The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes

by Mark Urban

  At last, Graham’s column began attacking the rear of the French position, trying to force a passage across the Zadorra. He was unable to achieve this, and so the idea that the battle might see the destruction of the entire French army vanished.

  Still, Joseph and Jourdan realized that their hour of judgement was at hand and that, with the Bayonne road threatened, the only way out of the plain was due east, on small mountain roads to Pampluna, towards a remaining French garrison. Any hope of uniting with the other half of the Army of Portugal had been forgotten. All that mattered now was saving what remained of their force.

  As the French general retreat began, one by one, divisional commanders realized there was no way to extricate their artillery. Dozens of guns were falling into British hands. With brigades of infantry turning about and trying to flee to the east, holes appeared in the French line through which British cavalry began to flow.

  Antoine Fée, a French conscript serving with the dragoons of the Army of the South, watched as this last line of cavalry tried to save the huge train of baggage that lay just to its rear:

  our dragoons found themselves in an area dissected by many ditches and fences marking the many market gardens, and could not maintain their formation; the horses were brought down, their riders, having got them up again turned around and I found myself, like all the others, in the middle of a great rout, pursued by English hussars, who had nothing in front of them and threw themselves on the baggage, sabring many who were unable to offer resistance. To add to the terror of this unarmed mob, howitzers and shells began going off in the air, showering those below with splinters.

  Hussars of Grant’s recently landed brigade broke into the French rear at twilight. Their arrival caused a general panic and the dissolution of the last bonds of discipline that were holding many French units together.

  Surrounded by screams, gunfire and the thundering of horses’ hooves, it became apparent at last to Joseph, Jourdan and those around them that their kingdom was forfeit and so might their lives be at any moment. One of the king’s courtiers recorded:

  [Joseph] was held up like the others and running the risk of being caught by English hussars. I saw a man hit by a musket shot falling at the feet of his horse. Luckily for the King, his regiment of Guard light horse remained within range of his group at all times and having pulled back slowly and in good order, arrived just at this moment.

  Under this escort, Joseph fled the field. Jourdan was separated from him, but also made his way with a couple of ADCs, swords drawn, towards the east. Beyond the city of Vitoria, the ground was naturally quite boggy and, as discipline collapsed, wagons and gun limbers toppled into the deep ditches beside the road, creating great jams. In many places, drivers or officers cut the traces of draught animals and leaped on to them so that they could gallop away. Each escape of this kind left another disabled engine of war obstructing the roads.

  Realizing that the coaches and heavy fourgons belonged to none other than the king and his ministers, the 18th Hussars began looting the convoy. The scene that presented itself to the soldiers of Wellington’s Army was to prove one of the most memorable of their years of campaigning:

  the road to Pampluna was choked up with many carriages filled up with imploring ladies, wagons loaded with specie, powder and ball, wounded soldiers, intermixed with droves of oxen, sheep, goats, mules, asses, filles de chambre, and officers … it seemed as if all the domestic animals in the world had been brought to this spot, with all the utensils of husbandry and all the finery of palaces and mixed up in one heterogeneous mass.

  Rifleman Costello, running through the town, saw an ornate coach leaving under escort of a French officer, ‘a comrade had followed and we immediately fired. The officer fell and the carriage stopped. We rushed up to the vehicle, it contained two ladies, evidently of high rank.’ An officer of the 10th Hussars appeared and took the women, one of whom was General Gazan’s wife, into custody. Costello went off in search of something else of value: ‘all who had the opportunity were employed in reaping some personal advantage from our victory, so I determined not to be backward’. Costello eventually clapped hands on a portmanteau stuffed with silver dubloons to the value of £1,000. Elsewhere, a private of the 87th made off with Marshal Jourdan’s baton and a trooper of the 14th Light Dragoons with the king’s solid silver chamberpot.

