The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (44 page)

Wellington then asked London for the return of George Murray, his previous QMG, and this request was granted, and the Scot, who managed to combine zeal and charm in equal measure, appeared in Frenada early in 1813. Once back in charge of his old department, Murray returned to his office as quarter master general and became the second most important man in the army, in practice if not by seniority.

There were also many items in the newspapers crossing Wellington's desk at the end of 1812 that gave him satisfaction; the beginning of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in October had especially caught the British popular imagination. Caricatures showed “General Frost Shaveing Little Boney.” A giant wielding a razor marked “Russian Steel” was shown trampling French armies and grappling with a tearful Bonaparte.

By the time the scale of Napoleon's defeat in the east was known, Wellington had set off for Cadiz. He left, accompanied by Colonel FitzRoy Somerset, on the twelfth. The Spanish regency had let him
know it was willing to give him supreme command of all their armies for the coming campaign. The precise terms of this arrangement needed to be tied down face-to-face.

Those remaining at Frenada would have read the
Times
of 17 December with fascination. The paper published an “Extraordinary Gazette” devoted to Napoleon's failure in Russia, telling its readers:

As Christmas approached, the little square outside headquarters was abuzz with gossip about the latest events. Staff officers and generals up from their divisions strolled in greatcoats and fur-lined caps trading the latest rumors: Napoleon had fled his army; the entire host, 500,000 men, no less, had perished in the snows. If the French generals had grumbled the year before that they were stuck in Spain while others were going to win glories against Russia, now it was the British officers' turn to rue the fact that they were unable to witness the spectacle of a general
débandade
*
of Napoleon's mighty army. It was into this hubbub that the distinctive figure of Saornil and his bodyguards arrived, bearing their valuable cargo.

The guerrilla chieftain went to the door of headquarters only to be received by Colonel Campbell, the head of Wellington's household. That would not do, he had important French dispatches that could only be delivered into the hands of the general himself. The colonel answered that Lord Wellington was abroad and might not return for some considerable time. Saornil was implored to share his information. But the mustachioed guerrilla was quite firm: he had to see Wellington in person. These were letters from King Joseph to Napoleon himself, they could only be delivered to someone of the highest rank.

It took some hours to convince Saornil that he must hand over the
papers promptly if they were to be of any use at all. Eventually the Spaniard agreed, on the promise that Wellington would accord him every honor and civility once he returned to Frenada.

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, and 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, this demonstrating the severe difficulties of 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 Center 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 22nd 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 re-occupied.” He was right about Murcia but the phrase “whole country” should actually have been deciphered “all centers.”

This letter of Joseph's had been superceded by events, for in it the king had asked his brother for reinforcements as part of his plan to reestablish control over the country. What Joseph didn't yet know was that Napoleon, far from providing fresh cannon fodder for Iberia, would now be looking for the veterans serving in Spain to replace his fallen army.

Jourdan's letter to General Clarke in Paris, however, was much more up-to-date. The old marshal seems to have recognized that reinforcements were out of the question and therefore launched a sort of preemptive
attack on the minister, laying out in detail the desperate situation in Spain. Instead of Joseph's empty boasts, this message painted a vivid picture of the miserable conditions prevailing in the French 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 also showed that the Armies of the South and Center had almost run out of ammunition, most units had lost all their transport wagons, there was widespread guerrilla activity and the army's pay was months in arrears. Jourdan's letter left little doubt 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 particular direction of an Allied thrust, that would depend on further intelligence about French dispositions and a greater understanding of their scheme of operations, which was precisely the information contained in a further letter from Joseph to the emperor dated 22 December 1812. Scovell's knowledge of the
Grand Chiffre
had during many quiet hours of reflection in Frenada improved 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, with its frank assessment of future operations, was perhaps the most important message that Scovell worked on. Certainly, like the king's dispatch to Marmont of 9 July 1812, it would have the greatest consequences for Wellington's overall strategy.

The king had positioned 100,000 troops along the lines of the Douro and Tagus Rivers. This deployment formed a sort of diagonal line from northwest to southeast, 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 Douro-Tagus line, so
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 Center, he could “combine their divisions as events dictate.” If things went wrong, this defensive line was at least positioned to shield the main line of communications back to France via Burgos.

In his 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 favor 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 thought it displayed both Joseph's delusions and portrayed 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 29th January:

In his last remark, Wellington had given his strongest testimony to the value of deciphered French communications and thus, more or less explicitly, to Scovell's work. Messages in the broken Great Paris Cipher had become his most reliable source of strategic intelligence. The only curious thing was that he put this vital labor at risk by sharing with a Spanish politico that Joseph's cipher was being read at Frenada. Cadiz, after all, was a playground for all sorts of spies, charlatans and intriguers. In truth, 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 codebreaking 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 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 this vital knowledge came at a price, and this time it meant that Wellington had to honor Colonel Campbell's promise and sit down to dinner with the notorious ruffian Saornil, who had been loitering about Frenada for weeks. Those invited to share this experience included 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.” Staring down at his place setting of silver cutlery and gleaming crystal he became quite confused. It was an awkward moment for this onetime convict. Larpent recorded that “the Spanish General O'Lalor treated [Saornil] like a child, told him what to do and eat; but he [Saornil] had, I concluded, 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 spelling out in full the 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 an eminent marshal had been plotting against him in this way. But on 28 January he wrote to the emperor again, finally informing him of the marshal's indiscretions in all their painful detail. He included a copy of Soult's infamous letter of 12 August, accusing the king 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's ride beyond leaving Burgos, traffic had to climb into the Cantabrian hills toward the Pancorbo pass, a defile that had become infamous among the
bataillons de marche
*
and
estafettes
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 onto the French below. It was in here that the guerrilla chieftain Juan Longa hunted the French and their collaborators.