[218] Wellington’s Despatches.
[222] This is how the naval authorities summed up the failure of the negotiations for exchange: “There is no fixing the French Government to any basis of exchange. Every concession on our part has produced fresh demands. We have about 50,000 prisoners of war in England, in France there are about 12,000, two-thirds of whom are not prisoners, but détenus, many of them women and children. Even these our Government were willing to exchange, when the French Government proposed that their 50,000 should be sent over en masse, for the 12,000, and then afterwards the Spaniards would be released. This would enable it to man twenty-five sail of the line, and still retain the Spaniards, our allies, in his hands.”—Naval Chronicle, vol. xxiv., p. 327.
[232] Appendix H.
[233] A good description of Verdun in 1811 will be found in the Narrative of a Forced Journey through Spain and France an a Prisoner of War in the Years 1810 to 1814, by Major-Gen. Lord Blanfrey. In 2 vols. 1814. Vol. ii., chaps, xxxvi.-xxxvii., good account, viii., ix., xl., xli., xlii., xliii., xliv.
The author says he was confined for seven weeks as a hostage to prevent the English Government from punishing a French officer who had projected a rising of the French prisoners in England.
[238] Naval Chronicle, xiv., 17; xv., 122; xvi., 108; xvii., 108; Douglas Jerrold, The Prisoner of War, 1842; A Picture of Verdun, or the English detained in France, from the Portfolio of a Détenue, 1810, 2 vols.; Letters from France, written in the Years 1803 and 1804, including a Particular Account of Verdun and the Situation of the British Captives in that City, 2 vols. 1806; Chambers’ Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, 1854, vol. i., p. 330.
[240] Few of the Danes were brought to Norman Cross, either at this period of the war or in the second period when there were a considerable number confined in Great Britain. From a return made to the House of Commons in 1812, it appears that of 54,508 prisoners confined at the various depots, 52,640 were French and 1,868 Danes, but no register of Danish prisoners confined at Norman Cross has been found.
[241] Mr. Share often heard his grandmother speak of her husband’s acts of kindness to the prisoners who were landed at Plymouth. One incident which he recollects was, that one day, just as the family were sitting down to dinner, Captain Holditch ran in, seized the large beefsteak pie just placed on the table, and carried it off, saying, “I want this, there are a batch of French prisoners going by, and they look famished, they must have it.”
Mr. Godwin (loc. cit.), mentioning that on Christmas Day 1805 some 250 French prisoners from Porchester Castle marched into Basingstoke on their cheerless way to Norman Cross (probably some of the heroes who had fought against Nelson and his captains on the 21st October), asks the question, “Did the Hampshire folk give them a share in their festivities?” The above anecdote justifies us, I hope, in saying that the answer to this question would be “Yes.”
[242] These had been a considerable source of profit to the farmers, who had contracted to remove them regularly from their positions below the latrines, and had used their contents, with the rest of the refuse of the prison, as a guano to the great benefit of their land.