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The Adventures of John Wetherell
by John Wetherell, edited by C. S. Forester
About John Wetherell
and Introduction to John Porritt Wetherell's Adventures
by C. S. Forester
John Wetherell was a native of Whitby, one of the thirteen children of Nathan Wetherell, a whaling captain. He was born in 1780, and his father died in 1789 — killed, according to Wetherell, in a skirmish with Eskimos in Davis Strait. Wetherell himself died, probably in New York, sometime after 1834. He left behind him an autobiography, in three volumes of manuscript amounting altogether to a thousand pages. It had been the object of a fruitless search by students of the period until, a few years ago, Mrs. Anne Klein of New York, an enthusiastic collector of rare nautical books, discovered it at the New York auction of the library of the late Gabriel Wells. There can be no doubt about its genuineness; the paper, the script, and the ink help to bear it out, even if the internal evidence was not conclusive. The water colors with which he illustrated his work, some of which, quite charming in their simplicity, are reproduced in this volume, could only have been painted by a seaman of the time.
There can be no doubt about the genuineness of the document, but unfortunately there is room for doubt about the truth of many of the passages contained in it. It purports to be a diary, but on the face of it the manuscript is at best a fair copy made from the original documents — that is obvious from the uniformity of paper, ink, and handwriting, and the absence of erasures or corrections. And a very brief further analysis shows that there is considerable variation in the value of different parts of the book. Wetherell was shipwrecked over and over again, a dozen times in all, and on more than one occasion he was the sole survivor, escaping with nothing more than his life and most certainly without the current volume of his diary. Later on he reconstructed the lost passages from memory — his memory was clearly very tenacious of names and dates — but then he never could resist the temptation to embroider his narrative. Some of the reconstructed passages are absurd, and some are demonstrably false, which is a great pity. For instance, there can be no doubt that he was an eyewitness of the Battle of the Nile, being present as one of the crew of a hired storeship, and if he had stuck to the truth in his account he might have made a decided contribution to history; but what he wrote about the Nile is so colored by newspaper accounts (the style can be detected) and so distorted by faulty memory as to be valueless.
Yet on the other hand there are long passages in the book which are obviously quite genuine, an exact reproduction of his original diary, unretouched even in transcription. It calls for only a brief examination to determine that these passages represent the portions of his diary which he was able to bring home to his relations in Yorkshire on the occasions when he completed a voyage without being shipwrecked or was able to save his belongings if he was. The quality of these passages is enormously higher than that of the other material. The style is more natural and there is no attempt to touch up the truth. The longest and most interesting of these passages deals with Wetherell's service in H.M.S. Hussar and his captivity in France, and that is the passage that has been selected for reproduction in this book. In length it is between a quarter and a third of the original manuscript, and it shows Wetherell at his best, patient and resourceful, simple and yet observant.
Wetherell had served his time as an apprentice in the British merchant navy, having narrowly escaped (by his own efforts) from being apprenticed to a baker. His articles dated from March 1793 (England was just entering into the long war with revolutionary France), and the ships in which he served were all North Country owned, from Whitby and South Shields and Hull. He made voyages — several of them, as has been said, abruptly terminated by shipwreck — to the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and one in an auxiliary vessel which took part in the successful British amphibious attack at the Helder. Much of his time, however, was spent in the Newcastle coal trade, the most instructive and exacting school of seamanship to be found at that time. Cook the circumnavigator learned his seamanship half a century earlier in the same school. Winter and summer, but especially in winter with its gales and fogs, the collier brigs made their way up and down the treacherous east coast of England where aids to navigation hardly existed, bringing the coal of Newcastle to London (sea coal, it was called, because of the way it was transported) in thick weather or clear; the tricky tides complicated the problem of picking their way through the sands of the Thames Estuary; the easterly gales of winter always found them with a dangerous shore to leeward; and the more usual westerly winds imposed upon them the necessity of working to windward into the Thames or the Tyne.
