The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes Page 6
A cavalry attack on the rear of a broken force could yield devastating results, but the ground to the north and east of the city was just as unfavourable as Grijo had been the day before, to the south. Major-General Stewart once again took personal command of a squadron of light dragoons and ordered a charge. Once again, it was carried out with some losses and little positive effect.
Stewart’s charge did not, however, reverse the positive results of the day’s action. For trifling casualties (125 killed, wounded and missing), Wellesley’s force had killed about 300 French, captured about 1,700 prisoners, many of whom had been abandoned in hospitals during the French retreat, and six cannon. The British army had seen its new commander in action and could not fail to be impressed. Wellesley took over Soult’s fine headquarters, to discover that the Portuguese servants had prepared a dinner, expecting their French guests to return that evening. Instead, the victor savoured his culinary spoils.
Breathless at this success, Scovell penned a letter to Colonel John Le Marchant, his old teacher at the Royal Military College. He began:
I must give you a line if it only shows how delighted I am at having been able to pay off my old friend Soult a few of the old scores we were in his debt at Corunna. He certainly never bargained to have them returned so soon and with such good interest.
The staff officer had also clearly been impressed with 12 May’s operation, telling Le Marchant ‘the passage of the Douro was certainly as gallant a thing as ever man did’. As for the French, ‘they appear to have been so taken by surprise at the boldness of the attempt as to have completely lost their brain work’ (underlined in original).
The verdict of some of Soult’s officers was not that different. Captain Fantin des Odoards, the light infantry officer who had also been present at Corunna, decided: ‘Marshal Soult allowed himself to be surprised because of an overconfidence that only the French are capable of.’ The evacuation of Oporto was not the end of Soult’s crisis, but just its beginning. He and his men (around 20,000) were on their own. There were no other French troops to support them within 100 or perhaps even 200 miles; information was too sketchy to know for sure. There were two main routes back to the comparative safety of Spain. One ran north, close to the sea, but Soult did not want to use it, once again fearing that British naval superiority might endanger his withdrawal. The other road ran east, further inland, before turning north. Soult had positioned one of his divisions, under General Loison, on this second route to protect his favoured line of withdrawal. After quitting Oporto, Soult therefore headed east and made his first night’s bivouac. He needed to put some distance between himself and the English and that meant he could only allow his men a few hours’ sleep.
Luckily for Soult, there was to be no British pursuit on the 13th, the day after crossing the Douro. Wellesley had decided to give his men one day’s rest after the hard marching of preceding days, and to allow supply wagons to catch up. This failure to follow hard on Soult’s heels would have earned him the scorn of many a French commander. Unfortunately for Soult, the British general had no intention of letting his enemy escape. Four days before, he had sent a column further inland, under William Beresford, a British general who had been appointed in command of the Portuguese army with the very grand-(and rather French-) sounding rank of marshal. Beresford was a big, powerfully built man, known in the Army for his energy and intelligence. However, his career as a soldier had not been a happy one, as he had taken part in the disastrous expedition to the River Plate in South America three years earlier and had been wounded, leaving his face badly scarred. Wellesley felt that the newly appointed commander of Portuguese troops was one of his more able generals and gave Beresford a vital task, to cut the very line of retreat that Soult hoped to take and had dispatched General Loison to secure.
In the early hours of 13 May, a messenger arrived at Soult’s encampment. He bore a dispatch from General Loison, announcing that he had been fighting some of Marshal Beresford’s Portuguese, had failed to break through on the road towards Spain and was therefore marching back towards the main French body. It is not hard to imagine the cold shudder that must have gone through Soult on hearing that his line of withdrawal was cut off. He could not turn around and march back towards the sea, since the road went back through Oporto, which was in British hands. He was cornered, just as Dupont had been cornered at Bailen by the Spanish the previous year.
