According to the Entry-book of French prisoners-of-war on parole at Moreton (now in London at the Public Record Office) twenty-eight arrived in 1807: four of them (a Navy captain and three midshipmen) broke their parole on 27, 28 September—the Entry-book says ‘run’: another midshipman ‘ran’ in 1809, another one remained till 1810, and a general (Rochambeau) and his servant remained till March 1811; but all the rest, and nine new-comers, left in May 1808, and no more came till March 1810. In that month ninety-three arrived, and fifty others before October. One of them died there, and thirty-three ‘ran,’ including eight captains, eight commanders, and fourteen other Navy officers. They mostly ‘ran’ in batches: six on 28 October and seven on 21 December 1810, five on 18 January and four on 26 January, and six on 11 October 1811. Fifteen of the others left in 1810, forty-four in 1811, and the remaining fifty in February 1812.
Up to October 1810 the prisoners-of-war at Moreton were chiefly Navy men; but in that month a hundred and twenty-eight arrived, and these were chiefly Army men. In the Entry-book seventy-one of them are marked ‘General Dupont’s Army, Spain.’ (This army had capitulated at Baylen, 20 July 1808.) Only one of these men ‘ran’—he was a surgeon—and the other seventy left in March 1811 together with thirty-three other Army men who arrived in October 1810 but are not entered as Dupont’s. Of the other twenty-four who arrived then, two died, two ‘ran,’ two left in 1811 and eighteen in February 1812. There were only twenty-eight arrivals from November 1810 to March 1812: four of them ‘ran,’ ten left during 1811 and seven in February 1812, after which date a general (Reynaud) and six others were the only prisoners remaining, and they all left in November 1812. There were no more prisoners there until May 1814: then forty-three arrived, and these very soon left.
This gives a total of 379 French prisoners-of-war on parole at Moreton at one time or another; and the greatest number at any one time was 250 at the beginning of 1811. Rochambeau was the best known of them—he came out in full uniform on hearing of any French successes. He had been commander-in-chief at San Domingo, capitulated there in 1803 and was not exchanged till 1811, and in 1813 he was killed at Leipzig.
The three who died at Moreton were buried in the churchyard, and the tombstone of lieutenant Arnaud Aubry is still there, but I cannot now find the tombstones of the other two, lieutenant Louis Quaintain and midshipman Jean François Rohan. The tombstones were there not long ago, and must have been destroyed or carried off—nothing is safe now from a curiosity hunter in a motor car. Out at Dartmoor prison the graves were all obliterated in the following thirty years while the place was uninhabited and derelict; and the present monument, for all the French who died there, was not erected until 1865.
It has no names; and till these last few years there was no notion of commemorating people individually because they fell in a great war. We see monuments to Wellington and Nelson and other great commanders, and neat marble tablets in old parish churches to officers who happened to be squires, but never any record of the rank and file. We do not know who went from here to serve with Wellington or Nelson or Marlborough or Drake; and this is all the more annoying as we have lists of all the men here who ‘protested’ in 1641: see page 68. There will be lists enough of those who fell in this last war, thanks to all the busybodies who disguised their own pet schemes as War Memorials.
They pulled down the old Market House at Moreton to make way for their War Memorial there. The structure was an upstair room supported on granite columns and sheltering the open space between them; and it was a four-sided room with the corners rounded off, eight of the columns standing at the eight points where the sides began to curve. It was not a masterpiece of architecture; but it looked quite comfortable in its surroundings there until a new public-library was built on one side of it and a new public-house on the other, and then it looked like one of the New Poor between two Profiteers. If they were bent on pulling down the room, they might at least have left the granite columns and the architrave, put on a roof, and placed their War Memorial in the space below; or if the space seemed disproportionately large, they could have moved the columns closer in.
This is a granite country; and if men are to be commemorated here, their names should be inscribed on granite. But cutting names on granite slabs costs more than casting them on metal plates: so an inscription was cast, an ungainly piece of granite was put up, and the metal plate fixed on. That is the War Memorial for which the Market House was swept away. It is like a notice-board. The metal thing at Bovey is like a kitchen-fender. There is an old town-cross there, and this unsightly piece of metal has been fixed on round its base; and the medieval mouldings were chiselled away in order to fit this on. No doubt, the cross was not intact before: it had been restored, removed from its old site, and set up on a new substructure. But that was all done by a gifted architect who saw exactly how to gain a great effect; and this addition just spoils it.
They cut down an old oak tree at Newton to make way for a War Memorial there; and it was a well-known tree, one of the landmarks of the place. The memorial is a classic column with a figure of Victory on the top. If people want that sort of thing, they would get far better results by copying some ancient masterpiece, instead of carrying out an ancient notion in a modern way. In this case they might have tried a restoration of the figure of Victory by Pæonios, together with its pedestal. It is a triangular pedestal, about twenty feet high, and exactly suited to the site, which is a triangle between three roads.
There is an excellent precedent in Vitruvius, II. 8. 15, for dealing with a War Memorial. Artemisia captured the city of Rhodes about 350 B.C. and put up a War Memorial there, comprising two bronze figures: one, a portrait of herself, in the act of scourging the other, a personification of the city. After the Rhodians had driven her out, they wanted to remove this War Memorial; but they had scruples, as it had been consecrated. So they decided that the site was holy ground on which no foot might tread, and therefore built a wall round it; and they made the wall so high that nobody could see the War Memorial.
In such figures as Rhodes, personified, the ancients had a great advantage over us, as they were all accustomed to these personifications. We have only John Bull for England, and Britannia for the British Isles. There is nothing Britannic about Britannia: she is merely Athenê holding Poseidon’s trident instead of her own spear. John Bull is out of date: one cannot imagine that worthy person using any weapon but his fists; and there would be very little dignity in a pugilistic group of John Bull knocking out the German Michael. Some sculptor should create a type that really would personify England.