The Unknown Warrior (29 page)

The prisoners wasted little time leaving their mark on Portchester Castle. They inscribed their names, generally initials in the case of the nineteenth-century detainees, and dates on the walls; for example, along the outer face of the north side of the corner bastion. All recognisable names were French and dates recorded were ‘1796 (2), 1797 (9), 1799 (1), 1800 (2), 1805 (1), 1808 (2), 1810 (2), 1811 (3)' (
ibid.
: 69). There were a few possible American names (John Yarold, F. John Gill, Thomas Collins, and John Rigby) from 1796 to 1798 (
ibid.
: 69).

The phase that Cunliffe refers to as ‘Period 3' (1794–1810) saw the castle's preparation for its role as a prison, resulting in several changes to the Medieval building, ‘Nine prison huts provided accommodation for 4,500 prisoners. The keep and north range held perhaps another 2,500. The basement was used as a
cachôt
or “black hole” for the incarceration of recalcitrant prisoners while the upper floor is recorded in local tradition to have been an autopsy room' (
ibid.
: 49).

Later phases included the ‘metalling of the airing yard with a thick deposit of beach gravel … in anticipation of an influx of new prisoners' (
ibid.
: 29). This took place between 1810 and 1815 during the final throes of the Napoleonic era in Europe encompassing Napoleon's defeats in the Peninsular Wars (1808–14) and Waterloo (1815). After this, the castle was used as a prison for deserters, though this is archaeologically invisible.

Life at Portchester might not have been too dissimilar to barrack existence; conditions were rudimentary and far from comfortable. Boredom would have been a further problem and the French prisoners helped to alleviate this situation by crafting items from materials available to them. Such ‘Prisoner of War Art' is now much sought after on the antiques market.

Animal bones were extensively used by the prisoners to manufacture a wide range of items some for their own personal use, others to be sold to the local populace or to dealers. Bone shop models and bone boxes made in the prison camps were much appreciated at the time … As might be expected the excavations at Portchester have produced a number of bone artefacts and bone-working debris … (Cunliffe and Garratt, 1994: 110)

Similar prisoner-made objects were crafted at Norman Cross and are preserved in the nearby Peterborough Museum. As we have seen, much work was put not only into making boxes and models, but also into manufacturing bone gaming pieces. The results of this activity would have given the bored prisoner a further outlet for his energies.

Soldiers who were taken prisoner did not necessarily survive internment. The memorial to the 1770 French and Dutch soldiers of the Grand Armée on the Great North Road near Peterborough bears testament to this (see Plate 18). A pillar with a bronze eagle perched on its top was located at this point, close to the prison camp of Norman Cross (Yaxley barracks), which had opened at the end of the eighteenth century. The camp has gone and the bronze eagle was stolen (it was replaced in April 2005), but traces of the camp are still visible.

Andersonville Prison

For the infantryman, prison was not always an alternative to death, sometimes it simply meant that he died at a different location. One of the most notorious prison camps, as far as nineteenth-century soldiers were concerned, was Andersonville. This American Civil War site was the place of captivity for Union troops: ‘At least 12,920 of the roughly 45,000 prisoners who entered its gates died as a result of malnutrition, exposure, dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, and various other diseases and sheer brutality' (Prentice and Prentice, 2003: 175). The camp commandant, Captain Henry A. Wirz, was later hanged for the goings-on in the camp. Substantial archaeological work has since been carried out at Andersonville, revealing much about the form of the prison and elements of life within its confines.

The original stockade had been built by slaves and had squared posts as shown by the excavations. Prisoners were made to build extensions to the camp and this, too, has been investigated: ‘The 1987
seac
Field investigations at the prison's northeast corner uncovered roughly 216 linear feet of stockade wall that was part of the 10 acre northern extension added in late June 1864.' In parts ‘preservation of the stockade posts … was very good so it was possible to determine the placement and size of posts exposed in the trench … the prisoners had used unhewn pine logs rather than hand-hewn square posts used by the earlier slave gangs' (
ibid.
: 177).

