The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  The AQMG of the 5th Division returned unscathed and thrilled with the success of his mission, writing to his sister that ‘far from finding my employment irksome, I enjoyed it; and it became so much the more interesting from the probability of my being shortly called upon to lead my flock in the same direction’. Luckily for Wellington the explorations of Gomm and others were not detected. Similarly, a train of wagons bearing pontoons intended to bridge the Esla was brought up to northern Portugal without the French finding out.

  By early May, the elements of a grand scheme to advance on the French by a great and unexpected manoeuvre were nearing completion. Furthermore, Wellington’s quest to perfect his Army had resulted in improvements in all areas. A firmer discipline had been imposed, resulting in dozens of courts martial. Judge Advocate Larpent pronounced with grim satisfaction, ‘we have flogged and hung people into better order here’. Scovell’s new Staff Cavalry Corps was ready to take to the field too.

  All aspects of supply had been attended to. After years in the field, the troops had finally been issued with tents. Their old, weighty, iron camp-kettles had been traded in for lightweight tin ones. Great magazines of supplies had been accumulated and were being brought up-country by the mule trains.

  Many regiments had been issued with new uniforms. The old ones had literally become washed-out rags, held together by locally procured cloth. For the heavy cavalry, the new outfits were of quite a different style. The old bicorne which drooped on the head like a soggy croissant had been replaced with a handsome Romanesque brass helmet much like those worn by French dragoons.

  The Army was more numerous than ever before. Drafts and reinforcements had taken the total of the Anglo-Portuguese main Army to more than 81,000 men. Several divisions of Spanish troops were now placed under Wellington’s direct command. His host was about to enter battle with a much stronger cavalry arm, too, a brigade of hussars and the heavies of the Household Cavalry having joined the army.

  Bringing this great force to bear would require a level of organization not previously seen. Thomas Graham and Rowland Hill would each lead a column of several divisions and at that level troops would be officered by the likes of the dependable Picton, Pakenham and Lowry Cole. Perhaps Wellington’s greatest comfort was that he would have Major-General George Murray at his right hand once more as Quartermaster-General. And it was to Murray that he looked to draft the complex orders directing these assembled divisions through the rough border country and into the place where they would discomfit King Joseph’s calculations.

  *

  At last Wellington launched his Army. The British advanced through Salamanca and that seemed to position them to march in a great diagonal across north-east Spain towards Valladolid and Burgos towards the border. That was what Marshal Jourdan had planned on, and as Wellington knew from intercepted letters, it was the axis around which the French divisions could easily concentrate.

  Just north of Salamanca, on 25 May, the British caught up with General Villatte’s rearguard. Four guns of the Royal Horse Artillery opened fire on the French infantry regiment marching across open ground. The crack and whoosh of the British six-pounders did nothing to disconcert the French march and Scovell marvelled at their steadiness. For a footslogger, it was an unpleasant business to be moving along with two brigades of enemy cavalry trotting behind and beside them. Any mistake in the alignment of companies or the execution of a turn might create the opening the enemy horse were waiting for. If that happened, it would all be over in minutes and those messieurs en rouge would be carving them up with their sabres, as they had those wretched battalions at Arapiles the previous July.

  As Scovell watched the French marching along, he started to meditate how the column could be attacked more effectively by the British cavalry. Every time the horse artillery stopped firing to allow an attempt at a charge, the French battalions slowed up a little, closed ranks and prepared to receive what they knew was coming. He watched a division of the Royals gallop forward. It was the same result again: faced with a steady phalanx of men presenting their muskets, the heavies had pulled up fifty yards away and turned about. What they ought to do, he thought, is deploy a small body of cavalry hovering about the French flank, who could charge in whenever they saw an irregularity of formation. Only when this charge was about to strike home should the horse artillery cease firing.