It was hard work and dangerous work, but nowhere in his account of his adventures does Wetherell bewail his lot, and most certainly never does he allow himself to dwell for one moment on the possibility that he might have grown up into a journeyman baker safe on shore. His articles of apprenticeship expired in 1803, the original seven years having been prolonged by the periods when he was not in his masters' employ through shipwreck and through transfer to another vessel. Up to this moment he had been protected from the press gang by the fact of his apprenticeship, for the Royal Navy did not press apprentices. This was partly because the Navy rightly considered apprenticeship as the best school in which to train young men for the highly skilled profession of handling sailing ships (the sailing masters and master's mates of the Royal Navy were mostly drawn from the merchant navy), but also because there was a conscientious objection to interfering with the rights of private property — for a shipowner it was a definite investment to train an apprentice.
Wetherell's indentures terminated at an unfortunate time for him, just when the uneasy Treaty of Amiens was ending and England was mobilizing afresh for war. The Navy had to be hurriedly expanded to ten times its peacetime strength, and skilled seamen had to be found. Landsmen were useful, and could eventually be trained, but the men who were needed were men who could 'hand, reef and steer', men already possessed of the myriad skills that were necessary to the sailor, and without such men a ship was helpless. They could only be found in the merchant navy, and quite legally they could be drawn from there, on the principle that the men so seized could be replaced by landsmen who could be trained for life at sea in conditions less exacting than in the fighting service. As a principle, it was entirely sound, but it was applied clumsily and with a good deal of friction. A naval officer, captain of an unmanned ship and anxious to get to sea — with his professional reputation largely dependent on his ability to man his ship — was not likely to observe rules and regulations too closely, especially as once he had his men on board, subject to the Mutiny Act and safely at sea, there was not much chance of protests reaching any influential quarter for a long time if at all.
Wetherell was on the threshold of his career. He had been offered the position of mate in a ship engaged in the West Indian trade, plying out of London. If he should survive the West Indian diseases as well as the hazards of the sea he could look forward to steady promotion and even to acquiring a respectable competence. But his ship was not ready, and while she was fitting he had returned to Yorkshire to say good-bye to his family and friends; he was at this moment betrothed to a girl, number three or four on the list of seven or eight to whom he lost his heart, according to his own account. The farewells made, the question arose as to whether he should return to London by road or by sea. To travel by road was slow, difficult, and expensive, and Wetherell elected to go by sea. British ships of war were watching the mouth of the Thames — much more than half of England's sea-borne trade came up London river — and Wetherell was seized, among others, and found himself a sailor of King George, on board H.M.'s frigate Hussar, Captain Philip Wilkinson.
She was one of a small squadron under Sir Sydney Smith (the man who had defended Acre and made Napoleon 'miss his destiny'), stationed for the very purpose of seizing men from the merchant shipping. For the authorities the situation was desperate. Immediately after the Treaty of Amiens had been concluded a most rigorous regime of economy had set in, under the direction of St. Vincent, and the number of men on the permanent establishment of the Navy had been reduced to the lowest possible figure. There were a few half-manned ships, and the rest of the Navy had been laid up under the smallest care and maintenance parties. In a day or two, not more, the French privateers would be out, and in hardly longer Napoleon would have his fleets at sea, and it was his boast that he only needed command of the Channel for twenty-four hours to be able to dictate peace on English soil. It was of the most pressing importance to reman the Navy, and every rule and regulation went by the board. Wetherell had provided himself with a 'protection' as a carpenter, which in the previous war would have been sufficient to keep him out of the hands of the press gang, but as it was, it only served to mark him out as the first man to be seized.
All the merchant ships that could be caught were denuded of their crews, to such an extent that they were unable to go on up to London. To deal with this situation the regularly enlisted men of the Navy (the Lord Mayor's men, in Wetherell's term, who could be more trusted not to desert) were put on board to sail the vessels up to London, whence the men could be returned to their ships via the guard ship. To the guard ships also were despatched the men in excess of the number necessary to complete the crews of the squadron; as Wetherell points out, the captains naturally retained all the best men for themselves. The distinction between the pressed men and those regularly enlisted was rigidly maintained; boats for the shore were manned only by 'Lord Mayor's men', and the fact that even this precaution might not prevent desertion was proved by the nearly successful conspiracy of Wetherell and his friends to desert with the Hussar's boat with the first lieutenant on board. But it was noticeable — more than one naval writer of the period has remarked on the phenomenon — that the pressed men played their part with zest when it came to pressing other men, perhaps because misery loves company.
