The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (48 page)

Making their way to a knoll behind Gazan's position, Joseph and Jourdan regarded the fighting along the ridge line with foreboding. Their hopes of employing the natural strength of the terrain in their defense were crumbling. Moreover, they were acutely aware that they could not afford to lose, for at that moment 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. More troops were ordered onto the ridge to try to stop the British attack.

Watching this reinforcement move up at about 10:30
A.M.
from the slope above a village called Villodas on the left bank of the Zadorra, Wellington was 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 toward the ridge now was one less brigade to be used later against the two large Allied columns that he had set marching toward 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 farthest east of those passes, 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 to be sure that the other columns would be able to act in concert. While absolutely necessary for his overall plan to work, it meant that the troops on the Puebla Heights paid a very heavy price. The French threw more and more men into the attack. 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, rendering him 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 toward Gazan's front. On 21 May his whole campaign had begun with a movement to pin the French to their river defense line. Now that its climax had been reached, the same idea was being used at the tactical level, 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 the water and were soon under attack from the French. As the fighting intensified, the Light Division men were heartened to see the head of the 3rd
Division appearing across the plain to their left. The first of the flanking columns came 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, from his little knoll just two miles away, see that both of Gazan's flanks were in danger and that 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 Arinez, the second position of the French army, with cheers and great rolling volleys of musketry.

For the French it was now vitally important to fall back quickly, trying to extricate their guns and infantry, under the covering fire of their artillery. Around 4
P.M
., with the battle was at its peak, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and Light Divisions as well as a couple of brigades of cavalry were forcing the French eastward. They in turn responded with barrages of cannon fire. The whole floor of the valley was cloaked in dense smoke from the battle.

At last Graham's column began attacking at the back of the French position, trying to force a passage across the Zadorra. This he was unable to do, and with that failure the hope that the battle might see the destruction of the entire French army began to vanish. The rest of Wellington's host, however, continued to follow its original orders, pressing forward in other parts of the field.

With this ferocious British assault going on around them, Joseph and Jourdan realized that their hour of judgment was close and that, with the Bayonne road threatened, the only way out of the plain was due east, on small mountain roads to Pampluna, toward 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 under their own hands.

A general retreat began, as one by one divisional commanders recognized that 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:

At twilight, hussars of Grant's recently landed brigade broke into the French rear. Their arrival caused a general panic and dissolved the last bonds of discipline that were still 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:

Under this escort, Joseph fled the field. Jourdan was separated from him but also managed to make his way together with a couple of ADCs, swords drawn, off toward the east. Beyond the city of Vitoria the ground was naturally quite boggy, and as chaos set in wagons and gun limbers toppled into the deep ditches besides the road, blocking the way to those who tried to follow. In many places drivers or officers cut the traces of draft animals and leapt onto them so they could gallop away, but each escape of this kind just 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 themselves, 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:

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, arguing that “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 doubloons 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 chamber pot. Heavy wagons bearing the name of General Villatte were found to be crammed with silver plate, altar pieces and religious artifacts stripped from churches in southern Spain.

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) of his army was lost. One of the more sublime ironies of the day was that 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 portion of this money was ever recovered; the rest disappeared 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 two thousand 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 their enemy, 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 the twenty-first, Wellington was forced to send 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 behavior 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, a thing that was priceless to him but quite useless to the
pillaging mob who was cackling and laughing, trying on the finest Parisian dresses, emptying out drawers and scattering papers to the winds. The best place to find what he was looking for would be the king's coach or nearby in some private secretary's
calèche.
*
These were among the few vehicles that had been placed under the guard of dependable cavalry when Wellington had discovered that there were priceless paintings stripped from Madrid and left rolled up in the king's coach.

He finally found the large document, folded up, with the words
Sa Majesté Catholique
*
written on its outside, in the king's leather paper case. Lieutenant Colonel Scovell opened the
portefeuille
to reveal Joseph's personal copy of the Great Paris Cipher decoding table. He also discovered the little booklet for enciphering, with its alphabetical listing of words, letters and phrases. So it came to pass that on 21 June, both French power in Spain and the
Grand Chiffre
died together.

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 Pyrennees to France. Bereft of artillery, they were incapable of resisting the British further. He and some other troops were moving east, at the foot of the mountains marking the frontier, toward the Army of Catalonia, the only remaining French force of any size in the Iberian Peninsula. Joseph had confessed so many embarrassing details about the Battle of Vitoria, but one more remained, which the minister of war in Paris needed to know:

The king never suspected that the British had already been reading his most sensitive letters the entire previous year and could not have seen
the irony 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 an intercepted dispatch from the French minister of war to Marshal Suchet, in command of the Army of Catalonia, intended to explain the disastrous campaign that had led up to Vitoria:

“The King judged it expedient to abandon his first line of defense,” 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 to attack the new cipher, scribbling possible meanings down in pencil. But Scovell and Wellington realized there was little point. Precious few messages would be captured in the future in any case. The Army of Catalonia was falling back slowly toward the frontier too. French communications were now being sent almost entirely through their own country. There they were quite safe from the Spanish guerrillas, whose raids had of course been vital to the business of obtaining ciphered dispatches in the first place.