The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (49 page)

The commandant of the Staff Cavalry Corps would have several months' tough campaigning ahead of him in southern France. From time to time divisional orders in some impudent
petit chiffre
fell into British hands and gave Scovell an amusing afternoon's labor, but the real business of code breaking was over.

At about the same time that Scovell surveyed Clarke's letter to Suchet, King Joseph received a final dispatch of his own: the emperor was recalling him to France. He was no longer king since it would be quite impossible for the army to be regrouped for the defense of southern France under somebody who had failed so manifestly and lost the confidence of all its generals. A new commander would be needed to galvanize the weary remnants of France's Spanish legions. On 15 July, none other than Marshal Soult was appointed to that task.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
W
ATERLOO,
I8 J
UNE
1815

I
t was early afternoon as the small group of staff galloped across the top of the Mont St. Jean ridge and down toward their vantage point overlooking the French. Ahead of them, straight up the line of the Charleroi road, was the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte. Behind them, the village of Waterloo. A heavy bombardment of the British line atop the high ground was beginning, with a great mass of French artillery lined up beyond the buildings and pointing in their direction.

The sky was thick with the smoke of several hours' hard pounding as Lieutentant Colonel Scovell, Colonel De Lancey and Lord March, accompanied by an orderly dragoon, had gone together to try to make out what was happening in this part of the battlefield. Wellington and Napoleon had been at war for twenty years, but this was their first time on the same ground. There, in these green Belgian fields, they were going to fight their final battle, the deciding match in the long Anglo-French struggle for domination of the Continent. There were familiarfaces
everywhere that day, hardly a member of the Peninsular staff had been overlooked. Hardinge was with Prussian headquarters as Wellington's confidential representative. FitzRoy Somerset was beside his master almost throughout the day. Only Murray was absent; he had not been able to travel over to Belgium in time for the battle and his place as the army's quarter master general was taken instead by William De Lancey.

Scovell was proud to hear that his name was on a list Field Marshal Wellington had prepared of those essential to the smooth running of his staff. He had been placed in charge of the army's communications once more.

As they pushed forward Scovell and his comrades were riding toward death. They had just galloped past Ompteda's brigade of the king's German legion, closer to the enemy, and the smoke had blinded them to the presence of a powerful French battery not far ahead. In any case, the din of cannon was so deafening that had one of them realized and called out, the others would probably not have heard him. This was an intensity of fire they had never experienced in Iberia. Napoleon had positioned a grand battery of eighty-four cannon to smash the British center.

Suddenly, the whizzing and cracking of round shot and grape filled their ears, followed immediately by the ominous smack of metal striking flesh. In a few short moments, De Lancey was off his mount and so was March. A ricocheting cannonball had bounced off the ground and hit the QMG square in the upper body. The dragoon who'd accompanied them was killed instantly by another shot. Scovell reined his horse in and it reared up. He put his hand up to his hat to stop it from falling off and a cannonball shot through his cloak, just under his arm. Another ball whizzed across his horse's rump, leaving a six-inch strip of pink flesh shaved hairless. Then five pieces of grapeshot hit the animal and Scovell too was dismounted.

He picked himself up and scurried across to De Lancey. Wellington and some other officers who had been riding not far behind appeared on the scene. The colonel looked up at Scovell and said, “I am mortally wounded,” and bid him to look after March. The young ADC had been hit in the arm by grape and was able to get to his feet. They called out for help. De Lancey was carried from the field and March taken to a surgeon. De Lancey's wound was so severe that those who survived would later marvel that he had been able to stand at all. The shock of the cannonball had separated several ribs on his left side from the spine and his internal organs
suffered enormous damage. Scovell himself had somehow emerged from that cloud of hot metal unscathed. He found another mount and galloped off to do the duke's business in another part of the field.

Just as De Lancey received his mortal wound, the battle reached its crisis. The French took La Haye Sainte just before the approaching Prussians joined the British on the field. Early that evening, having failed to break the Allied center, Napoleon threw his Imperial Guard into the fray. The emperor's most precious reserve marched to the top of the St. Jean ridge, where its battalions tried to deploy into proper attack formation. But the British Guards and the 52nd Light Infantry, mostly Peninsular veterans, had suddenly appeared to the front and flanks of the French columns and poured in a heavy fire of musketry. Those redcoats who had survived several seasons' campaigning in Iberia had learned their lessons well: they kept up a relentless salvo at pitifully close range. The grenadiers of Napoleon's Old Guard swayed and stumbled under this onslaught for a few moments, their officers trying desperately to rally them so they might return fire and press home their attack. And then the unthinkable happened, the mustachioed old grumblers of the Guard began leaving the ranks, fleeing back in ones and twos. Sensing their moment, the British light troops charged the remainder and put them to flight. The emperor's last gambit had been foiled. The Battle of Waterloo was won.

The price paid by the staff for this triumph was high indeed. They all knew that theirs was a dangerous business, but, somehow, almost all of them had come through years of peninsula campaigning alive and largely unscathed. On the evening of 18 June, however, Scovell and Wellington himself were among the few of the old campaigners still in one piece. The prince of Orange's arm had been shattered, as had FitzRoy Somerset's, and Hardinge too had been similarly struck at Ligny the previous day. Alexander Gordon (a favorite young ADC) was mortally wounded.