  This game of cat-and-mouse continued across the plain for a couple of hours before the British broke off. It had cost the French around 100 dead and 150 prisoners. Scovell admired them for escaping without greater losses. He felt for the conscripts, each struggling to keep up and turn on the right command, lest any mistake produce their ruin. And these feelings produced anger that their general should have put his men through this trial: ‘General Villatte ought to be punished for keeping his Infantry in Salamanca so long.’ He scribbled down these reflections on how the engagement might have been better managed in his journal as soon as he found a moment. That record had, by the summer of 1813, expanded into its third volume.

  At the head of a body of British horse, Scovell could not stop himself thinking like a cavalry commander. Little matter that he had left the 4th Dragoons seven years before. Now at least he had the Staff Cavalry formed up behind him and, unlike the Mounted Guides who were cast about the country in their penny packets, these men had been prepared to act as a single unit if the need arose on the battlefield.

  Wellington remained with the force advancing north of Salamanca for a couple more days. His presence was intended to deceive French spies: while this column was marching along precisely the line the enemy expected, General Thomas Graham’s force of 40,000 was moving through hill country well to the north-west, making its way towards the Esla valley. Lieutenant-Colonel Gomm was riding at the head of the 5th Division, guiding them through. In addition Graham’s column contained five infantry divisions and two brigades of cavalry. While Wellington made sure the French were pinned to the Duero river line, Graham’s force was making that barrier irrelevant.

  At French Headquarters, there was the customary lack of good information. Marshal Jourdan had seen to it that silver had been broadcast around the border region for months in the hope of attracting some good spies, but he noted,

  despite the care taken by the Chief of Staff [himself] to the secret service, and despite the money put into this service, it always failed to obtain precise intelligence on the Anglo-Portuguese army. The reports received were so contradictory that instead of clarifying matters they increased uncertainty.

  Worst of all for the marshal, a patrol of dragoons in the Esla country failed to spot Graham’s column at first, creating a false sense of security for some days.

  On 28 May, with the advance continuing rapidly, Scovell received a most welcome order. He was to take the Staff Cavalry Corps and report to the Light Division. There he was to act as the light cavalry for that famous body. Lieutenant-Colonel Scovell’s dream of leading mounted troops in the advance guard was suddenly real.

  For the next few days, the Staff Cavalry acted as the reconnaissance screen of the Light Division. Its men moved forward in small numbers by day, scanning the country for any sign of the enemy, and by night manned the outposts needed to provide warning of any surprise attack. Scovell’s delight at this small but significant role was exceeded by the pleasure of his Commander in Chief as it became clear that the French had abandoned their defensive line, with a headlong retreat from the Douro line commencing on 2 June.

  Everything at French Headquarters was confusion and recrimination. Their attempts to concentrate forces were taking too long. Breathless messengers arrived with reports of each new sighting by reconnaissance parties of Graham’s column. There was a council of war in which Jourdan suggested advance rather than retreat. That notion was dismissed by King Joseph, who recited his brother’s orders like a catechism: communications with Bayonne must be maintained at all costs; no conquered provinces should be given up; it would be dishonourable to conced
e to Wellington without offering to give battle. But where could His Catholic Majesty rally his scattered host? A decision was made to assemble at Burgos. Joseph still had not concentrated the divisions of the Army of Portugal that had been sent to fight guerrillas in the northern sierras. Without them, he had half as many men as Wellington and could not offer battle without inviting nemesis for himself and what remained of French rule in Spain.

  By 10 June, it was becoming clear to the king that his hopes of gathering all his forces together around Burgos had been unrealistic. Wellington simply kept pushing his Army forward around the French right. Again, the British had turned the enemy position and the choice was stark: retreat once more or be cut off from France. Joseph issued orders for a concentration behind the River Ebro near the Basque city of Vitoria.

  Leaving Burgos, the French detonated mines around the ramparts, a procedure that went disastrously wrong, sending masonry crashing on to the heads of hundreds of French troops who were marching through the town. British troops heard the distant boom of the mines going off. Veterans of the siege of Burgos were heartily glad, Captain Tomkinson commenting, ‘we were all delighted to hear of its fate. What a thing it would have been if it had never been attempted! The army would probably have wintered near Salamanca and Cocks would now have been with us, half mad with delight at our rapid and successful advance.’

