The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes Page 2

  Outside the port itself, other regiments set themselves to the same unpleasant task. Some of the hussars and dragoons wept as they drew their weapons. Hundreds of horses were shot on a beach, their lifeless bodies soon being dragged back and forth by the waves, blood bubbling in the surf. On the cliffs just south-west of Corunna, men of the artillery train, having dispatched their draught animals, pushed their wagons and caissons over the precipice, watching them smash to pieces on the rocks below.

  Even in the cool of mid-January, the consequences of all this destruction were soon even more distressing. Dozens of animals had already dropped dead from exhaustion. This deliberate slaughter of the others combined to create an overwhelming assault on the senses. A commissary, one of the civilian supply officers accompanying the army, wrote in his journal:

  Their putrefying bodies, swollen by the rain and sun and bursting in places, are lying under the colonnades in front of the public buildings in the market place, on the quays of the harbour, and in the streets; and while they offend the eye, they fill the air with a pestilential stench of decomposition, that makes one ill. Over 400 of these wretched animals lie about here, and the discharge of pistols, which are adding to their numbers, continues incessantly.

  The commissary’s estimate only covered the town centre; something approaching 3,000 horses were killed in and around Corunna. For the young cavalry troopers, this final humiliation was particularly hard to bear. The Hussar Brigade was one of the few elements of the Army that had emerged from the previous weeks with its reputation enhanced. Moore’s abortive foray into northern Spain had begun in November of 1808, with the aim of slowing down Napoleon’s conquest of Iberia. By the end of December, Moore had realized that his force was at great risk from superior French forces and had turned his men around. Their march across the mountains of north-west Spain in blizzards and howling winds had been a shocking affair, hundreds having fallen behind or died of exposure in the cold. Many of the footsloggers bitterly resented the fact that these privations were being suffered without the satisfaction of giving battle. Discipline had begun to collapse, with much looting by the soldiery. The hussars, however, had maintained good order. Their mission as a screening force had meant they were involved in several actions guarding the rear of Moore’s force. The 7th Hussars had broken Napoleon’s picked men, the Chasseurs à Cheval* of the Imperial Guard, at Benavente and captured their general. The 10th and 15th had broken two French regiments at Sahagun. Now, with the loss of most of their precious horses, the regiments would need much hard training to bring them back to peak efficiency.

  Scovell left all this behind him as he reached the village up in the hills overlooking the port. By this time, the sun was sinking over the Atlantic and the scenes playing themselves out in Corunna were unknown to the Staff. Captain George Scovell was a Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General. Not the Deputy, nor one of the several Assistants, but a Deputy Assistant. If the title itself seemed to denote ‘insignificance’, so did his rank. Scovell was nearing thirty-five years old and he was running very lamely in the promotion stakes. Certainly he did not look like any young thoroughbred. The hair above his round, benign, face had already started receding from his brow. He had over-compensated somewhat by growing his sideburns thick and wide, covering most of his cheeks with a ginger-brown thatch. It was voguish to sport sideburns, but younger, more handsome types did not cultivate quite such formidable whiskers. In Scovell they seemed to reinforce the impression of a kindly countenance, and of a man who had to achieve some sort of promotion very soon, before he aged past the point of being a threat in the race for preferment. He wore a red coat with the yellow distinctions of the 57th Foot marking its collar and cuffs, one of the most common combinations in the Army. Scovell’s eyes were a deep blue, the kind of colour the portraitist struggles to capture, and reinforced the appearance of an acute intelligence. Not that favourable impressions had transformed his expectations; on the contrary, his first campaign in thirteen years of soldiering simply seemed to mark a particularly bitter chapter in a long saga of disappointments.

