one means of foiling plots to escape, by preventing the prisoners congregating too long and getting to know one another. The British prisoners of war, sailors and soldiers and merchantship skippers and seamen, all of these-except naval and military officers on parole, who were allowed to travel independently*—were tramped across France to Verdun in gangs and convoys, escorted by gendarmes or soldiers, according to the number of prisoners, being passed along in custody from one district to another. Under the Napoleonic regime all France was mapped out for police purposes in a network of artificial squares, each some fifteen or twenty miles wide, and to each of which a brigade of gendarmes was allotted. In turn, the several districts handed on the prisoner-convoys from one to another, each district passing them on to the next adjoining along the road. Every convoy was mustered and checked off before being handed on to its next custodians, also wherever it passed the night. "We walked always between twenty and thirty miles," describes one captive," and on entering any town where we were to pass the night we were drawn up in rank and file and called over. . . . The same form of calling over took place again next morning." Along the road the treatment of the prisoners depended entirely on the disposition of the gendarmes, their custodians-usually rough and brutal fellows. "It was too often the case," describes a British naval officer, who, as many did, had refused to give his parole, preferring to share the lot of his men, in speaking of one detail of a march of which he himself was an eye-witness, "that the "Prisoners of war having the rank of officers, as well as hostages (détenus)," directed Napoleon in a special decree for British officers, dated Paris, August 5, 1811, "shall enjoy the favour of proceeding freely and without escort to the place assigned to them to reside, and shall not be detained by the way on giving their parole not to depart from the route marked out for them, or to leave their place of residence without authority." prisoners, being without shoes, became so lame as to be incapable of marching. They were then driven on at the point of the sabre, sometimes being dragged along by being attached to the horse, and at length, when utterly incapable of proceeding, they were deposited in the next prison until able to march." Small parties of prisoners, up to a dozen in number as a rule, were normally escorted by two mounted gendarmes, the prisoners being sometimes handcuffed in pairs, and even roped together. At night they were locked up in barns or disused buildings, "often without roofs, containing mud and pools of water," as often as not in the common gaols of the towns where they had to halt; places for the most part filthy and damp, foul-smelling, and usually swarming with vermin, and sometimes already tenanted by French convicts and other criminals, among whom our men were thrust indiscriminately. Midshipman O'Brien, of the frigate Hussar, wrecked off the coast of Brittany in the early part of 1804, in his account of how he and the rest of the ship's company were marched from Brest to Verdun, relates that in some places, when the prisoners complained of the abominable hovels in which they were lodged at night, all the answer they got was to be sworn at and told that any hole was good enough for English dogs like them. In one of the larger towns, a fortified place, all of them, he tells us, were thrust into the underground dungeons of the citadel. It was bitterly cold weather, but so scanty was the supply of straw provided for the men's bedding that the officers had to buy more at their own expense, and to pay a shamefully exorbitant price for it. "In this straw they enjoyed what warmth they could, making it into ropes, and twisting it. round their exhausted limbs and bodies." O'Brien also describes how, at some places, when the prisoners' convoy with which he was marching arrived at their destination for the night before it was dark, they were all paraded in the market-place and made a spectacle for the people of the town to gloat over and mock at before being taken to their quarters in the gaol. He tells us further this ugly story of an attempt that was made to get his men to turn traitors. It took place at Rouen, in the gaol, where the captive crew of the Hussar had been shut up on their arrival on the previous evening. "At about eleven o'clock some French naval officers came to inspect our people, and gave some of them pieces of money, with an intention to induce them to enter the French service. This I saw, as it was publicly done in the gaol-yard, and I happened to be looking out of the window at the time. I desired them to be particular in what they were about. One man, a Dane (Hendrick Wilson, a very fine fellow, upwards of six feet high, who had been taken by us and had volunteered into our service), replied: 'We will take what money they choose to give us, sir, and that shall be all they will gain by coming here."" One shocking display of deliberate barbarity to three prisoners who were being marched to Verdun by themselves in charge of a gendarme, is also recorded by Captain Sir Jahleel Brenton, of the wrecked frigate Minerve, some of whose personal experiences while in captivity are related farther on. The three prisoners were a naval Captain, a Major of marines, and a Bermuda planter, captured while returning to England on board a merchantman. "They were landed at one of the ports of the western coast of France, and, notwithstanding their rank in life, were marched in the same manner as common seamen from brigade to brigade, and like them confined in the common prison of the place where they halted for the night. Upon one occasion, after being placed in the cachot and shown the straw upon which they had to pass the night, a fierce mastiff was brought into the place. The prisoners were told that if they lay perfectly quiet during the night they would not be molested, but if they attempted to get up the dog would seize them; and as |