generals of the world at the head of unconquerable troops.”

Wellington, patient under difficulties, had fully succeeded in his task
of freeing the Peninsula from French domination. And if at Salamanca
he showed a tactical skill which stands out in contrast to some of his
other victories, the final campaign of Vittoria shows a strategical
grasp which is not, in the opinion of foreign experts in the art of
war, so brilliantly apparent in the years before 1813-14. But one thing
may be mentioned, of which many are now ignorant. A common cry among
the French throughout the prolonged war was the cruelty with which
their prisoners in England were treated. The charge embittered the
already bitter contest, and though foreign nations were little better
than ourselves, if at all, there was more than a sub-stratum of truth
in what was openly proclaimed in France.

However much abuse may have been lavished on France in the time past,
and which lives to our shame and sorrow below the surface even now,
this is one of the evil heritages of that war-stricken time. This
is the recorded story of how the prisoners were treated: “They were
consigned in huge batches, like so many convicts, to the hulks at
Chatham and Portsmouth, and to inland prisons at Dartmoor and in some
rural districts of Scotland. The history of the hulks is one simple
tissue of horrors. The Government had no active wish to maltreat
its prisoners, but the officials placed in authority over them were
often rude, and oftener drunken, and did not understand the character
of their guests. Worse than that, they did not care about such
understanding; and at the time it was rather patriotic than otherwise
to detest a Frenchman. The prisoners were not systematically starved,
but they were fed as men-of-war’s men were then victualled--on weevilly
biscuit, salt junk, and jury rum. They had no means of cooking their
food in their own fashion; they were pent-up between the decks of
old vessels, all but deprived of exercise, and denied the commonest
appliances of clean