  His fellow DAQMGs, also captains, like Warre, were ten years younger. Hardinge, his friend and one of Moore’s aides-de-camp,† was a dozen years Scovell’s junior. These sharp-set young bloods were running the real race. William Warre, a son of the port-shippers who were renowned even in those days, was strikingly handsome. One portrait depicts him in the dashing dark-blue uniform of the light dragoons with seductive large eyes, a kiss curl across his forehead and the fur-trimmed hussar’s jacket or pelisse thrown over his left shoulder. Another of the young DAQMGs had his own secret weapon in the advancement game: his maiden aunt and her constant companion Goully, one of the ladies-in-waiting at Windsor. These two formidable spinsters made sure the ambitious officer’s name was not forgotten by the Duke of York and even the king himself. As for Hardinge, he was in the same lowly regiment as Scovell, the son of a Shropshire clergyman. But Hardinge had two things on his side: at twenty-two, he benefited from twelve years that Scovell could never regain, and this was an army where the high flyers had to be noticed by twenty-five or twenty-six. Hardinge had one other quality too, that uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time, something which creates a mystique among soldiers.

  As for Scovell, he had tried everything from ceaseless labour to the customary sycophancy towards those in authority, to the huge expenditure of buying a captaincy in a fashionable cavalry regiment; but none of it had worked. In fact, all it had done was bring him to the brink of financial ruin, see him suffer one check or slight after another, ending up in the 57th. Although he had become dejected, he still cherished the dream of commanding a cavalry regiment, a dream most of his colleagues would have regarded as utterly unrealistic.

  Captain Scovell duly reported the arrival of Admiral Hood’s transports to his superior, Colonel George Murray, the Quartermaster-General. Some loading of cannon and supplies on to the handful of merchantmen which were sitting in the bay when the Army arrived had already begun. Hood’s arrival was the signal to begin a general evacuation of all troops. Murray worked into the night, drawing up some further instructions for the embarkation. His job was to translate General Moore’s orders into reality: to choose the routes of march, find the fodder, chart unknown countryside, locate the billets and, most importantly for what was to happen to Scovell in later years, to gather information. The QMG’s labour was vast and unending, for, like some burden of Sisyphus, it began all over again each time the Army marched into some new place.

  *

  Just a few months earlier, in the summer of 1808, the British Army had set out with bold hopes and noisy public fanfare to aid their Spanish allies in the Iberian Peninsula. Scovell had joined this expedition a few weeks after it landed in Portugal.

  The defeat and capture of a French corps at Bailen in July 1808 had caused a sensation throughout Europe. General Dupont had marched 18,000 men into Spanish captivity, a humiliation which had never been inflicted on France by its more powerful enemies, Austria and Russia, in a dozen years of campaigning. All talk in England was of Spain’s heroic struggle against Napoleon and events in Spain captured the imagination of British society so completely that, for a few months, the usually bitter party game between the Whigs and Tories had given way to consensus. The former were smitten by the romance of Spain’s popular rising against the French and the tales of what ordinary folk, animated by patriotism, could achieve. The Tories regarded Napoleon’s reverses as the long-awaited evidence that these godless Jacobin regicides would receive their just deserts.

  When, the month after the Battle of Bailen, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley had defeated a French force at Vimiero in Portugal, this was all the prompting the government needed to send a full-scale expedition to the Iberian Peninsula, under Castlereagh’s vague directive to ‘cooperate with the Spanish armies in the expulsion of the French from that Kingdom’. Late in 1808, however, following the twin humiliations of the French at Bai
len and Vimiero, Napoleon had gone into Iberia to sort out the mess himself, and the Spanish armies there had started collapsing as soon as he struck them. It rapidly became clear that Britain’s force of 35,000 was not going to win the war on its own. Retreat was Moore’s only option.

  While Colonel Murray and the officers struggling to draw up evacuation plans had come under heavy fire for a series of organizational blunders in the course of the campaign, Scovell’s responsibilities had grown, for he had proved himself to Murray as a very capable officer. The QMG was doubtless impressed by Scovell’s thirst for self-improvement and his desire to learn as many professional lessons as he could from his first campaign. The captain’s habit of sitting down to write up his journal, often after long hours in the saddle in driving rain or snow, was one of his most admirable traits. Whereas other officers might down a few glasses of wine and then lose themselves in the oblivion of sleep, Scovell would find a table and scratch away with a quill, digesting the lessons of the campaign before taking his rest. This diligence led Murray to give Scovell responsibility for much of the Army’s communications.

