The following was the passport form for French prisoners whose exchange had been effected.
‘By the Commissioners for taking care of sick and wounded seamen, and for Exchanging Prisoners of War.
‘Whereas the one person named and described on the back hereof is Discharged from being Prisoner of War to proceed from London to France by way of Ostend in exchange for the British prisoner also named and described on the back hereof; you and every of you (sic) are hereby desired to suffer the said Discharged Person to pass from London to France accordingly without any hindrance or molestation whatever. This passport to continue in force for six days from the date of these presents.
‘June 3rd. 1757.
‘To all and Singular the King’s officers Civil and Military, and to those of all the Princes and States in Alliance with His Majesty.’
In 1758 the complaints of the French Government about the unsatisfactory state of the prisoner exchange system occupy many long letters. ‘Il est trop important de laisser subsister une pareille inaction dans les échanges; elle est préjudiciable aux deux Puissances, et fâcheuse aux familles’, is one remark. On the other hand, the complaint went from our side that we sent over on one occasion 219 French prisoners, and only got back 143 British, to which the French replied: ‘Yes: but your 143 were all sound men, whereas the 219 you sent us were invalids, boys, and strangers to this Department.’ By way of postscript the French official described how not long since a Dover boat, having captured two fishing-smacks of Boulogne and St. Valéry, made each boat pay twenty-five guineas ransom, beat the men with swords, and wounded the St. Valéry captain, remarking: ‘le procédé est d’autant plus inhumain qu’il a eu lieu de sang-froid et qu’il a été exercé contre des gens qui achetoient leur liberté au prix de toute leur fortune’.
This and other similar outrages on both sides led to the mutual agreement that fishing-boats were to be allowed to pursue their avocation unmolested—an arrangement which in later times, when the business of helping prisoners to escape was in full swing, proved to be a mixed blessing.
I do not think that the above-quoted argument of the French, that in return for sound men we were in the habit of sending the useless and invalids, and that this largely compensated for the apparent disproportion in the numbers exchanged—an argument which they used to the end of the wars between the two nations—is to be too summarily dismissed as absurd. Nor does it seem that our treatment of the poor wretches erred on the side of indulgence, for many letters of complaint are extant, of which the following from a French cartel-ship captain of 1780 is a specimen:
‘Combien n’est-il pas d’inhumanité d’envoyer des prisonniers les plus malades, attaqués de fièvre et de dissentoire. J’espère, Monsieur, que vous, connoissant les sentiments les plus justes, que vous voudriez bien donner vos ordres à M. Monckton, agent des prisonniers français, pour qu’il soit donné à mes malades des vivres frais, suivant l’ordinnance de votre Majesté; ou, qu’ils soient mis à l’hôpital.’
It would seem that during the Seven Years’ War British merchant-ship and privateer officers were only allowed to be on parole in France if they could find a local person of standing to guarantee the payment of a sum of money to the Government in the case of a breach of parole.
The parole rules in France, so far as regarded the limits assigned to prisoners at their towns of confinement, were not nearly so strict as in England, but, on the other hand, no system of guarantee money like that just mentioned existed in England.
On March 12, 1780, a table of exchange of prisoners of war, with the equivalent ransom rates, was agreed to, ranging from £60 or sixty men for an admiral or field-marshal to £1 or one man for a common sailor or soldier in the regular services, and from £4 or four men for a captain to £1 or one man of privateers and merchantmen.
In 1793 the French Government ordained a sweeping change by abolishing all equivalents in men or money to officers, and decreed that henceforth the exchange should be strictly of grade for grade, and man for man, and that no non-combatants or surgeons should be retained as prisoners of war. How the two last provisions came to be habitually violated is history.