  Heavy wagons bearing the name of General Villatte were found to be crammed with silver plate, altar pieces and religious artefacts stripped from churches in southern Spain. Perhaps, on 25 May, it had been a desire to save this weighty treasure that had caused the general to pull his men back from Salamanca so slowly.

  On the strictly military side of the ledger, the débandade of Joseph’s army left 151 cannon and 415 ammunition wagons in British hands. Almost the entire artillery (field and siege) was lost. By one of the more sublime ironies of the day, a treasure convoy carrying five million francs that Joseph had been demanding from Paris for months also fell into the hands of Wellington’s soldiery. Only a small proportion of this money was ever recovered, the rest disappearing, through the agency of soldiers, into the mouths of orphans, the pockets of whores and the tills of drink-sellers. French troops scattered into the hills, leaving their pursuers to take only 2,000 or so prisoners. Lieutenant-Colonel FitzRoy Somerset wrote to his brother, ‘the only thing to be lamented is that the enemy ran away so fast that we could not in fact do much harm to them as far as taking prisoners and letting the cavalry loose upon them goes’. The many ditches, walls and hedges of the market gardens and smallholders’ plots surrounding the city had also made it very hard for the British cavalry to pursue, just as it had for the French dragoons to protect the fleeing host.

  Any member of the Staff who surveyed this almost biblical scene of pillage knew that it would send Wellington into transports of rage. They were not disappointed. He was naturally furious that his plan to trap the entire French army had failed, but he put much of the blame for this on thieving soldiers. ‘We started with the Army in the highest order, and up to the day of the battle nothing could get on better; but that event has, as usual, totally annihilated all order and discipline,’ the general complained to Bathurst. He added,

  we have in the Service the scum of the earth as common soldiers … the officers of the lower ranks will not perform the duty required of them to keep the soldiers in order. The non-commissioned officers are (as I have repeatedly stated) as bad as the men. It is really a disgrace to have anything to say to such men as some of our soldiers are.

  On the evening of 21 June, Wellington sent the Household Cavalry brigade into the streets of Vitoria to secure the place against any plundering by British soldiers. The Staff Cavalry, it is clear, were too small in number to prevent the stripping of Joseph’s caravans, and in any case, most officers saw nothing wrong in it. Even Judge Advocate Larpent opined, ‘the understanding that this was all fair seems pretty general’. French military possessions, after all, qualified as spoils of war. Every standard and convention of civilized behaviour told the British soldier that this was quite different from robbing the Spanish populace.

  Scovell picked his way through the baggage in search of something very particular. This thing was priceless to him but quite useless to the soldiers and followers who were all about him, cackling and laughing, trying on the finest Parisian dresses, emptying out drawers and scattering papers to the winds. He knew the best place to find what he was looking for. It would be in the king’s coach, or in some private secretary’s caleche. These few vehicles had been placed under the guard of some dependable cavalry, for Wellington had discovered that there were priceless paintings stripped from Madrid and left rolled up in the king’s coach.

  He found it in the king’s leather paper case. In that portefeuille was a large document, folded up, with the words ‘Sa Majesté Catholique’† written on its outside. Lieutenant-Colonel Scovell opened it to reveal Joseph’s personal copy of the Great Paris Cipher decoding table. Elsewhere, the lit
tle booklet for enciphering, with its alphabetical listing of words, letters and phrases, was also discovered. French power in Spain and the grand chiffre died together on 21 June.

  *

  Six days after the disastrous battle, Joseph sat down in the little town of Vera to dictate letters to one of his secretaries. Most of his army had fallen back through the Pyrenees to France. Bereft of artillery, they were incapable of resisting the British further. He and some other elements were moving east, at the foot of the mountains marking the frontier, towards the only remaining French army of any size in the Iberian Peninsula, that of Catalonia. He had confessed to so many embarrassments about the Battle of Vitoria, but one more remained. The minister of war in Paris needed to know:

  my papers were mislaid on the 21st; the portefeuille bearing the cipher was lost. It may be that it has fallen into the hands of the enemy. You will doubtless think it prudent, Monsieur le duc, to order the creation and dispatch of a new cipher.

