LOST LETTERS

Manawatu Standard, Volume L, Issue 115, 11 April 1930, Page 6

LOST LETTERS

A SECRET IN A FRENCH BOX. A RELIC OF .1810. About the year 1876 a troopship landed from India Tho King’s Royal Rifles, formerly the 60th Foot. The soldiers, after tho habit of their kind, brought with them many curious objects, tokens and souvenirs of their foreign service. And one of them named Swan carried in his baggage perhaps the most curious object of them all, writes a correspondent of the London Times. It was a little box, the sides made of four pieces of different woods, hard and sorL with a slightly overlapping lid of soft wood attached by two hinges of iron wire. The whole box measured 7in long by 3Ln high and 4jin deep. Tho sides and the lid were decorated with an applied ornament made of small strips of variously coloured straw arranged in a central panel representing houses and trees within a border of the straws set aslant. Under a varnish the different straws had mellowed into a delicate golden harmony very pleasant to see. Tho ornament had fallen from the back, leaving bare tho design of the houses which the straws had followed. The inside had originally been covered with obviously European wallpaper patterned with dark red roses.

There is no record to tell in what Indian bazaar the soldier had picked up this peculiar treasure. For some 5U years it remained in his son’s family, preserved among the “Army things,” as the memorials of his father were called. Then one day the son of the house, looking round for a box to use in the construction of a wireless set, found this Indian relic and began to handle it, when tho bottom fell out, and from the cavity thus revealed came 18 letters written on old paper and in a language unknown to the family. His father, Mr J. W. Swan, brought the box and its contents to the British Museum, and there the strange history of the casket was revealed. For tiie straw ivork was of a familiar type, a manufacture which occupied the long, weary leisure of French prisoners in English camps and hulks in the days of the Napoleonic wars. The finest examples of the kinds are to be seen to-day in tire Peterborough Museum, the work of the occupants of the prison of Norman Cross, from tho broken roofs of which young George Borrow saw protruded “dozens of grim heads, feasting their prison-sick eyes on the wide expanse of country unfolded from that airy height.” But not in Norman Cross or in any inland prison were these letters written. They are dated in November and December of the year 1810 from two of the Chatham hulks, the Canada and the Irresistible, members of that grim fleet of 10 dismantled ships which has an evil pre-eminence even in the annals of w’ar prisons. Tlie year 1810, then drawing to its close, bad mocked those poor sufferers with an illusory hope of escape from their agony. Negotiations for the exchange ot all prisoners had been proceeding at Morlaix between the Comte du Moustier and Mr Mackenzie. But news had come that, through Napoleon’s obstinacy in unreasonable demands, the negotiations had proved abortive; and the letters make it clear that the prisoners had relapsed into their customary apathy ot despair. Occasionally, however, one more fortunate than the rest would be sent home to France as suffering from an incurable disease or as unlawfully taken.

THE SMUGGLER’S CHANCE. Antoine Damare, p f the commune of Etaples, had been carried off while pursuing his lawful avocation of fishing and in this winter of 1810 he was to be sent home. Here was a chance of smuggling letters. Amid much excitement in the hulks a box with a false bottom- was made, and the prisoners fell to writing their hopes and their despairs and their appeals to their distant friends. Antoine no doubt took away the precious contraband, but wo do not know what happened to him. The box was never opened, the letters failed, of their destination, and wandered over many seas and lands until the wireless enthusiast gave them back to the light of day. Interesting enough in themselves, their history lends them an extraordinary fascination; and it is sad to listen again to these voices doubly dead for a hundred years and restored thus strangely from the tomb. The men write in a new agony at the failure of their hopes of exchange. “If we lived in the days of the fairies,” says one, “I would implore their favour to take me from this place.” They promise that they will spare their friends the description of the accursed den in which they rot. But we can represent their circumstances to ourselves by studying the accounts of life in the hulks given by Colonel Lebertre in his letter to Crokcr from the Canada, and by Louis Garneray in his fascinating book “Mes Pontons.” Lebertre’s letter is illustrated by a horrible engraving of the orlop deck of the Brunswick, where -100 prisoners are shown lying packed like herrings in hammocks swung in a space 130 feet long by 40 feet broad and six feet high. There was space for only 431 hammocks, so that 29 men had to find a place underneath this mass of human beings. Tiro official regulations were not inhumane, but the carelessness of those in command and tho villainy of contractors frequently made, a mock of the intentions of the Government. Tho food wus vile and tho prisoners themselves often gambled away their clothes. Garneray describes them emerging on deck from their prison. “Imagine,” he says, “a generation of the dead rising for a moment from their tombs with hollow eyes and wan, earth-coloured complexions, their backs fallen in, their beards untrimmed, their dreadfully emaciated bodies scarcely covered with tattered rags, and you will have but a faint conception of the appearance of my comrades in misfortune.” Garneray was an artist, and perhaps intensifies his picture, but there is sufficient independent evidence that it is not wholly overdrawn. And he adds that their sufferings were increased by the curiosity of idle visitors, particularly English ladies, whom he bitterly describes as “parees avec cc luxe eelntant et de mauvais gout si essentiellement britannique.” NO ANSWERS.

Tho letters the poor fellows wrote amid these horrors are for the most part on the one monotonous note, Their messages home have received no •answer, and they complain bitterly that they are forgotten in their desolate captivity. It is an afflicting thought tnat these letters too were destined to receive no answer. Some are the work of illiterates hardly to l.e deciphered except by an expert in French phonetics, save when they give an unconsciously ironic turn to the universal sentiment of the rustic letter-writer and “hope that this lotter finds you as it leaves me at present.” One such, addressing his wife, tells her that he has written, to a friend in • Boulogne to send “mes xefes” (mes.ef-

fets) to her, but the letter to the friend is set down for'him by a more literate hand. His Boulogne correspondent is to go to a certain house and demand tho vests and shirts and carpenter’s tools (for the prisoner was clearly a ship’s carpenter), but he must be careful not to disclose the writer’s address. ,

These men had been gathered by the hazards of war from all France. This last was a Breton, but another, Van Haverbeke, came from Dunkirk. He had commanded a privateer with the extraordinary name “Lo singe en batiste,” and one of his crew, Louis Benoit, of Antwerp; was in the same prison. Van Haverbeke had asked to be put on his parole and to be released from tho hulks, but that grace was refused him because his ship mounted only 12 guns. Two more, guns, it appears, would have set him free. He writes two letters to his father and to his love, Mademoiselle Kerkheve, in the same tone of resigned despair. Both letters are in French, but he adds a postscript to his mistress in Flemish, the language of their affections, wishing her the Happy New Year that was to be denied to himself by the failure of the negotiations for exchange. Another sends a bitter letter to his mistress, daughter of an innkeeper in Dax, reproaching her for her faithlessness since she sends no answers to his letters. So all, writing to father, mother, wife, mistress and friend, strike the same plaintive note of sick heart and hope deferred. Their purgatory was to endure, for release came only with the fall of Napoleon in 1814.

Among the papers is a certificate of the death of one of the prisoners on board the Brunswick. The dead from the hulks lie now in tho grounds of the Naval Barracks at Chatham where a memorial has been erected over their bones. Another memorial was dedicated to the memory of the dead prisoners at Norman Cross on July 23, 1914, when tho world was preparing for another and greater war in which the French and English were to V .get their ancient animosities, and the

same sad tale of weary imprisonment was to repeat itself for many soldiers of both nations. The story of these letters, recovered by so odd a chance after their distant wanderings, will have a poignant memory for those of this generation who have shared the experience of the dead and forgotten writers.