All Roads lead to Verdun: British Prisoners of War in the Peninsular War, 1808-1814
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53351/ruhm.v9i18.622Palabras clave:
Napoleonic Wars, Peninsular War, prisoners of war, British Army, laws of warResumen
The French Revolution has generally been regarded as marking a water-shed in the conduct of war, a moment, indeed, in which the world embarked on an age of total war. This process supposedly affected eveery aspects of waging war, including, not least, the treatment of prisoners of war: according to the rhetoric of the more violent revolutionaries, and especially the Committee of Public Safety, indeed, prisoners of war were to be put to death, in which respect particular vehemence was expressed in respect of the soldiers and sailors of Great Britain. In this article, which is strictly limited to the situation that pertained in the theatre of war itself (the experiences of the prisoners concerned once they reached France are discussed by another contributor to this work), these claims will be examined via the prism afforded by the experiences of the 5,000 prisoners of war estimated to have been taken by the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Peninsular War of 1808-14, these being catalogued in some detail by the memoirs and other works produced by them in the years after the conflict. By reference to these narratives, it is possible to establish that, if it ever existed at all, the new model urged upon the French armies by the Committee of Public Safety certainly made no appearance in Peninsular-War Spain and Portugal. Prisoners of war could expect a greater or lesser degree of brutality at the moment of capture and occasionally ran the risk of being killed in cold blood, but there was little difference here with the experience of earlier conflicts, whilst the continuities remained in place thereafter: for the rank and file, in particular, conditions were rarely anything other than uncomfortable, but officers were invariably treated with a great deal of courtesy. As for the many men who were found to be wounded at the time of their capture, they were given such medical care as was available. In short, however much the men concerned may have suffered, their experiences were very much those of predecessors in earlier conflicts, the fact being that what is seen in Spain and Portugal is not the birth of a new age of barbarism but the survival of eighteenth-century norms of conduct.
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