"We are not strangers. We are brothers in misfortune," Denham answered, with the smile which always drew people to him. "Call it a loan if you like. For your wife's sake—" very softly—"do not refuse."
Roy did not hear all this, but he heard more than he was meant to hear. A move then was made, and Curtis replied huskily to some careless remark, as the callers took leave.
"Den, I say, I didn't mean to listen, but I couldn't quite help," came outside as a confession.
"Then your next duty is to forget. Now for the ramparts," Ivor said, dropping the subject at once. Roy knew better than to put any questions.
When first Verdun was appointed to be a depot for prisoners, the commandant was a General Roussel, of whom no English prisoner had any complaint to make. He treated them well and justly, and such hardships as they had to endure were for the most part not his fault but the fault of the French Government.
Unhappily, before many months were past General Roussel was sent elsewhere, and his successor, General Wirion, soon showed himself to be a man of a totally different stamp. Wirion was a product of the Revolution, the son of a pork-dealer in Picardy, at first an attorney's clerk with a shady reputation, then an active terrorist, approved of by the villain Robespierre. He was, in fact, a low-born and ill-bred scoundrel, avaricious and grasping, who under Napoleon had risen to be a general of gendarmerie.
Prolonged captivity, with such a creature in authority, was likely to become even worse than it had been before; and so, to their cost, the captives at Verdun speedily found.
All indulgences allowed by the first commandant were removed. Prisoners and détenus alike, no matter what their grade or position, were compelled twice a day to report themselves at appel, unless they preferred by payment to escape the unpleasant necessity. Instead of being free to walk or drive as far as five miles from the town in any direction, they now might not leave the gates without payment of six francs. Incessant douceurs were demanded on every possible pretext; and oppressions, bribery, and rank injustice became the order of the day.
Again and again numbers of the détenus, on some false excuse, or with no excuse at all, were closely imprisoned in the citadel, being set free only on the payment of heavy sums of money. This dread hung over them all as a perpetual possibility.
Far worse still was the terror of being some day suddenly despatched to the "black fortress," Bitche, where large numbers of British prisoners pined in a more grim confinement than at Verdun. The tales of Bitche dungeons, of Bitche horrors, which from time to time filtered round to those who lived in Verdun, read now like stories of mediæval days.