ABSTRACT
I WAS sorting through the papers of Sir George Scovell, Wellington’s cypher-secretary during a great part of the Peninsular War, when I came on two documents of extraordinary interest. Scovell, I must explain, was an expert in the unravelling of all sorts of cyphers, and had been attached to the Intelligence branch of the Quartermaster-General’s department, because the French commanders during the latter part of the war sent all their important dispatches in cypher. The country between the headquarters of each of their armies was so infested by guerrilla bands that when there was need to communicate with a colleague, or with Madrid, the choice lay between sending an aide-de-camp with a considerable escort or a spy in disguise. There were French officers who could pass as native wayfarers, but not many; on the other hand, the supply of Spanish adventurers who were prepared to carry a secret message for a round sum of dollars was considerable. Some of them were true Afrancesados, who had thrown in their lot with the French cause, and worked honestly for their party; others were merely greedy, unscrupulous, and unpatriotic. Their risk was great, for the guerrillero chiefs—Julian Sanchez, on the borders of Castile and Leon, was the most wily and bold of them—were singularly able detectives, and had an uncanny power of discovering that a muleteer, a priest, or a pedlar, found on the road far from his home, was a French messenger and not a simple traveller. And Julian and some of his rivals were strong enough not merely to stop individuals, but sometimes to surprise and capture 162an officer with his whole escort of twenty or thirty chasseurs à cheval or hussars. Not only from patriotic reasons, but because Wellington paid a round sum down for every French dispatch brought him, all the captured documents found their way to the British headquarters, and when, as usual, they were in cypher, they were passed over to Major Scovell. They ranged from considerable documents covering eight or ten folio pages—evidently entrusted to an aide-de-camp with an escort—down to scraps of the smallest size, written on thin paper so as to go into some secret place of concealment on the bearer’s person. Some of them look as if they had been sewn up in a cloth button, or rolled under the leather of a whip-handle, or folded between the soles of a boot. Probably every one of these had cost a life before it reached Scovell’s hands.