Many of the objects recovered by these investigations related to the construction of the site, including an iron axe head, and axe head fragment, one brass and one iron buckle, 19 cut nails, and a brass fiddle-shaped padlock cover stamped with a crown symbol and the letters GR (
ibid.
: 179–80). Personal touches were also visible in this most de-humanised environment. Finds included a ‘silver filigreed band with intact eraser [which] was all that remained of a pencil probably used to write letters home or perhaps to make entries in a diary' (
ibid.
: 186).

Escape

Not surprisingly, given harsh conditions at many of these prisons, the inmates would frequently try to escape. At Portchester, non-French inmates – those who were German or Swiss but still served in the Grande Armée – were sometimes recruited into the British Army, the King's German Legion, for example, so ending their imprisonment. After a change of English law in 1794, it also became possible for French men to enlist into the British Army (Holmes, 2001: 50). French prisoners would often attempt to escape from prison, too:

many escapes were attempted and some succeeded throughout this period and particularly during the year 1811. Various means of escape were favoured: tunnelling is mentioned several times, on one occasion a rope was used to help the prisoners scale the wall and in August 1812 the possible complicity of the turnkey was investigated. Escapees, when caught, were confined to the ‘Black Hole' on reduced rations … (Cunliffe and Garratt, 1994: 158)

The traces of an attempted escape were excavated at Andersonville. ‘During the 1990 excavations, a failed prisoner escape tunnel was also discovered along the southern stockade wall … Within the excavated units, the widest section of the escape tunnel was about three feet. Based on profile map reconstructions, the tunnel was approximately 20 inches high, just big enough for a man to crawl through' (Prentice and Prentice, 2003: 185–6). The tunnel failed as it had been cut through sandy soil, which collapsed and brought stockade posts down just 1m past the stockade line.

MEMORIALS AND BURIALS

Although individual leaders had been commemorated in the past, it was a relatively new occurrence to create memorials to those individual soldiers of low rank who had died in the service of their country. It started in the nineteenth century, in the wars of the British Empire, the American Civil War and Napoleon's campaigns. Names of battles were immortalised by the country that emerged victorious. Central Paris, for example, has a number of memorials to the conquests of Napoleon, including the Arc de Triomphe, the Gare d'Austerlitz and the Avenue de la Grande Armée. America has its Gettysburg and Sherman Avenues, although a civil war is, perhaps, more difficult to commemorate. Britain has Waterloo Station and numerous Alma Roads.

Perhaps, in terms of nomenclature, one of the more poignant memorials of nineteenth-century wars occurs at British Football Grounds. The Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 was one of the bloodiest learning curves ever encountered by the British Army. The Boers, though small in number, fought for a cause in which their belief was unshakeable. They made use of the terrain in which their local knowledge was crucial, and utilised the accuracy of the most modern rifles to inflict several defeats on supposedly stronger British forces.

The Battle of Spion Kop is one of the most well known of these engagements. In January 1900 British troops were pinned down on the hill, in very shallow trenches, by Boers who commanded the heights above them. Casualties were very high and many hundreds were killed. A large number of men who served in this battle had come from Lancashire and it was later determined that areas of terracing at several football grounds in this area would pay tribute to the service of their countrymen at this engagement. Hence, the Spion Kop (later simply the Kop) end at Blackpool and, famously, the Kop end at Liverpool. Other clubs – such as Bradford City, Birmingham City and Coventry City – also followed in this tribute.

The deeds of nineteenth-century regiments were also remembered in their home town or city, or on the battlefield itself. Many of these were raised some time later, when wounds from the event had had time to heal both literally and metaphorically. The battlefield at Waterloo is a case in point with monuments to all sides being raised – Dutch, German, French and British. The farmhouse of Le Haye Sainte, pivotal to the battle, has plaques on its enclosing walls to the sacrifices made by both British and German defenders, and also to the men of the Grande Armée who had stormed it.

In the age of the British Empire, Imperial might was often thrown against indigenous warriors who were armed with spear or sword as opposed to rifle and artillery. Despite the casualties suffered, all too often those killed by British forces not only had no marked grave, but also no memorial. Isandlwana is an exception to the rule. There, alongside the memorial to the 24th Regiment, and the whitewashed stones that mark the place of burial cairns, is a large monument to the Zulu forces that fought in the 1879 war. In America, too, there are Civil War regimental memorials throughout the country, such as the Shaw monument in Boston on which infantrymen are depicted in relief. It is in the nineteenth century that, for the first time, individual soldiers of lowly rank, rather than the great army commanders, are recognised in memorials.

