"The Man who broke Napoleon's codes" by Mark Urban

George Scovell was a man of low birth who, having initially trained as an engraver, joined the British army during the Napoleonic wars. This book traces his career from Captain with Sir John Moore at the time of the evacuation from Corunna to his work as an assistant quarter-master general with Wellington where he was initially responsible for a team of guides to reconnoitre and gather information, then taking on the duties of postmaster, running teams of men carrying messages, and finally as Wellington's code-breaker. The book also tells of the Peninsular campaign and includes the British attacks on the great forts of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz and the great victories of Salamanca and Vitorio; Waterloo and the aftermath of his career are included in a post-script.

This is a well-told (plain and clear, rather like the prose of the Duke of Wellington himself) narrative history and it includes some very useful maps. In an original touch there is a friexe above each chapter heading which shows a quotation written in the Great Chiffre Napoleonic code and which is gradually revealed as the chapters go by.

Some of my favourite lines:

• "Captain George Scovell was a Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General ... the title itself seemed to denote 'insignificance'." (C 1)
• "While Massena had kept his mistress at Headquarters ... Marmont, although reputedly one of the most handsome men in Paris, brought no Venus to the field of Mars." (C 7)
• "Sometimes a column of infantry marching across a dusty Estremaduran plain would see the glint of a telescope on a nearby hillside and then catch sight of a silhouetted figure on horseback." (C 7)
• "An intercepted mail ... was taken by Longa, who killed 400 men who escorted it except 12, who, he says, did not show so strong an inclination to leave their bodies there." (C 17)

May 2019; 288 pages

"The News from Waterloo" by Brian Cathcart

After Wellington had defeated Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, Wellington had to write an official dispatch before sending it, via horse, coach, sailing boat, rowing boat and finally coach again, to London. In London the government and the Stock market worried. Since his escape from Elba Napoleon seemed unstoppable. The Government had raised a loan of an unprecedented £36 million (in the form of a loan called an Omnium, which is presumably where Trollope got his name for the Duke of the Palliser novels) to pay for a new army just days before and many bankers had their fortunes at risk if Wellington lost. But there was no instant communication, even the optical telegraph which the Admiralty had installed during the recent hostilities had been decommissioned after Napoleon's first defeat. It was 16 hours after the result of the battle that the dispatch was handed to Henry Percy at 1 PM on Monday 19th June; he reached London at 11 PM on Wednesday 21st June; it took 58 hours for the news to travel.

This was a time when newspapers didn't have reporters in the field (only Parliamentary correspondents) so the only unofficial sources of news were:

• Mr Sutton who had heard the news of Quatre Bras, the Napoleon Wellington skirmish 48 hours before Waterloo that ended in a draw (and Wellington falling back) which Sutton misinterpreted as an allied victory, telling London on Tuesday morning.
• The Green Knight of Kerry who spoke with Wellington after Quatre Bras and therefore knew the true situation
• The mysterious Mr C who was at the exiled court of the French King in Ghent when he heard the news of Waterloo and rushed to London, arriving Wednesday morning.
• And possibly an unknown informant of Nathan Rothschild who enabled the banker to buy government stock and make a profit

Cathcart, who also wrote even more brilliant The Fly in the Cathedral, tells these stories in an authoritative but fantastically clear and readable way. He debunks many myths. People just didn't use carrier pigeons in those days. Rothschild wasn't on the battlefield. Rothschild didn't start by selling shares causing a massive panic before buying loads up (the stock market records show no such panic). David Ricardo, however, made sufficient money to retire from promoting stocks and, working with his friend Thomas Malthus who also made money, found Economics as a science. The myths debunked, there is a still a remarkably dramatic story.

And one mystery is left: who was Mr C?

Great history. August 2016; 297 pages

"All the king's men" by Saul David

This book chronicles "the British redcoat in the era of sword and musket" from the first standing army of Charles II in 1661 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815. It starts with a brilliant prologue describing the (closer than normally accepted) battle of Sedgemoor of 1685 when the irregular rebels of the Duke of Monmouth were defeated by a small royal army that contained the future Duke of Marlborough. It then proceeds through the Glorious Revolution, the anti-Jacobite wars of William of Orange and the War of Spanish Succession culminating in Marlborough's successes at Blenheim etc; the Seven Years War with the Canadian success of James Wolfe; the failures in the American War of Independence; and the triumphs of the Duke of Wellington both in India, the Peninsula, and at Waterloo.

This is an unashamedly 'great man' version of history although there are many moments when the ordinary private is squeezed into the story of the great generals. There are times when David seems uncritical: some of the old stories about Waterloo, for example, are repeated without comment: did Wellington really call Waterloo a 'close-run thing'? But by and large these tactics keep the narrative rattling along; it could easily have been very boring.

I am not really a fan of military histories. I find it incredibly difficult to picture a battlefield and the long descriptions of columns advancing and flanks and wheeling squares leave me hopelessly confused. The maps in this book help little. Some maps of inadequately labelled: I did not realise the idfference between cavalry and infantry on one map until I encountered a better-labelled map later in the book. And I found the campaign maps frustrating: some were on too small a scale so that places mentioned in the text were off the map and others were on too large a scale: one map, for example, showed the entirety of Wellington's Peninsular campaign even though he advanced and retreated over several years.

I always like to pick up trivia. It fascinates me that famous people are often woven in and out of narrative threads that are far apart. Thus the doomed Duke of Monmouth had earlier been exiled for his part in the Rye House plot which had been against his own father. James Wolfe drilled his men in using their bayonets held at the hip rather than the shoulder many years before his martyr's death. William Cobbett 'accidentally' enlisted as a soldier and had to flee England after bringing allegations of corruption against some of his senior officers. The grand old Duke of York who was not much cop as a field commander was a fantastic administrator of the army. And the Duke of Wellington allegedly came up with the name Thomas Atkins (a soldier who had died at Breda against the French in 1794) to go on the specimen page of the Army paybook, thus creating the immortal Tommy.

An enjoyable book with a careful mixture of great men and little. March 2013; 500 pages