248 French Prisoners. 



Had Mr Forbes lived he would have acknowledged his indebtedness 

 to Mr Joseph Corrie, Millbank, Maxwelltown ; Mr James Carmont, 

 Castledykes, Dumfries ; and Mr John Shirley, Lanark. The matter 

 on Lockerbie and Lochmaben is confined to some letters from Mr 

 John Henderson, Bank of Scotland, Lockerbie, who interviewed 

 some aged inhabitants and recorded their recollections, and to a few 

 notes of names of prisoners. I have given the whole without much 

 alteration, but fear it is much less than we would have received 

 from Mr Forbes had he lived. The introduction I have taken in 

 its entirety from the Transactions of the Hawick Archseological 

 Society. — Ed.] 



Baron Lejeune in his interesting- Memoirs (Longman, 

 1897) tells us that Napoleon asked a great many questions 

 about the condition of the French prisoners in England. But 

 he sent no money to pay for the subsistence of those absent 

 members of his fighting family as the British Government did 

 in the case of theirs in France, and the result was that a bill 

 of costs for the maintenance of all the French prisoners in 

 Britain from 1803 to 18 15 was presented to the French 

 Government by the British Transport Office in 181 5 for the 

 amount of _;^6, 87 1,674 us iid. As is well known to readers 

 of history. Napoleon would not exchange prisoners save on 

 terms which were unacceptable to the British Government. In 

 this he was the forerunner of General Grant, who in the great 

 Civil War of 1861-5 would not exchange prisoners with the 

 Confederacy. Prisoners, therefore, accumulated in England 

 and the Confederated States, with direful results in the latter 

 case', for the South could not feed its Northern captives ade- 

 quately, and many of them were in consequence starved into 

 skeletons, or, worse, into Shadowland. 



The treatment of prisoners of war is a mark of the state 

 of civilisation of a nation, and it is painful to read of the usage 

 prisoners have received during the many wars of the centuries. 

 A well-known military maxim is — Make war as hard and 

 relentless as possible, and it willthe sooner come to an end. 

 In short, policy is invoked rather than principle. The care 

 and custody of prisoners make great demands on the admini- 

 strative powers of a country. In Britain this office was per- 

 formed by the Commission for Sick and Wounded Seamen, 

 and the duties of the Commissioners were thus defined so far 



