Jardet's deciphered letter. The marshal's staff officer had written to him from Paris that the Army of Portugal should “above all” remain on the plains around Salamanca, where they could threaten the British. This vague instruction had been superceded by further orders (those Wellington did not know about) from Napoleon on 18 and 20 February. If Wellington went to Badajoz, Marmont should “no longer think … of going south, and march straight into Portugal.” The second letter had expanded the emperor's concept: “If Lord Wellington were to march on Badajoz, there would be a certain, prompt, and decisive method of recalling him, by advancing on Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida.”

Napoleon's ideas rested upon the misconstrued notion that northern Portugal was a land of abundance, full of trees groaning with fruit, lush pastures and well-stocked British magazines ready for the plunder,
whereas it could not possibly sustain a large army. His belief that Marmont might bring Wellington scurrying back by threatening to ravish the border fortresses of Almeida and Rodrigo was also nonsense, since the loss of the Army of Portugal's entire train of heavy guns in January had nullified this threat. Marmont's men would be able to do nothing more than hungrily wander up and down outside the towns' massive walls, while the well-fed occupants hurled abuse and round shot at them. Marmont knew these ideas dictated in Paris by a master who was spending eighteen hours a day organizing his vast expedition into Russia were half-baked at best. His military instincts told him that if Wellington marched south, he should do the same, but Napoleon's orders had now given him the less risky option of a limited foray into Portugal.

For Marshal Soult and his Army of the South, Wellington had also prepared a diversion. At the end of January, Wellington had written to his brother Henry, Lord Wellesley, the British minister at Cadiz, “It is absolutely necessary that the whole of Soult's force should not be brought upon us with impunity.” To this end, he had asked Lord Wellesley to enlist the services of General Ballasteros, the commander of a Spanish flying column in Andalucia, to threaten Soult's base at Seville. Ballasteros was a typical fighting patriot whose faith in his own operations was inexhaustable, despite a catalogue of routs, drubbings and
débandades.
With a few thousand men, he would happily march around the south, causing nervous French governors in their outlying garrisons to panic and raise the alarm left, right, and center.

Wellington's underlying assumption in planning these diversions was that if neither Marshal Marmont nor Marshal Soult wanted to take risks already, a small eruption of Spanish troops would provide them with the perfect excuse for staying put. And if one of them did not march, why should the other try his luck against the British singlehandedly? As Jardet's letter had confirmed, in Marmont's staff the loss of Badajoz was viewed as a lesser evil than their master's defeat and the ruin of his reputation.

Into this psychological equation came a further variable, one that Wellington had not foreseen.

On the very day that Badajoz had been invested, Napoleon had scribbled a most important order to Berthier in Paris:

This directive, sent hurrying along the road to Bayonne and thence Madrid with an imperial courier, would seem at first glance to be exactly what Joseph and Jourdan had been praying for. It ended the nonsense that a man should be in command far away who worked with two- or three-week-old intelligence in the Tuileries and whose orders then took a similar time to reach the field commanders. It acknowledged, as the emperor was preparing to head east, that he could not personally control two wars at the same time and that the one against Russia had to take priority.

Although this new order had been dictated by the emperor in a more genuine spirit than the Rambouillet note of May 1811, King Joseph would soon discover that it was not what it seemed either. For one thing, Napoleon had not ordered Berthier to place General Dorsenne and his Army of the North under command of Madrid. He would remain under the direct control of Paris, and that arrangement proved to be a potent source of difficulty for Joseph. Moreover, Napoleon felt that if one of his marshals was to seek the emperor's advice while he was campaigning in Russia, he could not refuse.