At this time, with the war only just beginning, there was a difference in status between the men who 'entered' and the men who were pressed. The former were considered as voluntary enlisting, and theoretically they had certain rights. They had entered for service in one particular ship and could expect, when the ship was paid off, at the end of the voyage or for refitting, to be released from service, as at the termination of a contract. Subsequent events were to show that any such implied contract was unavailing, and men who had entered, and men who were pressed, were indiscriminately turned over from ship to ship without chance of liberty. But that was not foreseen at present, and pressure was applied to induce the men to 'enter'; the credit of the captain rose the higher with the number of these apparently voluntary enlistments. Wetherell's motives in refusing were twofold. He had no wish to serve under Wilkinson — and, as a pressed man, he might be transferred out of the Hussar — while at the same time he hoped that his friends at home might secure his release, which would be impossible if he had entered into a contract.
Harwich was raided, as Wetherell describes, and every available man there was swept off into the Navy. The men were ceaselessly exercised at their new duties — Wetherell complains about this without allowing for the anxieties of the captains, who might at any moment find themselves alongside a well-manned French ship of war in a battle where life, liberty, and honor would be at stake — and eventually the Hussar was sent off to join the squadron blockading Brest; she paid a brief call at Plymouth on the way, where Wetherell gives us an insight into the arrangements made for the entertainment of women on board the ships whose crews were never allowed to set foot on land, and then she began the dangerous and tedious service which resulted eventually in her loss.
Philip Wilkinson, her captain, was a brute, even making allowance for the strong prejudice Wetherell bore against him. He undoubtedly had previously been captain of the Hermione, as Wetherell says, but whether he was really responsible for the mutiny that took place under her next captain, Pigott, as Wetherell alleges, cannot be determined now; there is no doubt that Pigott was a brute too, and a most unpleasant one. The mutiny, to which Wetherell continually alludes, was famous, or rather notorious, in British naval annals. The crew of the Hermione, driven frantic by Pigott's treatment of them, rose during the night and murdered their officers. Pigott, badly wounded, was dropped overboard (in the evidence at one of the courts-martial there is a graphic account by an eyewitness of hearing Pigott's last words as he fell into the water), and the mutineers brought the ship into Spanish waters in the West Indies and handed her over to Spanish authorities. For many years after this event British naval records are studded with accounts of the courts-martial of the mutineers as they fell into the hands of the naval authorities. Quite a number of the mutineers could not endure their self-imposed exile and drifted, homesick, back to England. Most sailors of that day were unfitted for any shore employment, and they took to the sea again, and either they were pressed from merchant service or even, pathetically, enlisted direct into the Navy, where sooner or later they were, inevitably, recognized, tried, and mostly hanged. The Hermione was subsequently recaptured with a Spanish crew on board in one of the most daring cutting-out expeditions ever recorded, and incidentally the captain responsible, Edward Hamilton, years later was reprimanded by a court-martial for cruelty to members of his ship's company.
Cruelty was common enough. Flogging was frequent, severe, and practically unregulated, but before the practice is unreservedly condemned it is worthy of some little analysis. Even a conservative organization like a fighting service does not cling long to institutions that are actually deleterious. The first point to be borne in mind is that flogging was still a common and a legal punishment in ordinary life. While civilians were still being publicly flogged it would be Utopian to hope that soldiers and sailors could be made exempt. There was still an enduring superstition, surviving from the Middle Ages, that corporal punishment had some sort of intrinsic reformative effect on the victim, and it occurred to no one to question the effect it had on the person who inflicted it. But there was a more practical side as well. The sailor led a hard life; when the existence of a nation was at stake — its freedom, its institutions — the men of the fighting services had to submit to hardships pushed to the limit of human endurance, just as they have had to in every war save those of limited objectives. The sailors stayed at sea literally for years without a moment on shore, and they had to endure the consequent hardships of bad food and unhealthy living conditions. Life was as hard as it possibly could be, and in that case what was to be done with the recalcitrant, the lazy, or the rebellious? If a man shirked his work, how was he to be treated? To turn out to reef topsails on a wild night, to make one's way up rigging slippery with ice, whipped by a howling gale, in pitch darkness, in a ship rolling fantastically and unpredictably, was unpleasant as well as highly dangerous. What could be done with the skulker? Lock him up? The skulker would welcome any prison as an alternative to his present duty. Cut down his rations? He only had enough now to keep him in health, if that. Stop his pay? He could see no opportunity of spending his meagre pay for years to come. Hang him? Then his services were lost anyway. The only solution was to find a punishment that made life even worse than the hell on earth that he was already enduring, and the cat-o'-nine-tails was the answer in those days.
