IN THE DUNGEONS OF BITCHE AND SEDAN BITCH ITCHE, an isolated fortress in Lorraine, some eighty miles east of Verdun, was the principal punishmentdepôt for British prisoners who transgressed the regulations, naval and military officers and men, and civilian détenus. "The high turrets and massive towers of the gloomy fortress," as Midshipman O'Brien describes with a shudder the aspect of the place, "stood perched on the summit of a vast rocky eminence, steep and almost inaccessible, with a sheer drop of some hundred feet on all sides, amidst a bleak, forbidding tract of country. Their very appearance was sufficient to strike the mind with horror. . . It had on one side three ramparts. The first is from 90 to 100 feet high; the second from 40 to 50; and the third from 25 to 30; with redoubts, entrenchments, and all contrivances of military engineering almost innumerable." Verdun furnished most of the Bitche victims, principally during the rule of General Wirion, sent often for no specified offence. Some of Wirion's officer victims, indeed, were not allowed to know anything of what was impending for them until they were suddenly roused out of bed by gendarmes in their lodgings in the town-usually between four and five in the morning, while the whole place was asleep. The gendarmes hustled their victims off, giving them hardly time to cram into a trunk what things they could lay hands on at the moment; sometimes, indeed, we are told, hardly allowing them time to get all their clothes on. The prisoners were then ordinarily started off on foot, sleeping at night while on the way in the gaols of the places passed through. "As an indulgence, which I paid for," records one officer with money, who was so sent from Verdun to Bitche, "I was permitted to travel in a vehicle, with, as my companions inside, the two gendarmes my guards. I had to pay for the gendarmes' food and drink by the way-and they ordered what they liked !" Such was the experience, as a fact, of the first British prisoner sent to Bitche-a Colonel Stack of the Old Irish Brigade of the French Royal Army, who, after the Revolution, had joined the British Army. He had been arrested in Paris as one of the détenus and sent to Verdun. On the night before his deportation to Bitche Colonel Stack gave a large dinner-party in the house at Verdun he was allowed to occupy, at which General Wirion was present, all amiability and smiles. Wirion left the house at midnight, shaking hands with his host and thanking him heartily for his hospitality. Three hours after that, at three in the morning, two gendarmes knocked Colonel Stack up, produced what purported to be an order from Paris for his immediate transfer to Bitche, and hurried him off in a carriage hired at the Colonel's expense. They behaved during the journey as has been said, eating their meals at the Colonel's table, and even sleeping in the same bedroom with him. Colonel Stack was kept a close prisoner at Bitche for over three years, no reason for his detention being forthcoming. He was then sent back to Verdun, where he had to remain until 1814-until the end of the war. Prisoners of every description and class were to be found at Bitche: naval and military officers whose parole had been taken away, sailors and soldiers, also a number of détenus, some of them gentlemen of position in England, others blackguards and rogues, sharpers, drunkards, and so forth, whom the Verdun authorities had found it convenient thus to get rid of. The senior officers and détenus were assigned quarters in the upper barracks and case mates in the citadel, as many sometimes as twenty having to live together in the larger apartments. They were badly fed, on Government rations, and had to do everything for themselves, being subject to rigorous confinement, and only allowed out for exercise in the barrackyard for a limited time every day; but they fared royally in comparison with the lot of the other prisoners-the great majority-of inferior station. These, comprising midshipmen and merchant-ship officers and sailors and soldiers, were all crowded into underground vaults, damp, cold, loathsome dungeons, originally hewn out of the solid rock in the days of Louis XI. of France to serve as the storehouses of the fortress during a siege. One of the smaller vaults, the worst of all, a cramped and narrow cell in which were confined prisoners recaptured after escape, and undergoing special punishment in consequence, was fifty steps beneath the surface of the rock. "It was fifty deep stone steps underground, for I have often counted them," records Midshipman O'Brien, who was on two occasions kept a prisoner at Bitche. The place he describes as being "ankle-deep in slime and filth," and "reeking with noxious and pestiferous effluvium." For window there was one narrow hole in the rock face, with a triple-barred iron grating across it; that single aperture to admit air and light, and the prisoners there were only allowed, all the year round, “a little straw and a blanket." Half a dozen men were sometimes kept there together, for a month at a time, with only two hours above ground daily for exercise. In another dungeon, one of the principal souterrains, thirty steps under ground, according to O'Brien's description, as many as sixty prisoners were confined together, and had to live, and eat, and sleep in the place. They were allowed a wood fire in winter, "as an indulgence," and rush-lights at night, with, for bedding, a blanket and straw on the floor. There were two large souterrains of this kind at Bitche. |