HOW SOME OF THE PRISONERS ESCAPED IT T was after the negotiations for peace in 1806 broke down that the attempts at escape among the British prisoners became frequent, and began to cause serious trouble to the French authorities at the different depôts. Before that the attempts had been comparatively few. Henceforward, as time passed, with no end to their captivity in sight, the prisoners at Verdun and elsewhere became more and more reckless in their endeavours to get free, and their breakings out more numerous. In 1812 the Moniteur published a list, with names, of no fewer than 355 British prisoners, naval and military officers and men, as well as détenus, who had disappeared from their places of confinement and got away to England. How certain of the escapes were carried through will be told in the words of those who effected them. Some of the officers, we are told, purposely contrived to have their parole revoked for some minor offence before, making their escape. Others, after making their arrangements, coolly wrote on the eve of going off to the Commandant of the depôt giving back their parole, and bidding their gaolers good-bye. Some of the prisoners did not take even that formality, justifying their act to themselves as fair retaliation on the score of personal ill-usage and illegalities on the part of their custodians. The greater number of these parole-breakers, it would appear, were among the civilian détenus and merchant-ship skippers and mates; the naval and military officers were, as a rule, more scrupulous about deliberately violating their word of honour. With regard to this matter of parole, indeed, the Court of Inquiry held in England on escaped prisoners reporting themselves had, in the case of officers, always to be satisfied. One escaped officer from Verdun, it is on record, who had broken his parole in flagrantly irregular circumstances, was actually sent back to France by the British Government. He was, it is stated, a Lieutenant Sheehy of the 89th Foot, who made his escape from Verdun in October, 1813. At the personal instance of the Prince Regent, it is stated, he was publicly reprimanded in a memorandum issued by the Commander-in-Chief, and sent back in arrest under flag of truce to Morlaix, where he arrived in March, 1814. It was, as it happened, just at the moment that Napoleon was in the midst of his last desperate effort to rescue Paris, and to attend to the matter was, of course, out of the question. The Lieutenant was detained at Morlaix pending instructions from the Emperor which never came, and within three weeks hostilities were over. Nothing more is on record about him after that; he was not, however, it would appear, allowed to rejoin his regiment. Among the naval prisoners, Lieutenant George Vernon Jackson, who lived to become an Admiral, attempted four escapes. The first was while he was on his way under guard from Brest to Verdun; and he remained at large in France, with a brother officer, a midshipman, Mr. F. Whitehurst, hidden first at one place, then at another, for the lengthy period of fourteen months. After that he and his companion, getting to the coast near the mouth of the Seine, found means of launching a flatbottomed boat which they had managed to get hold of, with a sheet for a sail; but their luck now turned against them, and they were seen, chased, and recaptured by local fishermen. Lieutenant Jackson was taken back to Verdun and shut up in the citadel until again, this time with four other prisoners, he contrived to make his escape. Again he was recaptured, the party being pursued and surrounded on the second day of their flight. Imprisoned now in an underground cell of the Porte Chaussée gaol of Verdun, he made two other attempts to get away, both of which were foiled at the last moment. On the first occasion Lieutenant Jackson's companion fell and broke his thigh, necessitating the abandonment of the attempt; on the second, the clumsiness of another companion gave the alarm to a sentry near by. He was sent, in consequence, to the dungeons of Bitche heavily chained, to escape finally from there with a military friend, Lieutenant l'Estrange, of the 71st Regiment. The two had to separate to avoid capture, Lieutenant Jackson at the last finding a boat near a village on the coast of Normandy, in which he rowed across the channel until he was picked up in a state of complete exhaustion by a British cruiser off Selsey Bill. A midshipman named Temple escaped by crouching at the far end of a diligence under the cover of the petticoats of two women, a French lady friend of his and her servant. Hidden like that he contrived to get all the way to Strasburg, where the French lady, who was a native of the city, managed to get a passport for Temple, and smuggled him across the Rhine. In the end he made his way to Austrian territory and thence to Trieste, where he got on board ship. Another young fellow, who had acquired a perfect knowledge of French-William Wright was his namegot away from Verdun, and after wandering in France for some time, contrived somehow to get himself appointed interpreter to a French General, General Brabançon, commanding at Havre. Watching his opportunity, he succeeded one night in creeping on board an English vessel which had been sent in with a flag of truce, and hid himself in a large trunk while the vessel, as was customary, was being searched by the police before sailing. Nobody opened the trunk, and, after remaining shut up for an hour, as soon as the ship was at sea, the stowaway made his |