  The king never suspected that the British had been reading his most sensitive letters for the previous year and could not appreciate that the code sent to strengthen his hold on power had actually proven one of the principal mechanisms for its destruction.

  *

  Early in July, British Headquarters received a captured dispatch from the minister of war to Marshal Suchet, commanding the Army of Catalonia. It was intended to explain the disastrous campaign that had led up to Vitoria.

  ‘The King judged it expedient to abandon his first line of defence’, wrote General Clarke, ‘and to move to 730. 140. 377. 1007. 406. 19. 484. 520. 684. 219. 241. 315. 73. 775.’

  Scovell only had to look at the message to know. Any attempt to apply the Great Paris Cipher would be fruitless. The code had changed, and remarkably quickly at that. He began an attack on the new cipher, scribbling possible meanings down in pencil. But Scovell and Wellington realized there was little point. There would be precious few captured messages in the future in any case. And the Army of Catalonia was falling back slowly towards the frontier. French communications were now being sent almost entirely through their own country, quite safe from the Spanish guerrillas and their raids that had been so vital to the business of obtaining ciphered dispatches in the first place. 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 him an amusing afternoon’s labour, 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. It would be quite impossible for the army to be regrouped for the defence of southern France under somebody who had failed so manifestly and had 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.

  NOTES

  1 ‘In April 1813, each cavalry regiment in the Peninsular Army received a request for volunteers’: by an order of Wellington, 13 April 1813, Dispatches. The authority to raise them was given by the Duke of York in a letter of January 1813.

  – ‘A plan that he had first committed to paper in 1808’: this emerges in his letter to Le Marchant of 23 November 1808, reference given above. Alas, I have not found the plan itself.

  2 ‘By the end of the month, parties of new recruits were arriving’: the quote comes from Larpent’s memoirs, as does the intriguing information about the reluctance of the Household Cavalry men to serve – an early example of the special pleading by these regiments that anyone who has served in a subsequent British Army will find all too familiar.

  – ‘The troopers and sergeants who answered the call to Frenada were given a smart new uniform’: it was sketched by the artist Charles Hamilton Smith and published in a book of British uniforms in 1813.

  3 ‘you need be under no apprehension on the score of my good nature’: this comes from Scovell’s letter of 4 July 1813 to James Willoughby Gordon, the Quartermaster-General at Horse Guards. The letter now resides in the British Library Manuscript collection, Add. 49506. It is clear from the letter that the charges against Scovell must have emerged into the open following the pillaging of the French baggage at Vitoria in 1813, an outbreak of general thieving so large that Scovell’s 200 men could hardly have stopped it.

  – ‘The most significant was dated 13 March and was from King Joseph to General Charles Reille’: another original dispatch preserved in the Scovell Papers, ditto Lucotte’s.

  4 ‘It was from Earl Bathurst and contained the report of the London government decipherers’: this is the table referred to in previous chapters, WP 9/4/1/5. Earl Bathurst’s covering letter of 5 April 1813 is also in the Wellington Papers.

  – ‘The general wrote back to London sarcastically’: his letter on 24 May 1813. I am convinced that it was sarcasm since the knowledge of the Great Paris Cipher was sufficiently good by early 1813 for the general freely to be quoting chunks of ciphered French dispatches to Spanish politicians (see above) and the secretary of war. Scovell’s own papers state the cipher was to all intents and purposes completely broken by the end of 1812.

  5 ‘He had been banished from Salamanca by the French early in 1813, seeking refuge in Ciudad Rodrigo’: Curtis’s fate emerges in a letter he wrote to Wellington, contained in his papers at Southampton University.