Early that evening, Dr. Gunning, the surgeon, sawed away at Somerset's arm bone, taking it off right above the elbow. He was awake throughout this grisly procedure, propped up by Scovell on a blood-soaked kitchen table. As was Somerset's style, he made light of his calvary. As the orderly carried off his severed limb, its owner called out, “Hallo! don't carry away that arm until you've taken off my ring.”

Somerset's wound was bound up and he was loaded together with the prince of Orange, General Alava (Wellington's Spanish ADC) and Dr. Gunning into the duke's carriage and packed off to Brussels.

Scovell did not rest the following day. He managed to find out that De Lancey had been taken to a little Belgian farmhouse in the village of Waterloo and brought a surgeon there to attend to him. He was also able to discover that De Lancey's wife, who was in Brussels, had been told that her husband was dead.

When Lady De Lancey was brought to the farmhouse, Scovell met her outside and warned her of her husband's condition, adding, “any agitation would be injurious. Now, we have not told him you had heard of his death; we thought it would afflict him; therefore do not appear to have heard it.” The couple spent a few hours together. Their married life had begun only a few months before, after De Lancey's return from the peninsula, but it was destined to end here, in a small house near the field of Waterloo, the following day. The colonel's young widow never forgot her debt to Scovell, who had made that last meeting possible.

Exhausted after the brief but intense violence of the campaign, Scovell took part in its final scenes. Napoleon was pursued to the gates of Paris and abdicated. The peace of Europe had been restored for many years. Lieutenant Colonel Scovell remembered many things about the day of Waterloo itself. How could he forget that, on the day of the battle itself, at about 9
P.M
. Wellington had declared it was time for supper and asked Scovell to join him at his quarters. “This is too bad, thus to lose our friends,” the field marshal said as they ate. “I trust it will be the last action any of us see.”

Scovell was joined in Paris by his wife, Mary, where they were billetted in a handsome house with the commander of the Austrian army. The onetime apprentice engraver and Lancashire landlord's daughter thus found themselves sitting down to dinner with Field Marshal Prince Karl Philip Schwarzenburg and partaking in discussions about the future of Europe. This was how seven years of almost continuous campaigning had changed the life of George Scovell. The army had transformed everything for George and Mary and there was every reason to assume his future within it was secure, or so he thought.

A
s Scovell walked along Wimpole Street in a state of some agitation on a bitterly cold January morning in 1819, Waterloo was already evolving into a thing of national legend. Things had not gone at all to plan for him, for his hopes of a secure future in the army had been dashed. Surprisingly quickly he had found himself driven to ask for help, and that was not something he was happy about doing. Scovell had resolved to write to the duke of Wellington.

Immediately following the Battle of Waterloo, the Staff Cavalry had become part of an Army of Occupation in northern France. Scovell's little corps was well suited to its duties, keeping the soldiery, deprived of long marches and battles, in order lest they vex the French to the point of revolt. He and Mary lived very well, for a moderate outlay and his mastery of the language had assured an entrée into society. That had
been helped by the one further sign of the duke's approbation he had received at the beginning of 1815, a knighthood. His work forming the Staff Cavalry and breaking codes had earned him that noble distinction. Scovell's gratitude could easily be appreciated.

Whatever debt his old master may have felt in the peninsula and immediately afterward, it all seemed to have been forgotten by December 1818. The Army of Occupation had been brought home and Horse Guards, immune to all reason, had decided to disband the Staff Cavalry. The duke did nothing to save Scovell's corps, even though a quiet word might possibly have done so.

In many corners of what had been the Peninsular army, officers felt the loss of Wellington's interest keenly. William Napier wrote that as the seven-year struggle for Iberia terminated, so did “all remembrances of the veterans' services.” William Grattan, one of the men who had led the 88th Foot at Salamanca in the 3rd Division's key attack, noted bitterly, “In his parting General Order to the Peninsular Army he told us he would never cease to feel the warmest interest for our welfare and honour. How that promise has been kept, everybody knows … that he neglected the interests and feelings of his Peninsular Army, as a body, is beyond all question.” Had Alexander Gordon survived Waterloo, he could have reminded his colleagues in Peninsular headquarters that his assessment of Wellington, written in 1811, that he “has no idea of gratitude, favour, or affection, and cares not for anyone however much he may owe to him or find him useful,” had been fully vindicated by events.

It might seem that Scovell had no more cause to resent what had happened to him than hundreds of other officers. He had, after all, been able to make the vital steps to major and lieutenant colonel in quick succession while the duke had done little to advance the careers of many other fighting men who had won his victories. But what must have pained him was that after 1815, the favored members of the staff were very much remembered. Almost all of Scovell's old friends had been looked after.

On Christmas Day 1818, Scovell was placed on half pay. For a lieutenant colonel this was only about £150 per annum and being
Sir
George did not alter the harsh financial realities that would now ensue. After years of solving problems few others in the staff could be bothered with, and indeed years of living well from it, he could see himself slipping back to the state of penury.

The duke, meanwhile, had joined the cabinet and was engrossed in party politics. He helped other loyal members of the staff, but only in as far as they were suitable to do his bidding without question on a new battlefield: the House of Commons.