Читать книгу Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815. A record of their lives, their romance and their sufferings онлайн

37 страница из 159

Callous, almost brutal, according to our modern standards, as was the general character of the period covered by this history, it must not be inferred therefrom that all sympathy was withheld from the unfortunate men condemned to be prisoners on our shores. We have seen how generously the British public responded to the call for aid in the cases of the French prisoners of 1759, and of the Americans of 1778; we shall see in the progress of this history how very largely the heart of the country people of Britain went out to the prisoners living on parole amongst them, and I think my readers may accept a letter which I am about to put before them as evidence that a considerable section of the British public was of opinion that the theory and practice of our system with regard to prisoners of war was not merely wrong, but wicked, and that very drastic reform was most urgently needed.

Some readers may share the opinion of the French General Pillet, which I append to the letter, that the whole matter—the writing of the anonymous letter, and the prosecution and punishment of the newspaper editor who published it, was a trick of the Government to blind the public eye to facts, and that the fact that the Government should have been driven to have recourse to it, pointed to their suspicion that the public had more than an inkling that it was being hoodwinked.