The problem has endured to this present day; let that be understood. Soldiers and sailors still endure hell on earth. When conditions grow too bad for mortals to endure for long, something even more horrible must be devised to compel them to submit to those conditions. What could be more horrible than Passchendaele, to quote no nearer example? Something had to be devised, something even more horrible than self-mutilation, with its agony and danger and shame, something worse than death. So in these modern days there are secrets and dreadful places which are whispered about among the ranks and the ratings — Bull Rings and Glass Houses and so on — and which inevitably are revealed in the end, to become the subject of Congressional or Parliamentary inquiry, and to be thought about with shame by the nations that unknowingly maintained them and that nurtured the men who staffed them. But the shame should not be felt, as long as total war exists, for those things are necessary to total war, and the war into which England was about to enter, and in which Wetherell was reluctantly to bear a part, was a total war, in that the existence of England as a free country depended on her victory over the tyrant.
Yet it is quite obvious that in the Royal Navy of that period the power to flog — on which ultimately efficiency and discipline depended — was frequently and shamefully abused, so that often — the Hermione being the most vivid example — it defeated its own object. There were captains and subordinate officers who were sadistic brutes and who enjoyed the infliction of punishment, and their appetite for it grew with indulgence. There were also unimaginative officers, and stupid officers, and timid officers, who could think of no alternative to physical punishment or who were afraid not to employ it. Captains with powers of leadership, who could inspire their men with their own devotion and patriotism, seldom or never had to use the lash. There were many ships where flogging was unknown for months or even years at a time. In those days of long voyages and poor communications much had to be left to the discretion of the captains, and with seven hundred ships of war at sea — one ship to every fourteen thousand of the population — it was impossible to find enough discreet captains, and it would have been even if the methods of selection for promotion had been less imperfect than they were.
This leads to the consideration of one of Wetherell's most serious grievances against his captain, the fact that Wilkinson was of ignoble birth. It is a curious cause of complaint. Wetherell himself came from good middleclass stock, but he rose from poverty to the eventual command of a ship by his own efforts, and it is hard to understand why he should bear a grudge against Wilkinson for doing exactly the same. The distinguished naval officers of the British service have always been drawn from the most diverse strata of society; Cochrane inherited a peerage; Nelson was the son of a poor country parson (and so were many of his colleagues); but there were plenty of officers whose parentage was quite obscure besides Wilkinson — Westcott, the British captain who was killed at the Nile, was the son of a baker. But there was long a prejudice (which has not yet quite died out) among the lower ranks of the British services in favor of being commanded by gentlemen — that indefinable term being interpreted according to the standards of the lower ranks themselves. It might be said on the one hand that the men expected more sympathy and justice, straightforward dealing, and ingrained leadership from a gentleman; on the other hand it might be suggested cynically that the lower ranks feared that an officer who had arisen from among them knew too much about them and was not as susceptible to having the wool pulled over his eyes. Edgar Lee Masters warned against the man who rises to power from one suspender; Wetherell felt that fear a century before Masters wrote those words. The officer who proved himself could rely on the devotion of his men whatever his origin, but at least until recently if he came from the lower orders of society the proof he had to offer was far more exacting, even if the prejudice or superstition of his men was quite baseless.
Wilkinson offered no proof, but it can hardly be believed he was such a poltroon as Wetherell makes him out to be. When the Hussar went aground on the French coast and Wetherell was made a prisoner of war, the only boat that escaped to the British forces was the one commanded by Wilkinson, and the reader can form his own opinion as to whether or not this was due to Wilkinson's superior ability, but the Admiralty's opinion of him can be guessed at from Wilkinson's subsequent career. In the absence of all competent witnesses except Wilkinson himself the court of inquiry into the loss of the Hussar could reach no conclusion, but Wilkinson was only rarely employed again. Most of his time was spent on half pay; in the records we find a mention of his marriage; occasionally he was appointed acting captain to fill a gap caused by death or illness, but that was all. Before the war was ended he had risen by seniority to the top of the captains' list, received his automatic promotion to flag rank, and was 'yellowed' — left in retirement and never employed further.