Everything Soult had earned by fifteen summers of hard soldiering was in jeopardy. It did not matter that he had shared in the glory of Napoleon’s 1800 campaign in Italy, or led the key attack at Austerlitz. Nor did it matter that France’s conquering leader had created him Duke of Dalmatia, endowed him with generous estates and substantial pensions. Dupont had been one of the favoured too, but after Bailen the emperor had dubbed him ‘le capitulard’ and stripped him of every honour and bauble. Napoleon had even toyed with the idea of having this ‘capitulator’, this loser Dupont, executed, but had imprisoned him instead.
Soult understood that there was only one way to avoid this fate. If both of his two possible roads back into Spain were blocked, he would have to cross the land in between them, which consisted of inhospitable mountains. Three chains of high ground, like three giant hurdles, ran east to west, separating him from the Spanish province of Galicia. This was barren ground too, often sodden with water, particularly in May, but supporting little more by way of vegetation than pines, ferns and scrub. There were no proper roads across these mountains but Soult had been at war long enough to know that there are always paths of some kind, even if they are no more than tracks used by local herdsmen.
If he was to save his army and himself, Marshal Soult knew he had to sacrifice the bordelle* of wagons containing booty, supplies and so on that accompanied his army and restricted it to the roads. More importantly, he would have to sacrifice his artillery, since it too would not make it along shepherds’ paths. Rising to the crisis he had found himself in, the French commander spent no time bemoaning his fate, but instead immediately formed a new plan of action.
Early in the morning of 13 May, Marshal Soult gathered his commanders together to tell of the desperate measures that their desperate situation required. Captain Fantin des Odoards left a vivid account:
The soldiers were ordered to keep only what was indispensible in their rucksacks so as to make room for cartridges. One saw piles of clothes everywhere, booty being consigned to flames; the larger baggage was destroyed, the artillery made unserviceable as far as possible; wagons were jettisoned, even the marshal’s, everything was sacrificed. These extreme measures told us enough about the crisis our little army had found itself in. Anxiety and pain showed on every face, and it was in a doleful silence that we passed the scene of the destruction.
Wagons carrying £50,000 worth of silver coin also had to be abandoned. Soult ordered them broken open, and allowed the passing men to scoop handfuls of money. Such was the trepidation with which they now looked at the mountain barrier ahead of them, that many of the French footsoldiers either declined this heaven-sent opportunity or dumped the heavy coin as the marching became harder. The cannon were parked with one muzzle aimed at another and fired, rendering them useless.
*
On 14 May, Captain Scovell set out with a small reconnaissance force up the coastal route north. Since landing for the second time in Portugal, he had been assigned as the staff officer (still Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General) to a brigade of light cavalry. Scovell was not in command of these troops, nor indeed was he the principal member of Wellesley’s Staff to ride with them, an honour that fell to Lieutenant-Colonel William De Lancey, the Deputy Quartermaster-General. This officer had a romantic pedigree, being from a well-to-do American family whose loyalty to George III during the revolution had cost it much of its wealth and resulted in exile. Wellesley had known De Lancey since he was a boy. The American-born colonel was close to his ideal for the young military gentleman, having handsome looks, an impeccable Tory bloo
d line and a generous ration of self-confidence. Even on the march up towards Oporto, Wellesley had started using De Lancey as his personal executor with one wing of the Army, making sure that orders were carried out promptly and effectively.
The post with the light cavalry was much more to Scovell’s liking than his previous one. It did not involve trying to teach deserters to ride cheap nags in the corps of Guides for one thing. The society among the hussar and light dragoon officers was much more amusing too. It was closer to the situation of gentleman cavalry officer that he aspired to, despite wearing the regimentals of the 57th Foot and despite the fact that his company counted for little in the eyes of these rich young men. It also offered plenty of possibilities for a keen soldier to find distinction. And their mission north to help find the French was an ideal opportunity to bring himself to the notice of General Wellesley.
By the next day, 15 May, Soult’s men had cleared the first of their three mountain hurdles, the Serra de Santa Catalina. A heavy rainfall had set in, drenching the French infantry and liberating all the evil smells that a season’s campaigning had locked into their woollen greatcoats. Hours of struggling along slippery paths with waterlogged feet were followed by a fitful sleep under these sodden mantles. The downpours drenched the British, too, waterlogging the roads and splattering their white trousers in mud. The footsoldiers were soon cursing their prey, whom they nicknamed Soult the Duke of ‘Damnation’ instead of Dalmatia.