Soldiers who are not named, but who serve to represent the common fighting man, have been given the term ‘unknown soldier'. The individual infantryman was seen as the epitome of the sacrifice and struggle of the nation or cause. Although sometimes in heroic pose, it is more common for depictions of an unknown infantryman to be mourning the loss of fallen comrades or lying wounded in similar style to classical sculptures (such as the
Dying Gaul
– an ancient copy of which is held by the Capitoline Museum in Rome).

Many conflicts have been commemorated – from the memorial in London to the Guards regiments in the Crimean War (which also serves to depict the nurse Florence Nightingale), to the Boer War troops on monuments at Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk) and Cheltenham (Gloucestershire), for example. America is no exception, with statues of the Union or Confederate soldiers on memorials being common. In Georgia, to mention one state, infantry privates are shown from Abbeville (Wilcox County) to Waycross (Ware County).

Men who died in combat are also named (for example, on the obelisk to those British killed at Rorke's Drift in 1879), indicating that it had become important to remember individual dead – especially as mass burial was often still the only realistic option for those killed on campaign. There was no such thing as an identity disc in the nineteenth century for the infantryman and remains were often unidentifiable, especially when one considers the destructive power of artillery. Furthermore, immediate burial was not always possible; the British failed to bury their dead from Isandlwana on 21 January 1879 until five months later (20 June 1879), by which time they were skeletal (Van Schalkwyk and Taylor, 1999: 13). Burials here were of several individuals in a cairn, many of which have since been looted (
ibid.
: 13). Corpses were also robbed of items that might have served to identify them after the battle, both by soldiers and local people, some of whom were employed to bury the victims (Howard, 2002: 61). Loot was, of course, deemed by many soldiers to be one of the perks of the job. The above being the case, it is not surprising that archaeologists have excavated the last resting place of a number of soldiers who fought in the great battles of the nineteenth century – men whose names are no longer known to us.

THE FALLEN: UNKNOWN WARRIOR 11

Kutuzov seemed preoccupied and did not listen to what the General was saying. He screwed up his eyes with displeasure as he gazed attentively and fixedly at the prisoners who made a particularly wretched spectacle. Most of them were disfigured by frost-bitten noses and cheeks, and nearly all of them had red, swollen and festering eyes.

(Tolstoy,
War and Peace
, 1988: 1288)

In a ditch in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, several thousand human skeletons have recently been discovered. On excavation it became clear that these were the bodies of the remnants of Napoleon's Grand Armée, which had retreated from Moscow in the disastrous campaign of 1812. Harassed by Cossacks, the survivors of the army staggered through temperatures of –35°C to the gates of Vilnius, where they died in droves.

From a total area of 766 square yards (640 square metres) and up to four layers of corpses, a stupefying density was recorded … More than 3,000 skeletons were extracted from the matrix of sand by the archaeologists … Some of the cases are quite distressing. Some of the men were so exhausted that they died in a crouching position, frozen on their heels. One officer was still wearing his shako on his head, decorated with a red, white and blue rosette. (Bahn, 2002: 74)

Professor Rimantas Jankauskas has undertaken a detailed study of around 600 of these
c.
3,300 poor unfortunates and has revealed many fascinating insights into their demise (the information below was kindly provided to me by him in many discussions). Trauma on the skeletons was not due to combat wounds – thus immediately discounting accounts of Cossack massacres or a bloodbath; it had been caused by the rough handling of the dead bodies. Limbs were known to snap off from bodies, which had frozen as a result of the extreme temperatures; others were damaged as they were thrown into the makeshift grave: ‘There were perimortal fractures of longbones due to twisting, bending and blows with blunt objects' (Jankauskas, pers. comm.). Death came through cold, starvation and exhaustion: ‘Again and again I turned from one side to the other, and in the end I was frozen stiff with my clothing. Only by marching did I overcome freezing. November 26, 27, and 28' – Jakob Walter Infantry Conscript, Regiment of Romig, No. 4 (Walter, 1991: 87).