During the year in which the Hussar was part of Cornwallis's squadron off Brest she had taken an active part. Her boats shared in the cutting out of the Faisan — a brilliant achievement — and in the attack on the Revenge, which ended in a bloody repulse, in which Wetherell was wounded. Cruising in what even at that time were called the Western Approaches, she intercepted a good many would-be blockade runners. She carried messages, and she played her part in harassing 'Johnny Croppoe' as Wetherell calls him — Jean Crapaud, in other words; to the Englishman of that day the fact that Frenchmen occasionally ate frogs' legs was the most astonishing thing about them.
Perhaps a word of explanation is necessary regarding the Hussar's visits to Ferrol and Corunna. At this time Spain was a neutral in the struggle, but a neutral decidedly benevolent towards France. Secretly she paid a million francs a month to Napoleon from her bankrupt treasury (much to the easing of Napoleon's complicated finances), but openly she made her ports free to French ships of war. A French squadron had taken refuge in Ferrol and was blockaded there by Commodore Sir Edward Pellew with his pendant in the Malta, 80. The Spaniards could hardly deny the British the ordinary privileges of neutrals (especially as Spain was deliberately temporizing in order to get her treasure ships in from the Indies before declaring war), so that British officers with telescopes sat on hilltops round the harbors ready to report to Pellew any preparations the French might make to escape, and Pellew continually sent in for fresh provisions and water. Wine and brandy were cheap in Corunna, and tobacco was dear. It was only natural for the men who manned the boats to smuggle tobacco on shore and exchange it for liquor, and the men whose funds were too low to allow them to buy ship's tobacco parted with their shirts on their backs — literally — for something to drink. Wetherell describes how he was detected by the Spanish authorities in the act of smuggling; it is hard to believe there is any truth whatever in Wetherell's hint that he was smuggling on the captain's behalf. Wilkinson certainly would not have put himself in that manner into Wetherell's power — he had plenty of toadies to execute such a commission for him — and it is to be feared that when Wetherell speaks about the 'captain's tobacco' he means tobacco that had once belonged to the captain and had been removed from the captain's possession without the captain's agreement. It is a thousand pities that no research has been able to establish the truth or falsity of Wetherell's statement that Pellew himself obtained Wetherell's freedom by his threat to burn the town. Undoubtedly Pellew made energetic representations, and after that incident one can hardly blame Wilkinson (although Wetherell does; nothing Wilkinson did could ever meet Wetherell's approval) for mustering his ship's company, going through their kits, and punishing the men who were short of necessary clothing.
But that was very nearly the last of Wilkinson's official acts as captain of the Hussar, for shortly afterwards she was ordered back to Cornwallis's squadron, and was lost on the Saints' Islands. The ship's company, taken prisoner at the very beginning of a long war, languished in prison for many years. Wetherell himself was sent to Givet, a fortress originally planned to defend France on her Belgian frontier, and now, with the steady extension of the Empire, more nearly in its centre than on its border. A word of explanation may not be out of place regarding his method of going there and his delightful journey back again. Our minds have grown so accustomed to other means of transportation that it is hard for us to realize now that during the Napoleonic Wars every soldier who went anywhere, the conscript on his way to the depot, the recruit going to join his unit, the convalescent returning from hospital and the fortunate man who was granted leave, went on his own two feet, taking with him no more than he could carry on his back. Very rarely indeed fighting units were moved for some vital maneuver by wagon and diligence (like Maunoury's taxi-borne Paris army in 1914), but all the continual to-and-fro movements of detachments and drafts were made on foot. During the feverish military activity of the Empire, France was thronged with parties of soldiers going this way and that, and a system had been evolved which took care of the details efficiently enough. The soldier, or the noncommissioned officer in charge of a party, was given his marching orders — in French his 'feuille de route' — telling him where he was to go and what was to be the first day's march. Off he went, and at the end of the day he reported to the authority there. With the centralized French Government he could be quite certain to find a representative of the Emperor there; if not a military commandant or a prefect, then most certainly a mayor. The local authority endorsed his feuille de route and marked the next stage on it. Also he allotted him a billet for the night. Sometimes it would be in barracks, sometimes even in a building (often a disused church or a warehouse) specially devoted to the needs of transient soldiery, but most usually it was an order on a named householder to provide the bearer with a night's lodging — food, lights, and floor space to sleep on, all on a well-defined scale. This the householder was bound to provide, willy-nilly, and if he was a French citizen he could recover payment for it from the local authority, and the local authority from the central government; if the transaction took place in a satellite or subject country, it was only too unfortunate for the householder; for many years Napoleon maintained a large proportion of his army at other people's expense. But in France the system worked well enough, and private persons became accustomed, and even reconciled, to hearing a knock on their door and finding they had to receive a soldier or two as lodgers for the night. In humdrum provincial life it was one way to hear news and gossip, and a new face was not particularly unwelcome, particularly as most households had sons who were serving somewhere in the Empire.
