The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (5 page)

As Soult surveyed Corunna Bay with his staff, messengers kept arriving and departing with news of his army. Like many of Napoleon's principal lieutenants, Marshal Soult had accumulated wealth and titles during the previous decade's campaigning. He had dressed his young aides-de-camp in a striking uniform of his own design, with blue shakos
*
and yellow coats. Their outfit was against regulations, but
ma foi!
these ADCs were his personal representatives after all. The marshal himself wore his dark blue general's coat and clad his bow legs with white breeches, and as he gave orders in his strong southern French accent, he cut a fine figure on horseback, his head crowned with black curls and a handsome decoration on his breast. Soult's confidence ran deep. For his generals of brigade and division were similarly experienced in the business of crushing the emperor's enemies. Each knew their place within the Napoleonic system of war and each was the veteran of many battles. These men had beaten the Russians, the Austrians and the Prussians—why should the British worry them unduly?

In the early hours of the sixteenth, the British general was woken by one of his staff with an important dispatch. He still hoped he might not have to fight. “Now, if there's no bungling,” said Moore as his assistant went to leave, “I don't see why we should not all be off safely tomorrow.”

This was not to be. Under the cover of darkness, the French had been working to prepare an attack on the weak point of the British line. Soult ordered ten cannons to be heaved up the heights of Penasquedo, a ridge overlooking the Monelos gap. The gunners slaved away in the pitch black, using their shoulders, ropes, blocks, tackle and gun spikes to get their pieces into range.

At first light, a young French light infantry officer, rejoicing under the name of Louis-Florimond Fantin des Odoards, looked down from the Penasquedo to the British positions. “As a light fog dispersed, an eminently picturesque view appeared to us,” he recalled in his memoirs. “On the opposing heights were English troops, and beyond one could see the city of Corunna, its port and bay crowded with countless ships. A clear sky, brilliant sunshine and all of the warmth of early spring completed the panorama. Nothing broke the complete silence that reigned in the valley between the two armies.”

Soult's brushes with Moore's rear guard had taught him that any engagement with the British had to be carefully prepared, and so, even as the hours ticked by on that morning of 16 January, he did not order his assault. The French marshal was bringing up a force of infantry not much larger than the fourteen thousand on the British side. It was in artillery and cavalry that Soult had the decided superiority: more than four times as many guns and a force of three divisions of horses; forty-five hundred fine troops. Soult had a keen military mind, which had led him to the command of that great self-contained military organism that was the French
corps d'armée
*
at the same age as Scovell, while Scovell, from similarly humble origins, was languishing within his own organization. Since the British only effectively occupied one of the two ridges behind the city (the easternmost, or left from the perspective of the British general looking south), Soult intended to strike in the low ground between them. He would use an initial infantry assault to pin the British
down while the cavalry were pushed into the gap made by the Monelos and cut off Moore's line of retreat. All the time, the British battalions, standing in lines two men deep and three hundred to four hundred wide, would be pounded by a hot fire from the Penasquedo ridge.

The French hid their intentions sufficiently well for Moore to resolve on the morning of the sixteenth to begin withdrawing his men in preparation for boarding, starting with Paget's division. They were at the rear of the British position (closest to the port) and were the best placed troops to foil Soult's plan and plug the Monelos gap. It may also be that Soult, lacking decisive infantry superiority and contemplating a difficult assault, was waiting for precisely such a diminution of Moore's troops before ordering the attack. Paget's men had actually been marched to the port when the sound of a heavy cannonade late in the morning caused them to halt.

French guns had opened up from the Penasquedo ridge, sending cannonballs slamming into the British ranks. The standard French field piece was an eight-pounder, firing iron balls about the diameter of a small grapefruit, but the mass of these solid metal spheres was such that if an eight-pound shot hit a file of men standing one behind the other, it could easily kill a dozen before it lost momentum. The range from the Penasquedo heights to the British lines, about five hundred meters, was well within the eight-pounder's effective killing area.

