The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes (9 page)

If he was to save his army and himself, Marshal Soult knew he had to sacrifice the accompanying
bordel
*
of wagons containing booty, supplies and such that restricted his corps to the roads. More importantly, he would have to sacrifice his artillery, since it would not make it along shepherds' paths either. Rising to the crisis he had found himself in, the French commander spent no time bemoaning his fate, but immediately formed a new plan of action.

After sunrise on 13 May, Marshal Soult gathered his commanders together to outline the desperate steps that this desperate situation dictated. Captain Fantin des Odoards left a vivid account:

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 foot soldiers 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 in Portugal for the second time, he had been assigned as the deputy assistant quarter master general to a brigade of light cavalry. Scovell was not in command of these troops, nor indeed was he the principal officer of Wellesley's staff to ride with them. This honor fell to Lieutenant Colonel William De Lancey, the deputy quarter master general, an officer 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, and with his handsome looks, an impeccable Tory bloodline and a generous ration of self-confidence the American-born DQMG seemed like an almost perfect embodiment of the young military gentleman. Even on the march up toward 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. For one thing, it did not involve trying to teach deserters to ride cheap nags in the Corps of Guides. Another advantage was that the society among the hussar and light dragoon officers was much more amusing and closer to the ideal of gentleman cavalry officer that he aspired to, despite his wearing the regimentals of the 57th Foot and the fact that his company counted for little in the eyes of these rich young men. His new position 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 fitful sleep under sodden mantles. Those downpours soaked the British too, waterlogging the roads and splattering their white trousers in mud. The foot soldiers, cursing their prey, quickly nicknamed Soult the duke of “damnation” instead of Dalmatia.

On the evening of the fifteenth, the regiments Scovell was with were joined by Wellesley, Murray and several battalions of infantry in Braga, 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. Even though communications with him were proving extremely difficult, Wellesley was hopeful that Marshal Beresford's force would be blocking the other end, the eastern end, of this valley, to block the French from leaving. Late that evening, the Portuguese military commandant of Braga came to the headquarters asking to see Wellesley. He knew the Minho ranges well and wanted to tell the British general about an old Roman road that would allow Soult to escape the Cavado Valley directly to the north, cutting straight across the Serra da Geres—the last of Soult's great hurdles—without running into either the British or the Portuguese forces at either end. Wellesley would not consent to speak to the Portuguese officer, who took it as a snub resulting from his low social and military rank.

By the morning of the sixteenth, Soult's bedraggled column had cleared its second hurdle, had turned east and was marching on top of a sort of shelf along the steep southern side of the Cavado Valley. Using the same route, Wellesley's troops moved swiftly from Braga in the same direction and that afternoon caught up with the French rear guard at a village called Salamonde.

Wellesley had shown daring in Oporto, but here he approached the 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 farther up the steep side of the valley to
see if there was an easy way to bypass Soult's blocking force—probably about two thousand 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, taking his corps 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 the advanced elements of Marshal Beresford's Portuguese column came into play. Guided by Portuguese staff, Beresford had the local knowledge that Wellesley lacked: the key importance of the two bridges. The old Roman road from Braga to Galicia in Spain descended the steep valley below Salamonde, crossed the two bridges deep in this natural trough before climbing up the other side, across the Serra da Geres mountains. Quickly, Beresford sent Captain William Warre,
*
the same officer who had been a fellow DAQMG of Scovell's at Corunna, ahead of the regular troops. He rode ahead of Beresford's regular troops, and using his fluent Portuguese placed 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. This debris was 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 narrow, slippery timbers.

Soult's men were not to be deterred. The marshal called for a major of the light infantry by the name of Dulong, who picked a force of hardy stormers and prepared for an assault that very evening. In a hail of musketry, Dulong's men ran across the bridge's slippery skeleton. Some slid off and disappeared into the foaming waters below, but the momentum of Dulong's charge succeeded in driving the Portuguese militia into the hills.

At the same time, around dusk, Wellesley struck the French rear guard at Salamonde. It crumbled immediately, finally showing the British staff how low their foe's morale had sunk on the march from Oporto. “The enemy hardly waited to receive their fire, but fled precipitately,”
Scovell noted curtly in his journal. A more shocking account was penned by Fantin des Odoards, who recorded, “When toward evening, an English party attacked our rear guard, 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 away from Salamonde in what was by then a black night, the head of their column was making its way across the half-demolished Ponte Nova bridge, cleared just moments before by Dulong's stormers. The Roman road in this part of the valley is little more than four feet wide. In the dark, the men struggled not to lose their purchase on its smooth flagstones, which had become slippery from the persistent rain. More and more, Soult's men were losing their discipline, cursing their individual struggle to survive, longing to go home and see their mothers or friends again in the Auvergne, Normandy or Paris. “Infantrymen and horsemen pressed against one another,” Fantin des Odoards wrote, “throwing down their weapons and trying to outrun one another.” Despairingly he described the crossing of the Ponte Nova, where thousands of frightened French soldiers were trying to make their way along the treacherous remnants 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, however, 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 this misconception that the Portuguese officer had wanted to alert the British to in Braga the night before. So instead of following the French, Wellesley had pressed along the main route east and realized only after a few hours that something was badly wrong—Soult's force had disappeared. Scovell and Colonel George Murray (quarter master 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 about 30 Prisoners.” Scovell galloped back to Wellesley to report that they had found the trail of Soult's column again.

At the front of that mass of confused, tired, soaked Frenchmen, 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, the Misarella. It seems to leap upward from one rocky promontory and drop downward 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, but without being able to pull up the surface, since this time the Romans had built it with massive flagstones.

Warre's flimsy defenses were all that stood between the French and safety, between these thousands of exhausted young men and their families, between Marshal Soult and disgrace. Looking up at the bridge from the spot Soult and his men would have occupied, 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 onto this narrow track, with steep drops below in many places, would have had to step aside gingerly as the stormers pushed their way toward 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 survival 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 the few dozen Portuguese and the lone Englishman defending it.

When the signal was given, the French stormers launched their attack under the fire of the Portuguese and, 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 with
stand the charge of those 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 second Bailén, the capture or annihilation of an entire corps of twenty thousand Frenchmen, was gone and, though he did not know it then, it was to be Wellesley's only opportunity of this kind in seven years of Peninsular campaigning.