In the morning the soldier set off again, bearing in his haversack the unconsumed portion of his day's rations to sustain him on his day's march of fourteen miles or more; in each town experience had long shown what was the most convenient next stage in whatever direction the soldier was taking, to Poland or Spain or Italy. So he went on, day by day, sometimes going for hundreds of miles — he could even, when his meager pay fell due, draw that from the local authority as well. In many of the hundreds of military memoirs of the Empire the remark is to be found that those carefree days spent on the way to join one's unit were the happiest part of the military life, despite homesickness and footsoreness.
With prisoners of war the system applied with hardly any variation. There was a military, or at least a police, escort to the party, with an officer or noncommissioned officer in charge, and every member of the party had to be accounted for at each halt, but that was equally the case with parties of Napoleon's reluctant conscripts. Treatment was considerably more variable; on the credit side was the provision of wagons to carry the party's baggage. The application to the mayor for billets was a dip into a lucky bag containing more widely assorted possibilities than for a soldier, for there was always the chance that the party might be housed in the local gaol, to be overcrowded and underfed, attacked by vermin and blackmailed by an unscrupulous gaoler. But it was always in the cards that they might be given billets in private houses, unlikely as that may appear to us, and there they could usually expect, prisoners of war though they were, good treatment from their compulsory hosts. National enmity, and even resentment at the violation of domestic privacy, usually died away at personal contact, in face of the deeper appeal to charity and hospitality; Hitler's slave labor sometimes had the same experience despite the Fuehrer's savage edicts, and so did German and Italian prisoners of war who volunteered to work for the Allies. Moreover, in those unenlightened days Frenchmen with friends or interests in England did not hesitate to show their sympathy towards the prisoners of war.
In this introduction no explanation can be offered for Wetherell's claims to have witnessed an exhibition of public and judicial torture in Amiens; it seems more like a complete fabrication than an exaggeration, but it is hard to imagine what suggested the story to Wetherell. The judicial procedure of the Consulate certainly did not permit of torture. It may be suggested that Wetherell actually did see what he claimed to see, and that he was a witness of one of the last survivals of the methods of the old regime before the new criminal code was established, but it seems flatly impossible. Wetherell as yet knew no French, and there was some misunderstanding if there was no deliberate lying.
From Amiens, Wetherell went on through towns whose names have a different significance nowadays — Bapaume; Cambrai; he spent a night in the church at Albert, under the statue of the Virgin which a century later was to be watched by the soldiers of four nations as it hung head downwards from its spire and whose fall was — incorrectly — predicted to come with the end of the war. It was a march of seven and a half weeks until he reached his destined prison in Givet, the distance from Brest being nearly seven hundred miles — not very severe marching, but not too easy.