With the cannon dealing death from the ridge, French troops, who had been waiting just out of view, began walking down the Penasquedo in battle formation. Captain Fantin des Odoards's battalion of the 31st Light Infantry was among the leading units, and he noted: “To reach the enemy position, we had to go into a deep gully and climb its other side. At the same time, a powerful battery thundered from the heights we had left toward those of the English; they responded with a hot fire, and it was under a canopy of cannon balls criss-crossing over our heads that we reached the enemy position.”

The French veterans were sufficiently used to the demented whiz of cannonballs not to slacken their pace. They kept marching forward. On the British slope, however, soldiers were ducking down as the eight-pound shot began to smack into the bodies and limbs of their comrades. Moore appeared on horseback, apparently oblivious to danger, and tried to reasssure them that the terrifying noise made by a cannonball signified that it had in fact already passed overhead.

At the foot of the British-held slope was the village of Elvina. Soult needed to capture it to secure the flank of his own cavalry force, which was going to rush past it into the Monelos gap. The French succeeded early on in capturing the village and British troops were ordered to counterattack. As they began walking toward Elvina, the 42nd Highlanders (the famous Black Watch) and the 50th Foot had to endure heavy fire from the French battery overlooking them on the Penasquedo. And it was in Elvina that the heaviest fighting of the day raged.

Many officers on the British side had noted the “miraculous transformation” of men they had seen straggling into Corunna a couple of days before. In truth, the redcoat loved a fight. Nothing else compensated for the privations of campaigning in the same way. The marching of the previous two months had worn them out, body and soul. They had seen the French many times, but whenever battle had seemed imminent they had been ordered to resume the trek toward the coast, a retreat that many, officers and men, thought so dishonorable and pointless. Now the echo of cannon was reminding them of their purpose. Even so, Moore must have had his concerns, watching a group of Highlanders recoil in horror as one of their comrades crumpled screaming to the ground, his leg carried off by a cannonball. The general steadied the Scots, calling out to the wounded man, “My good fellow don't make such a noise, we must bear these things better.” His troops did not disappoint him.

With each victim the French cannon claimed, the advancing men shuffled toward the colors flying at the center of their battalion, closing ranks. In that way, a continuous line of muskets was maintained despite the losses. The weapons they carried were ineffective beyond two hundred yards and could only be used with devastating effect when fired en masse at half or even one quarter of that distance.

When the 42nd and 50th finally took Elvina from the French, they soon received a heavy counterattack. This contest was a savage affair, the village echoing to the shouts of soldiers impaling one another on bayonets. The crackle of musket fire continued, but was soon joined by much louder explosions; the French had moved several guns forward to rake the buildings with grapeshot. These munitions spewed out dozens of smaller balls, multiplying the killing power of each cannon. Each discharge of grape into Elvina sent shards of stone and plaster flying off the
buildings, lacerating the British troops with this debris and choking them in dust and smoke. It did not take long to drive Moore's two battalions out of the village again. The Highlanders had 150 men killed and wounded in this action, the 50th, 185 men (casualties of between one in five and one in four of those fighting).

General Moore rode close to the scene of the action to order a brigade of two Guards battalions to counterattack and retake Elvina. He sent Captain Hardinge, his ADC, to bring up one of the Guards units. The young staff officer reported back to his chief on the slope above the village, within full view of the French batteries overlooking the area.

“I was pointing out to the General the situation of the battalion,” Hardinge later recorded, “when a shot from the enemy's battery carried off his left shoulder and part of his collar bone. The violence of the shock threw him off his horse; but not a muscle of his face altered, nor did a sigh betray the least sensation of pain. The blood flowed fast, but the attempt to stop it with my sash was useless from the size of the wound.”

Carried from the field, Moore remained conscious as the British stubbornly fought their way back into Elvina and the momentum of the French attack slowly died away. Paget's division marched back up from the port to plug the gap in the British defenses at the Monelos river, and the French cavalry sent to break through in this direction came under heavy fire, leaving it with no choice but to retire.