On the evening of the 15th, Scovell and the units he was with were joined by Wellesley, Murray and several battalions of infantry in Braga, a town about thirty miles north of Oporto. Braga, a cathedral town considered Portugal’s Canterbury, stands at the mouth of the Cavado valley, which flows between the second and last of the three mountain barriers of the Minho country that Soult would have to cross. Wellesley was hopeful that Marshal Beresford’s force would be blocking the other, eastern end of this valley, even though communications with him were proving extremely difficult. Late that evening, the Portuguese military commandant of Braga came to the Headquarters, asking to see Wellesley. He wanted to tell the British general about an old Roman road which would allow Soult to escape the Cavado valley directly to the north, across the Serra da Geres – the last of Soult’s great hurdles – without running into either the British or Portuguese forces at either end. Wellesley would not speak to the Portuguese officer, who took it as a snub resulting from his low social and military rank.
By the morning of the 16th, Soult’s bedraggled column had cleared its second hurdle, had turned east and was marching along a sort of shelf on the steep southern side of the Cavado valley. Wellesley’s troops were moving swiftly from Braga in the same direction on the same route, and that afternoon caught up with the French rearguard at a village called Salamonde.
Although he had shown daring in Oporto, Wellesley approached this new situation with the greatest caution. The nature of the terrain made an immediate charge with cavalry impossible. Scovell, De Lancey and some light infantry were sent exploring further up the steep side of the valley, to see if there was an easy way to bypass Soult’s blocking force – probably about 2,000 men. Wellesley meanwhile ordered up the Guards Brigade to assault the Salamonde position frontally. The British general’s caution allowed Soult several hours in which to keep the head of his column marching. The French march took them down the side of the valley to the first of two bridges at its bottom. These spans would have to be crossed before Soult’s corps could scale the final ridge and make its way back into Spain.
It was at this point that advanced elements of Marshal Beresford’s Portuguese column came into play. Guided by Portuguese Staff, Beresford knew something Wellesley did not: the key importance of the two bridges in preventing Soult’s escape. The old Roman road from Braga to Galicia in Spain descended the steep valley below Salamonde and crossed the two bridges deep in this natural trough before climbing up the other side, across the Serra da Geres mountains. He sent Captain William Warre ahead to try to stop them. This was the same officer who had been a fellow DAQMG of Scovell’s at Corunna; with the British taking control of the Portuguese army, the son of one of the great port-shipping families was a natural choice to work on Beresford’s staff. Warre’s long years in the country meant that he could speak the language fluently. He rode in advance of Beresford’s regular troops, placing himself at the head of the local armed citizenry. The bridge in Ponte Nova was built of wood and, under Warre’s directions, they started pulling up the planks that formed its surface. These timbers were thrown into a barricade on the northern bridgehead. It was not possible, however, for the militia to shift the big beams that formed the bridge’s skeleton. These remained in place, challenging the daring or desperate to take their chances on this narrow, slippery surface.
Finding this obstacle, Soult called for a major of the light infantry by the name of Dulong, who picked a force of hardy stormers. At dusk that evening, they assaulted the Ponte Nova. Dulong’s men ran across its timbers in a hail of musketry. Some slipped off and disappeared into the foaming waters below, but the momentum of Dulong’s charge was irresistible and it drove the Portuguese militia into the hills.
At the same time, around dusk, Wellesley finally struck the French rearguard at Salamonde. It crumbled immediately, showing the British Staff how low their foe’s morale had sunk on the march from Oporto. Scovell noted curtly in his journal, ‘the enemy hardly waited to receive their fire, but fled precipitately’. A more shocking account was penned by Fantin des Odoards, who recorded:
when towards evening, an English party attacked our rearguard, a few shots were enough to throw it into unbelievable disorder. Frenchmen are hopeless in retreat, and there we saw the proof of that old axiom of war … The confusion resulting from this panic was explosive.
