Abstract
These verses written by Samuel Oakes, a Royal Marine imprisoned in France, provide a moving depiction of the prisoner of war’s plight. The intensification of conflict in this period and the consequent transformation in the conventions governing the exchange of prisoners of war meant that Oakes, alongside thousands of British soldiers, sailors and civilians, endured a captivity of much greater duration than had been the norm in previous European wars. Many did, as Oakes feared, die before they saw their home again.Oakes’ lament is an example of a text intimately shaped by the context in which it was produced. An acrostic, the first letter of each line spells out the site of the unfortunate prisoner’s captivity: Givet Prison. It is part of a corpus of accounts structured by the experience of imprisonment in the period 1793 and 1815. While the number of British prisoners in France was comparatively small - an estimated sixteen thousand - many wrote poetry, kept journals or published retrospective memoirs of their experiences. Relatively little recent attention has been paid to these texts: the last major study was published over fifty years ago.2 Yet prisoner of war narratives foreground several issues critical to our understanding of the ambivalence of wartime identities. Imprisonment undermined detainees’ personal identity as they lost many of the status signifiers they enjoyed at home or in their professional life; it also involved the imposition of a collective identity as military and civilians alike were classified as agents of the British armed nation.
Galled was my neck by strong Iron chains
I suffered much, tho’ vain it was to complain
Vainly I thought my suffering could not last
E’e this mortal thread of life was past
Torn were my feet by the stones for want of shoes
Poverty and misery before me were my views
Recalled was often my Nation & my home
I bore with patience the sequel of my Doom
Sometimes I wanted even Bread to eat
O then I knew that Liberty was sweet
Never more I thought to see my home again …
Lines written in the notebook of Sergeant Samuel Oakes, Royal Marines 1
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Notes
See Michael Lewis, Napoleon and his British Captives (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962).
Clive L. Lloyd, A History of Napoleonic and American Prisoners of War, 1756–1816: Hulk, Depot and Parole (Suffolk: Woodbridge, 2007), 21–3.
Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare: The Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1980), 31–74;
Gavin Daly, ‘Napoleon’s Lost Legions: French Prisoners of War in Britain, 1803–1814’, History, 89, 295 (2004), 361–80.
[Henry Lawrence], A Picture of Verdun, or the English detained in France… from the Portfolio of a Détenu (London, 1810), 2 vols, vol. 1, 2.
Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002), 57.
Edward Boys, Narrative of a Captivity, Escape and Adventures in France (London, 1827), 41.
On Prisoner of War ‘event scenarios’ see Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1994), chapter 4.
Peter Bussell, 25 February 1806, The Diary of Peter Bussell, 1806–1814, ed. G.A. Turner (London: Peter Davies, 1931), 5. See also, Farrell Mulvey, Sketches of the Character, Conduct and Treatment of the Prisoners of War at Auxonne, Longwy &c. from the Year 1810 to 1814 (London, 1818), 21.
Bussell, 22 April 1809, Diary of Peter Bussell, 84. For further examples of petitions from prisoners of war to the British government and of the general sense of abandonment expressed by members of the merchant navy in particular see William Story, A Journal Kept in France, During a Captivity of More than Nine Years… (Sunderland, 1815), 97–9.
A similar combination of stasis and loss of trust in official reports has been used to explain the proliferation of rumours and superstitions in the First World War trenches. See March Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992 [1954]), 89.
Gerald H. Davis, ‘Prisoner of War Camps as Social Communities in Russia: Krasnoyarsk, 1914–1921’, Eastern European Quarterly, 21, 2 (1987), 147–160;
Francis D. Cogliano, ‘”We All Hoisted the American Flag”: National Identity among American Prisoners in Britain During the American Revolution’, Journal of American Studies, 31 (1998), 19–37;
Rev. R.B. Wolfe, English Prisoners in France, Containing Observations on Their Manners and Habits (London, 1830), 6.
See, for example, Alan Kidd, ‘Philanthropy and the “Social History” Paradigm’, Social History, 21 (1996), 180–92;
Sarah Lloyd, ‘Pleasing Spectacles and Elegant Dinners: Conviviality, Benevolence and Charity Anniversaries in Eighteenth- Century London’, Journal of British Studies, 41, 1 (2002), 23–57.
On plebeian funeral culture and associations see Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, Death and Pauper Funerals’, Representations, 1, 1 (1983), 109–31.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
See John C. Gallagher, Napoleon’s Irish Legions (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Press, 1993), 38.
Watkin Tench, Brest-water, 7 December 1794. Gavin Edwards (ed.), Letters from Revolutionary France: Letters Written to a Friend in London Between the Month of November 1794, and the Month of May 1795 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001 [1796]), 23.
Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004), 7–9.
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© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
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Kennedy, C. (2013). Prisoners of War. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_6
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