  For an army of 35,000 to follow the plans drawn up by Moore and his QMG, a constant stream of messages was needed. In practice, this meant orders and reports being scrawled on small bits of paper by a general, often on horseback, and carried away quickly by a courier. If this missive arrived late, in the wrong place, or not at all, the consequences could be catastrophic. Sometimes these dispatches were entrusted to British dragoons. Otherwise, they were carried by a small, ad hoc unit under Scovell’s personal command, the Army’s Guides. The Guides were an odd assortment, a group of a few dozen men assembled on the cheap, all foreigners hired locally for their knowledge of the countryside and their ability to speak the language. When Scovell was placed in charge of his little band of Italian, Swiss, Portuguese and Spanish deserters and ne’er do wells, however, none of them even knew how to ride a horse. Scovell had been forced to teach them everything on the march. While he resented being worked to the point of exhaustion on a task that would win him few plaudits in the Army, Scovell did recognize that it would offer him a good opportunity to display his extraordinary abilities as a linguist, another skill that had already been noticed by Colonel Murray. Scovell’s French was fluent, he was picking up Spanish as he went, and he had some grasp of Italian. Using these abilities, he was at least able to teach his men, whereas most other English officers would have floundered.

  Perfecting the Army’s system of communications was just the type of thankless task eschewed by those members of the Staff most obsessed with seeking glory and promotion. Scovell was no less intoxicated by heroic dreams – he clung to the hope that his ultimate destiny lay in leading a regiment of British cavalry, sabres drawn, to some glorious charge – but he was sensible enough of his station in Headquarters to know that he could only reach his goal by applying himself diligently to the tasks Murray gave him. Already, Scovell had become fascinated with the workings of secret messages, codes and signals. The Navy were the experts in this field, and, on his passage down to Portugal months earlier, Scovell had copied out dozens of signals into his notebook, filling in the sketched flags with brightly coloured inks. It was his attention to the Navy’s signalling methods that had resulted in Murray delegating him to superintend the vital task that lay in the hours ahead: embarkation at Corunna.

  Just as the campaign marked the beginning of Scovell’s involvement with trying to organize the Army’s communications, so it had shown the extraordinary intelligence that could be obtained by intercepting enemy dispatches. One month before, an order from Napoleon’s headquarters to one of his marshals, General Soult, had been captured by Spanish guerrillas and sold to the British. From it, Moore had learned that Soult was advancing into north-west Spain with a detached corps small enough for the British to take on successfully. This precious knowledge saved Moore from blundering into the main French army and triggered his order at the end of December, turning his small force around so that it could find a safe place of embarkation.

  But now, all hope of expelling Napoleon from the Iberian Peninsula seemed extinguished and the British troops were ready to leave the Continent, hopeless and dejected. The army scattered about Corunna had been the best Britain could field, and General Sir John Moore was widely acknowledged as the most professional commander in the army. His attention to detail, zeal for the service and active intellect were generally respected. If these men had failed so miserably, what hope was left?

  NOTES

  1 ‘Scovell brought the glass to his eye and searched the horizon’: Scovell left us a journal as part of WO37 at the PRO that describes this scene.

  – ‘British officers had begun speculating what the next few years might hold for them as prisoners of war’: this fear was expressed by William Warre of the Staff. His journal and letters are published as Letters from the Peninsula 1808–12, published in 1909 and reprinted by Spellmount in 1988.

  2 ‘Moore’s soldiers had become euphoric at the sight of the sea’: this is mentioned by several diarists of the Corunna campaign.

  3 ‘One captain of the 10th Hussars kept a record’: Captain Alexander Gordon of the 15th Light Dragoons (Hussars) published as Cavalry Officer in the Corunna Campaign, London, 1913.

  – ‘A commissary, one of the civilian supply officers accompanying the army, wrote in his journal’: this was A. L. F. Schaumann, in On the Road with Wellington: The Diary of a War Commissary, originally published in 1924 and reprinted by Greenhill Books in 1999.