  – ‘Gomm emulated the tactics of previous exploring officers’: details of his mission emerge from Sir William Gomm, His Letters and Journals from 1799 to Waterloo, London, 1881.

  6 ‘All aspects of supply had been attended to’: details gleaned from various journals by our regular informants, Lieutenant Cook, Rifleman Costello, Captain Tomkinson.

  – ‘Just north of Salamanca, on 25 May, the British caught up with General Villatte’s rearguard’: Scovell describes the action and his thoughts in his journal WO37/7b.

  7 ‘Marshal Jourdan had seen to it that silver had been broadcast around the border’: see his Memoires.

  8 ‘The countryside was largely undisturbed by the war’: the first quote comes from Cook, the one about the band from G. Simmons, A British Rifleman, London, 1899.

  9 ‘On the 14th, Scovell found himself invited to join a picnic lunch in a nearby field’: this bucolic vignette was sketched for us by Larpent in his journal.

  10 ‘Jourdan, it has to be said, did not expect a fight at Vitoria at all’: the quote is from his Memoires again.

  11 ‘The 71st was forced back briefly’: details from the journal A Soldier of the Seventy First. Most of those lost Highlanders had actually been captured and were free the following day.

  12 ‘One of the king’s courtiers recorded’: Miot de Melito in his memoirs.

  – ‘the road to Pampluna was choked up with many carriages filled up with imploring ladies’: this rather literary description came from Lieutenant Cook. This panorama of destruction and pillage reminds me of the Mutla ridge, where I saw the remnants of Iraq’s army following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.

  13 ‘FitzRoy Somerset wrote to his brother, “the only thing”’: letter to the Duke of Beaufort of 26 June 1813, BP FmM 4/1/9.

  – ‘The many ditches, walls and hedges of the market gardens and smallholders’ plots surrounding the city had also made it very hard for the British cavalry to pursue …’: this was the view of FitzRoy’s brother Lord Edward, the cavalry commander, in his letter home of June 1813, also in the Beaufort Papers.

  14 ‘In that portefeuille was a large document, folded up, with the words “Sa Majesté Catholique” written on its outside’: Joseph’s table resides in the Wellington Papers, WP 9/4/1/6.

  15 ‘The minister of war in Paris needed to know’: Joseph’s letter of 27 June to Clarke is in Du Casse.

  – ‘The king never suspected that the British had been reading his most sen
sitive letters for the previous year’: this seems obvious, given his letter to Clarke. A French researcher, Cyril Canet, while helping me, uncovered a letter of the Army of Catalonia (File 295, item 17 at the French Army archives at Vincennes) suggesting that they were aware that their ciphers had been compromised in 1813. This letter to Marshal Suchet is dated 15 February. We must assume that the author was referring to the simple chiffres used only in that army area. If not, there is a possibility that Headquarters never reacted properly to this alarming news.

  – ‘a captured dispatch from the minister of war to Marshal Suchet, commanding the Army of Catalonia’: Scovell Papers, WO37/3

  * This must be distinguished from the Royal Staff Corps – an organization of field engineers and craftsmen (to which Sturgeon belonged) that had existed throughout the Peninsular campaign – and the Provost Marshal, the small force previously charged with organizing the Army’s law and order.

  † His Catholic Majesty, i.e. the King of Spain.

  ‘1 DON’T BELIEVE WE WERE EVER DECEIVED IN THESE LETTERS AND COLONEL SCHOVEL … IS THE PERSON WHO MADE THEM OUT’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Waterloo and Scovell’s Later Life

  It was early afternoon on 18 June 1815 as the small group of Staff galloped across the top of the Mont St Jean ridge and down towards the vantage-point overlooking the French that they had already used several times that day. The sky was thick with the smoke of several hours’ hard pounding. Ahead of them, straight up the line of the Charleroi road, was the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte. A heavy bombardment of the British line atop this feature was beginning, with a great mass of French artillery lined up beyond the buildings and pointing in their direction.