Wetherell was a prisoner for eleven years, and the account he gives of his imprisonment is very like accounts by prisoners in many prisons in many countries — the hopes and the disappointments, the weariness and the synthetic amusements, the riot, the escapes, the treachery, the infiltration of news. He was by no means badly treated; materially, as regards food and housing, he was probably better off than he would have been while serving in a British ship of war, and it is to be feared that he lived better than the prisoners in England lived. Yet already there was one marked difference apparent from the amenities of the eighteenth century. There was almost no attempt to exchange prisoners, although even in the last war there had been frequent exchanges; Wetherell himself had already been a prisoner once, after shipwreck on the coast of Flanders, and had been exchanged after only a brief confinement in Valenciennes. Bonaparte now had reason to believe that his resources in manpower were greater than those of England, and refused to contemplate exchanges in consequence. He had already taken the unprecedented step of arresting, at the outbreak of war, all British civilians in his domain, and he kept most of them prisoner during the eleven years of war; in Wetherell's notes we find allusions to these prisoners, most of whom lived on parole near Verdun.
Wetherell like a sensible man kept himself occupied, learning French and navigation and music, and later on had frequent cause to be thankful for all three. Like the prisoners of 1914-18, and 1939-45, he learned of the victories of his captors through their bulletins, and of their defeats only from new prisoners. Austerlitz was balanced by Trafalgar, Wagram by Talavera. Givet was on the road to one of the principal crossings of the Rhine at Mainz, and time and again he saw the Grand Army pouring forward to fresh victories. Then at last came the issue of the famous 29th Bulletin, when Wetherell, like the French Empire, first heard of the magnitude of the disaster in Russia. It was a moment of cold common sense on the part of Bonaparte, unlike Hitler's reaction to the news of the surrender of Paulus at Stalingrad. Wetherell knew the Empire was tottering, but he had another year to wait — a year during which he saw a new Grand Army thronging forward to the Rhine and the battered wrecks of it falling back.
With the arrival of the Allies on the frontiers of France itself the prisoner of war camps at Givet had to be evacuated; there were many similar incidents in 1945, but they were attended with a dreadful horror that was almost entirely missing in Wetherell's experience. Bonaparte was as much a megalomaniac as Hitler, and both those potentates fought it out to the last gasp because admission of defeat could only mean giving up all power, but Bonaparte to the end retained some sanity and some clarity of vision, and he ruled a people and had delegated power to subordinates who retained, or regained, their common sense with the approach of disaster. There were few atrocities, and on the other hand there were remarkable displays of kindness towards the marching prisoners; Wetherell and his party completed half the circuit of France, first at a moment of total mobilization, and then at a moment of total collapse, with few hardships and many experiences that involved something quite the opposite. There is something oddly appealing in the picture of the well-rehearsed band marching into the little French provincial towns playing catchy tunes and the townspeople gathering round them as they gave their concert in the place. France had been a dreary place for the last year or two, with every man of military age caught up into the Army, with news almost entirely lacking, with an impending sense of disaster, and with taxation and regimentation pushed to what in those days seemed the uttermost extreme. Here came Wetherell and his fellow instrumentalists, youth and music and fun. They brought news, the townspeople could learn about Salamanca and Vittoria — battles of which they had never heard — from the lips of men who had actually fought there. And they brought the promise of the end of the regime, and they were living proofs that the conquerors of France would not be the undisciplined horde of savages that Bonaparte had threatened them with. And they brought spring with them, too, the lovely first budding of the coming summer, into the Loire Valley that Rabelais loved. Small wonder that the girls lost their hearts and the rich men opened their purses.
France was being assailed on two sides at once, as was Germany in 1945. While Russians and Prussians and Swedes and Austrians advanced across the Rhine, Wellington and his ever victorious army had burst in over the Pyrenees and was pressing into the fairest provinces of France. Toulouse and Bordeaux fell to him, and the prisoners who had been hurried in one direction to avoid recapture by the Russians were turned about to avoid recapture by the British.
The present editor has confined his editorial efforts to an endeavor to make the book easily read. Wetherell's style is unaffected and good, and his spelling is of a remarkably high standard, but he knew nothing whatever of punctuation. Periods and exclamation marks and colons and quotation marks are dotted about lavishly with almost no reference to the sense, making the matter difficult to read; there are some passages in the original that have had to be puzzled over before their sense can be extracted. But with the punctuation supplied remarkably little more needed to be done. Occasional redundant words had to be removed and some necessary conjunctions supplied, but in no case has the sense of the original been varied.
Wetherell wrote a great deal of doggerel verse. Most of it was remarkably poor, and most of it has been eliminated, only enough being retained to show what the rest was like. The reader is assured that he has lost nothing of consequence.
C. S. Forester