As the French troops began streaming back from Salamonde in what was by then darkness, the head of their column was making its way across the half-demolished Ponte Novo bridge, cleared moments before by Dulong’s stormers. The ‘Roman road’ in this part of the valley is little more than four feet wide. Night had engulfed them and its smooth flagstones had become slippery under foot from the persistent rain. Soult’s men were losing their discipline and cursing their individual struggle to survive, to go home and see their mothers or friends again in the Auvergne, Normandy or Paris. Fantin des Odoards wrote, ‘infantrymen and horsemen pressed against one another, throwing down their weapons and trying to outrun one another’. Despairingly, he described the Ponte Nova crossing, where thousands of frightened soldiers were trying to make their way along the slippery beams that were all that remained of the bridge:
so many crowded on that numerous men were thrown off and drowned in the torrent or were trampled under the horses’ feet. If the English had taken advantage of this rout, I don’t know what would have become of us, the fear was so contagious, even among the bravest soldiers.
The English, though, were not taking advantage. The road down to the Ponte Nova was not the main route running up the valley, but on a turning off it. It was precisely the point that the Portuguese officer had wanted to alert the British to in Braga the night before. Wellesley had pressed along the main route east and after a few hours realized something was badly wrong. Soult’s force had disappeared. Scovell and Colonel George Murray (Quartermaster-General to Wellesley, just as he had been a few months earlier to Moore) were sent galloping into the night, trying to find a peasant who knew where the French might have gone.
By morning, Scovell and Murray had discovered the scene at the Ponte Nova so vividly described by Captain Fantin des Odoards. The rear of the French column had already passed over the half-demolished bridge and the Portuguese peasantry had emerged to wreak vengeance on the invaders. Scovell wrote:
nothing could exceed the horrid scenes I witnessed this morning. The road was literally strewed with dead and dying, and the Portuguese inhumanely murdering and stripping those who otherwise might have recovered. We saved several and took ab
out 30 Prisoners.
Scovell galloped back to Wellesley to report that they were on the trail of Soult’s column again. At the front of that mass of confused, tired, soaked men, one step ahead of the murderous Portuguese villagers, Soult’s advanced scouts had pressed up the Roman road, and on rounding a corner stumbled upon the second bridge. It remains there to this day, an elegant span across a gorge and above a foaming tributary of the Cavado called the Misarella. It seems to leap upwards from one rocky promontory and drop downwards to the other, which gives rise to its local nickname, the ‘saltador’ or ‘jumper’. Here, Captain Warre and the armed locals had prepared another barricade. Unfortunately, they had not been able to pull up the surface, since the Romans had built it with massive flagstones.
Warre’s defences were all that stood between the French and safety, between so many young men and their families, between Marshal Soult and disgrace. Looking up at the bridge from the angle Soult and his men would have seen it, the Serra da Geres rises up behind like a great wall. The French knew this was their last obstacle. Once more, Major Dulong was sent for and a team of grenadiers and other volunteers demanded. The columns of troops packed on to this narrow track, with steep drops below in many places, would have had stepped aside gingerly as the stormers pushed their way towards the front and the bridge.
At a run, the saltador is about thirty paces long. Thirty steps for Dulong and his stormers upon which the whole of Soult’s army depended. Doubtless many of those at the front of Dulong’s little column carried axes or other means of breaking down the barricades placed across the bridge by its few dozen Portuguese and single English defender.
When the signal was given, they launched their attack under the fire of the Portuguese, supported by musketry from their own comrades crouched beside the track leading up to the saltador. It was over in moments. The Portuguese farmers could not stand in front of desperate men, skilled in close combat. They were scattered and the last impediment was gone. The legions marching under Bonaparte’s eagles were taking the same path out of Lusitania as those under the eagles of Rome. Britain’s chance of a Bailen, the capture or annihilation of an entire corps of 20,000 Frenchmen, was gone and, although he did not know it, it was to be Wellesley’s only opportunity of this kind in seven years of Peninsular campaigning.