Free The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes by Mark Urban

appear to have been so taken by surprise at the boldness of the attempt as to have completely lost their
brain work”
(underlining 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.” For Soult, the evacuation of Oporto had saved most of his troops, but it was the beginning of a greater crisis. He and his men (around twenty thousand) were on their own, with no other French troops to support them within one hundred or perhaps even two hundred miles. 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, fearing that British naval superiority might endanger his withdrawal. The other road ran east, further inland, before turning north. This was his favored line of withdrawal, so Soult had already positioned one of his divisions, under General Loison, on this second route to protect it. After quitting Oporto, Soult therefore marched east to make 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 next day, the thirteenth, either. Wellesley had decided to give his men one day’s rest after the hard marching of the preceding days, and to allow supply wagons to catch up. This failure to follow hard on Soult’s heels immediately would have earned him the scorn of many a French commander. What Soult did not know, however, was that the British general had no intention of letting his enemy get away. Four days before, he had sent a column further inland under William Beresford, a British general who had been given the command of Portugal’s 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. His career as a soldier had not always been a happy one, as three years earlier he had taken part in the disastrous expedition to the River Plate in South America 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 selected him for the vital task of cutting the very line of retreat that Soult hoped to take and had so prudently sent 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 toward Spain and was therefore marching back toward the main French body. It is not hard to imagine Soult’s cold shudder on hearing that his line of withdrawal was cut off. He could not turn around and march back toward the sea, since the road through Oporto was in British hands. He was cornered, just like 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 favored too, but after Bailen the emperor had dubbed him
“le capitulard”
and stripped him of every honor and bauble. Napoleon even toyed with the idea of having this “capitulator,” this loser Dupont executed, but 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