As darkness engulfed the battlefield, fighting ebbed away and Moore lay dying in a Spanish house, attended by a surgeon and some of his staff officers. It had been apparent to everyone, not least the general himself, that it was a mortal wound. He was barely able to speak, but when news was brought to him that the French had been hammered to a standstill, Moore whispered, “I hope the people of England will be satisfied.”

With the hills illuminated only by moonlight, General John Hope, who had taken over command, began the difficult task of extricating his troops. He was well aware that the French might attempt further assaults if they detected this movement, so sentries engaged in a charade of noisy calling between posts and stoking of campfires while the bulk of their comrades filed off.

The British soldiers passing through Corunna at dawn on the seventeenth presented a most sorry spectacle. They had looked dreadful even
before the battle. But now, one eyewitness noted: “They were all in tatters, hollow-eyed, covered with blood and filth. They looked so terrible that the people of Corunna made the sign of the cross as they passed.”

Up on the Penasquedo ridge, the French spent a fitful night. The men of the 31st Light Infantry shared around some rough wine and stale bread. “[We were] recounting the day's events, and mourning comrades who had stood on the threshold of their careers,” one of their captains remembered. “Behind the camp, in some ruins, was our dressing station. The cries of the unfortunates suffering amputation there, carried by the gusts of a strong wind, did not lighten our insomnia. Toward midnight the enemy's fires began going out; by day we were surprised to see their embarkation had been carried out in the darkness.”

On the morning of the seventeenth, Soult, seeing the British had abandoned their positions, moved his batteries forward onto a promentory overlooking the harbor and ordered them to fire.

For an instant it looked as if the worst fears of the officers organizing the embarkation were coming to fruition. Some of the inexperienced masters of merchantmen panicked, cutting their cables in an attempt to escape the French cannonballs and make their way out to sea. “Everybody commanded, everybody fired, everybody hallooed, everybody ordered silence, everybody forbade the fire,” one officer later wrote. In this chaos, four of the small transports ran aground. Sailors were dispatched in longboats to rescue the crews and passengers of these stricken vessels. Some of the Royal Navy escorts began responding with broadsides toward the French batteries. As the grounded merchantmen were cleared of passengers they were set on fire to prevent them from becoming prizes of the French. Soon the bay was full of smoke, the thundering of heavy guns and the cries of men in longboats trying to find space on board the few ships not full or getting under way.

The moment of Scovell's private anxiety had arrived and he rapidly assembled his Guides near the waiting boats. He had been ordered not to take the dozen or so Spaniards home, although some of them pleaded to be allowed to go with the army. Instead they were each paid a bounty of fourteen Spanish dollars; they signed for their money and disappeared into the streets of Corunna. But the others, Italians and Swiss
who had deserted the French and given good service to the British army, had to be gotten on board quickly. Scovell calmed them as the bay thundered with the echo of French guns.

With the harbor itself becoming unsafe, the staff decided to switch the embarkation to the other side of the Corunna isthmus. This was risky, since there was no quay there and the rocks that were to be used as a makeshift jetty would answer for this purpose for just a few hours at high tide. Scovell moved his anxious Guides across to this new place, where, to his immense relief, they were taken off on the evening of 17 January.

Scovell himself left it as late as he safely could, when all but a couple of thousand British troops were afloat, taking a longboat out to
Implacable,
an impressive seventy-four-gun line of battleship of the Royal Navy squadron. Early on the eighteenth the last British troops embarked. Later, several officers (including the dashing Captain Warre) claimed in their journals and letters home the honor of being the last man to leave. For these ambitious young bloods, it was important that their patrons learn of their gallant act as quickly as possible, and circulate the story in the salons. Alas it was to be Hardinge, eyewitness to Moore's death, who would be in demand at many a general's table on their return, to tell his melancholy tale.