  As Wellington’s troops marched into the hill country north-west of that city, there was an intoxicating good humour about the Army. The days were warm, but not oppressively so, as they had been during the manoeuvres around Salamanca the previous summer. The countryside was largely undisturbed by the war, ‘this enchanting valley is studded with picturesque hamlets, orchards of cherry trees, and fruitful gardens, producing every description of vegetation,’ one diarist recorded. Crossing one bridge, the Light Division saw its bands lined up and heard them playing ‘The Downfall of Paris’. ‘We were much amused at their wit on this occasion,’ remarked one officer, ‘and we had it followed by a national tune or two to remind us of Old England.’

  The daily marches were a prodigious feat. Back in 1809, on the journey down from Oporto to Abrantes, even a stage of three leagues each day had left dozens of men straggling behind and committing every sort of outrage. In June 1813, the soldiers were frequently covering five leagues in a day and leaving few in their wake. Scovell, whose duties included collecting stragglers, noted, ‘our Men are marching much better than I ever saw them’. The provision of tents had made a big difference, for fewer soldiers were sick. Each divisional commander had also become adept at organizing his columns of march and provost so as to make it harder for the malingerer to fall out of the ranks.

  On the 14th, Scovell found himself invited to join a picnic lunch in a nearby field. His hosts were the Prince of Orange, General Alava (one of Wellington’s Spanish Staff), Judge Advocate Larpent and Lord Fitzclarence, one of the young ADCs. Together they hacked pieces from a cold ham, tasted the rough country bread and sipped champagne brought by the prince’s servants. It must all have been rather intoxicating to someone who had once believed his life held no more in store than long hours at the engraver’s bench.

  *

  The plain of Vitoria is surrounded on all sides by highlands, with access to low pasture afforded by a few passes. The city’s position had made it a crossroads for centuries and this in turn made it King Joseph’s choice as the place to rally his footsore army. They had been marching hard for three weeks and needed to rest. Their leaders also required time, to adjust to the fact that Wellington had just evicted them from a great slice of Spain (including its most fertile lands and great cities like Madrid and Valladolid) by manoeuvre alone.

  It was a good place to rendezvous with the Army of Portugal’s divisions, straddling the main line of communications to Bayonne. With the Salinas pass on the Bayonne road to their rear, the French armies occupying the plain only had to plug the four other main routes into the plain to defend themselves effectively. Better still, any attackers wishing to use three of those passes – to the east and north of the Vitoria lowland – would have to divide their forces, committing them to long roundabout journeys through steep-sided valleys, thus opening themselves to defeat in detail as each of these columns arrived at its destination. This left just one obvious route into the city, the Puebla gorge where the main chaussée from Burgos emerged at the south-east corner of the plain. Jourdan and Joseph hoped that topography would equalize the balance of forces and allow them to fight to advantage.

  Jourdan, it has to be said, did not expect a fight at Vitoria at all. The marshal wrote,

  Lord Wellington had shown himself, from the opening of the campaign, more disposed to force the retreat of his adversaries, by manoeuvring on the right, than to confront them head on to give him battle, we believed that continuing with this method, he would head for Bilbao … to force us to fall back in haste on Mondragon so as not to lose our communications with France.

  Prudence, however, dictated that Jourdan deploy the king’s armies in earnest. General Gazan, Soult’s successor in command of the Army of the South, was placed with 26,000 men and fifty-four cannon to block the exit of the Puebla gorge. Gazan’s left was anchored on a steep-sided ridge, the Heights of Puebla, and his right on the River Zadorra. That stream curved around his line and stretched eastwards, back across the plain. And whereas the position was less than three miles across Gazan’s front, the possibility that Wellington might use the three passes entering the plain from the north meant that the French deployment had to be about seven miles deep, since any irruption from those northern gateways to the plain would leave Gazan with the enemy behind him. It was this curious characteristic of the French position, that it was deeper than it was wide at the front, that led one British officer to observe caustically that the French defence had two major defects, the first of which was that it was facing in the wrong direction.

