Although it was a traffic strictly forbidden, some of the prisoners sold their turn of exchange to their more wealthy comrades, the purchaser assuming the name of the vendor, and vice versa. If detected, the vendor forfeited his rights of exchange, and was kept a prisoner until the end of the war. Notwithstanding this regulation, it was said that one man had contrived to carry on these transactions from 1797 to 13th January 1800 without detection. This voluntary prolongation of the imprisonment surely helps to prove the falsity of the statements of the French as to the treatment of the prisoners by the British.

This practice of personating a fellow prisoner was carried out occasionally under more tragic conditions.

In the course of the investigations to establish the facts of the epidemic of 1800–01, a certificate was found with the name François le Fevre crossed out, and the name of Bernard Batrille substituted, with a note that the name of François le Fevre was assumed by Batrille when he entered the hospital to die of consumption. This was, doubtless, not the sole instance of such practices among the prisoners. A prisoner high up in the list for exchange, who knew that he was dying, would, when about to enter the hospital, for a sum of money or from friendship, exchange his current number and his name with another man low down in the list, the dying man, if this was done for payment, thus securing a sum of money for his heirs in France, and the other increasing his chance of release by exchange.

The case of Le Fevre and Batrille would have escaped detection, but for the special investigation made by Captain Woodriff to establish the identity of those who had died in the epidemic unrecognised. The investigation led to the identification among the living prisoners of François le Fevre, who had been personating Batrille, since he entered the hospital, and had died, and was buried in the name of the former man.

During the first period of the war, 1793–1802, exchange went on, with interruptions from the causes mentioned. The prisoners passed in a sluggish stream through Norman Cross, but so sluggish that many of them were there, confined or out on parole, during the whole five years. Notwithstanding the exchange the prisons were at times greatly overcrowded, and in 1801, when the French army in Egypt surrendered to Abercrombie, such was the burden of prisoners that no attempt was made to claim the troops as captives, but they were transported in British ships to France.

During the second period of the war negotiations for exchange completely failed. In April 1810, when there were about 10,000 British prisoners in France, and 50,000 French in Britain, Mr. Mackenzie was sent by the British Ministry to treat for a general exchange, the main condition in the British proposal being that for every French prisoner returned to France, a British prisoner of equal rank should be returned to Britain; that this should go on until the whole of the British prisoners were restored; and after that was accomplished, the British Government would continue the restoration of the French, on the understanding that France on her part returned to his native country, man for man, one of the prisoners of Britain’s allies—i.e. a Spanish or Portuguese of equal rank with the French prisoner handed over by Britain.

To this the French Emperor would not agree; he insisted that the British and their allies should be reckoned as one army, and that for four Frenchmen released from the British prisons and returned to France, only one British subject should be returned to England, and three other prisoners of various nationalities restored to their respective Governments. On this plan, if the negotiations fell through while the exchange was going on, say, when it was half way through, France would have got back from Britain 20,000 of her veterans, England would have received only 5,000 Britons, the balance, 15,000, being a rabble of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian levies of practically no value, and this contention Buonaparte held to, although it was his opinion expressed a few years later “that while as a fighting unit, you might set against one Frenchman one Englishman, you would require two Prussian, Dutch, or soldiers of the Confederation.”

Buonaparte, referring to the failure of these negotiations, accounted for his firmness by his want of faith in the British, and his conviction that when they got their 10,000 countrymen back, they would find some excuse to stop the further exchange. Could we, on our part, after the unfair conduct of the exchanges, in the early part of the war, instances of which with the Norman Cross prisoners have been given, rely on the French Government carrying out in good faith even its own scheme, which on the face of it showed a disregard of British rights. [222] The negotiations fell through, and the great bulk of the prisoners at Norman Cross had to drag out their weary life until the abdication of Buonaparte and his retirement to Elba in 1814.

CHAPTER XI

BRITISH PRISONERS IN FRANCE—VERDUN—NARRATIVE OF THE REV. J. HOPKINSON