  4 ‘Another of the young DAQMGs had his own secret weapon in the advancement game’: this was William Maynard Gomm. Details come from his Letters and Journals from 1799 to Waterloo, London, 1881.

  * Light horse, one of the first cavalry regiments established in the Imperial Guard.

  † ‘Field assistants’, the junior officers used by a general to communicate orders and to observe operations on his behalf.

  1. 249. 1076. 718. 320. 1082. 365. 622. 699. 655. 699. 439. 669. 655. 1085. 398. 326. 13. 309. I. 1085. 655. 249. 481. 320. 980. 985. 186. 320. 843. 688. 2. 718. 249. 1297. 536. 174. 1085. 1024 … 713. 320. 980. 854. 655. 326. 536. 700. 699. 171. 1015. 1003. 13. 320. 980. 1015. 131. 320.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Battle of Corunna

  At dawn on 15 January, the feeble first light revealed great activity in Corunna Bay. The dismounted cavalry had been embarking throughout the night. Longboats criss-crossed the harbour, carrying the troopers to their cramped berths. They clambered on board with their valises and portmanteaus and into the dirty spaces offered by vessels usually carrying coal or bales of wool. Some of the horses had been saved; generally the officers’. This made some sense from the Exchequer’s point of view, since officers took their own horses on campaign and were entitled to compensation if the beasts were killed on service. A common trooper’s mount might cost £20 or £30 to replace, but the price of compensating some lordly cornet for the loss of his Irish thoroughbred might be far more. One final moment of anguish awaited one cavalry subaltern who had not had the heart to kill his charger. ‘One of these poor brutes followed the boat which bore its master – an officer of the 18th Hussars – to the transport,’ noted the commissary in his journal, the animal’s head could be seen straining to stay above the swell, nostrils flared as its legs galloped away underwater; it ‘swam like a dog from the shore to the ship; but it could not be taken on board. All who witnessed this incident had tears in their eyes.’

  Moore’s artillery was already largely afloat. Some guns had been hoisted on board the few vessels at anchor in the harbour even before Hood’s squadron arrived. By the 15th, there were only nine field pieces ashore, and they garnished the infantry’s positions on the hills behind the port. Some were apprehensive about this, since they suspected Marshal Soult would bring far more guns to bear, and indeed, as dawn broke the first of forty cannon were already being manhandled into range of British positions.

  On the heights of Pa
lavea, two of the French field pieces had been dragged up by their gunners and by noon they had opened fire. This ominous, unmistakable sound echoed across the bay, shattering the illusions of anybody who might have thought Marshal Soult was going to give up and allow his quarry to escape. It took no time for the French artillerists to find their range, and many of Moore’s troops stood in positions that offered no cover.

  Scovell was hard at work down on the quayside. He had his own private worry about the embarkation; that he could honourably discharge his responsibility to his Guides. Since they were an exotic mix of half a dozen nationalities (none of them English), he was afraid that they would be left behind if the battle was lost and it turned into a pell-mell scramble for the boats. And those among them who had deserted from the French army could expect only one thing if Soult captured them. At this moment, on the afternoon of the 15th, there was nothing he could do for them. They were still up with their divisions and he had others to embark.

  Moore’s Deputy Assistant QMG was unhappy for other reasons, as he stood watching the bustle in the port. He believed the order to get so many guns on board was unwise in the extreme. Around fifty pieces had been embarked, transforming a British superiority in that arm into a decided weakness. ‘Knowing that we should be obliged to fight an action to ensure our safety,’ he asked rhetorically in his journal, ‘why deprive yourself of so powerful an arm?’ The loss of artillery was a peculiarly political matter, though, something evidently beyond the ken of a frustrated and passed-over captain. Generals were court-martialled for the loss of guns. Napoleon, artillery officer by trade, had made a curious fetish of listing the pieces captured during his many victories in his news sheet, the Moniteur. The loss of guns was political, a matter of propaganda.