  Wellington’s attack on the Vitoria position began on the morning of 21 June. An allied column under Lieutenant-General Hill was to make its way up the backside of the Heights of Puebla and on to the great ridge that commanded Gazan’s left. Some Spanish troops led the way up the heights and were followed by Hill’s 2nd Division. They were aided in this endeavour by the fact that the southern side of the ridge is a much easier climb than the scarp on Gazan’s flank. As he saw the puffs of musket shots from his look-outs and heard the crackling of a fusillade, he was forced to send up battalions, almost on all-fours (the gradient is one in one), to reinforce them. Arriving at the top winded, these Frenchmen were impaled on the bayonets of the 71st and 92nd Highlanders and 50th Foot.

  Joseph and Jourdan, making their way to a knoll behind Gazan’s position, regarded the fighting along the ridge-line with foreboding. Their hopes of employing natural strength in their defence were crumbling. They were acutely aware that they could not afford to lose, for just behind Vitoria were great columns of Spanish afrancesado refugees, wagons containing all the state papers removed from Madrid, the army’s artillery park and numerous fourgons belonging to the army command. They ordered more troops on to the ridge to try to stop the British attack.

  Watching this at about 10.30 a.m. from the slope above a village called Villodas on the left bank of the Zadorra, Wellington was evidently pleased. For him, Hill’s attack was no more than a diversion designed to achieve precisely these results. Any reserve that the French committed south towards the ridge was one less brigade to be used against the two large allied columns he had sent marching towards the passes at the north of the plain. Wellington’s plan, if it succeeded, would be one of annihilation: General Graham had been sent around to the furthest east of those passes and, if he broke in there, would be able to cut off most of the French army from its line of withdrawal.

  Wellington allowed the fighting atop the ridge to go on for three hours so as to be sure that the other columns would be able to act in concert. This was absolutely necessary for his overall plan to work, but meant the
troops on the Puebla Heights paid a very heavy price. The French threw more and more men into the attack there. The 71st was forced back briefly, losing its commanding officer and leaving ‘not 300 of us on the heights able to do duty, out of above 1,000 who drew rations that morning’. That Scottish narrator fired 108 rounds from his musket, resulting in him being unable ‘to touch my head with my right hand; my shoulder was black as coal’.

  Eventually, at around 12.30, Wellington ordered the 4th and Light Divisions to move forward towards Gazan’s front. His whole campaign had begun on 21 May with a movement to pin the French on the Duero River. Now its climax had been reached, the same tactic was to be used on the field of Vitoria, for if Gazan was to be cut off from his retreat, he would have to be kept where he was.

  The Light Division soon stormed two bridges over the Zadorra, on the right of the French line. They ran up a steep slope behind and were soon under attack from the French. Some of the Light Division men could see Joseph and his Staff on their knoll, little more than one mile away. As these attacks intensified, the men of the Light Division were heartened to see the head of the 3rd Division appearing across the plain to their left. The first of the flanking columns was coming into action and, after a brief cannonade, Picton’s Fighting Division stormed the next bridge down the Zadorra.

  With this event, Joseph’s nerve seems to have faltered, for at about 2 p.m. he could see that both of Gazan’s flanks were in danger and he would have to order a general withdrawal of his first line. The 3rd Division promptly deployed into line and began assaulting the village of Ariñez, the second position of the French army, with cheers and great rolling volleys of musketry.

  For the French, it had become vitally important to fall back quickly, under the covering fire of their artillery. At the same time, however, they needed to extricate their guns and infantry. Around 4 p.m. the battle was at its peak, with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and Light Divisions, as well as a couple of brigades of cavalry, forcing the French eastwards. They responded with barrages of cannonfire, the whole floor of the valley being cloaked in dense smoke from the battle.