: The French Prisoners of Norman Cross: A Tale by Brown Arthur Rev - Napoleonic Wars 1800-1815 Prisoners and prisons British Fiction

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The curfew bell rang at nine o'clock; the lights were put out; and all had betaken themselves to their hammocks. The sentries passed backwards and forwards outside, or stood at ease in their boxes. The picquets went the rounds every half-hour. Each soldier on guard was on the alert, and had need to be. Silence and slumber fell on all but the many watchers in that large assemblage of unhappy men.

There was, however, one prisoner who could not sleep that night. It was not the roughness of his accommodation that kept him awake. Mere hardship would have been welcome to him, for he was a true soldier. It was the thoughts of his heart that troubled him; and alas! he knew not the soothing power of prayer. Not a thought of prayer, not one paternoster entered his mind. For he had lost his faith in God. We do not mean that faith which no one has till he asks the Spirit of God to give it him, and which then makes him love God in spite of all difficulties; but we mean faith in the existence of God, which all have by nature, and which sin alone can extinguish; not only grosser sin, but sinful vanity of mind.

He thought of his much-loved home, of the mother that was so dear to him, what agony of mind she must be undergoing; of his darling Elise, how her dear heart must be full of him. And then there pierced him, like the sting of an adder, the thought of separation, certainly for years, perhaps for ever, from all that happiness: the hopelessness of his condition as a prisoner of war at a time when war seemed chronic in Europe, without prospect of cessation. And in the abject misery of his soul--misery all the more intense because of his peculiar sensitiveness of nature--he thus bewailed in secret and with rebellious will his fate.

Some idea has already been given of the formation of the Norman Cross barracks; but a fuller and more detailed account of them may, perhaps, be interesting.

Norman Cross is the name given to that part of the parish of Yaxley, in the county of Huntingdon, where that grand old thoroughfare of England, the Great North Road, along which coaches might drive four abreast, is crossed by the Peterborough Road. In one corner, bounded by these two roads, is a large piece of pasture land, some forty acres in extent, which Government purchased in 1796, for the purpose of erecting barracks on it for prisoners of war, then multiplying fast, and for a large number of soldiers to guard them.

The situation was exceedingly healthy, being at the highest point of the road sloping up for a mile and a half from what was then Whittlesea Mere. It was not too near the sea, to make escape more easy, yet near enough to Yarmouth, King's Lynn and Wisbeach, to facilitate the landing and transport of prisoners to their destination. It was on the Great North Road, only 78 miles from London, and near enough to towns to obtain provisions with ease and in abundance. It was in fact selected by the War Office on all these accounts from amongst several other eligible sites in the kingdom.

The accounts given of the plan on which these barracks were constructed do not altogether agree in particulars. There is a plan of them still in existence which has received the imprimatur of Major Kelly the Commandant, his signature being on the back of it in testimony of its correctness. We shall not therefore be very far wrong in making that our main guide in the description of them.

The part where the prisoners were confined consisted of sixteen large buildings of wood, very long and lofty, each two stories high, placed at the end of four rectangular pieces of land , nearly in the centre of the forty acre field, and occupying altogether some fifteen acres. Each rectangle was separated from the others, and was surrounded by very high and strong palisades. They were placed symmetrically round a circular block-house, mounted with cannon, which commanded every one of the sixteen buildings, as well as the ground attached to them. There were therefore four of these huge buildings, side by side at intervals, at one end of each quadrangle, which was again sub-divided so that every building had an equal portion of ground belonging to it.

A wall of similar palisading surrounded the whole of the quadrangles at some distance.

The prison was constructed to contain 5,000 prisoners, and compared with some other places of confinement in England for a similar purpose must have been tolerably comfortable.

Besides these central buildings, which may be called the prison proper, there were a great many others scattered about, intended for various purposes, such as kitchens, bakehouses, guard-rooms, turnkeys' lodges, and, more important than all to the safe custody of the prisoners, two large wooden barracks like each other, one at the east and the other at the west of the whole enclosure, for the accommodation of two regiments of infantry that formed the garrison.

The English officers were quartered in a large wooden house close to the road towards the south-east corner of the enclosure, and close to the house of the Commandant. This last was the only building of brick in the whole place, and remains to this day, together with the officers' mess- room, and the house where they were quartered, now cased with brick.

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