The French in the hulks and the English prisoners in France had undoubtedly to endure great hardships, but these hardships did not justify the exaggerated charges brought by each nation against the other—Englishmen pointing to Verdun as the embodiment of French cruelty and oppression, while Frenchmen enlarged with bitter invectives on the condition of their countrymen in the hulks and prison-ships in English harbours. This exaggeration and these bitter recriminations went on to the end of the war. Buonaparte himself was never tired of seeking to arouse in the hearts of his soldiers a spirit of hatred towards England by allusions to this subject, and before Waterloo he included these words in his address to the Army: “Soldiers, let those among you who have been prisoners of the English describe to you the hulks, and detail the frightful miseries which they have endured.” {6a} The number of prisoners of war was so great that their care had been handed over to a new department of the Admiralty thus described: “The Transport Office is a newly created Board, and was instituted in July 1794 at first for the superintendence of the Transport Service only; but to that employment has since been added the management of the Prisoners of War, in health, at home and abroad.” {6b} To this department all communications in reference to the prisoners of war had to be addressed, and through them all information reached the Admiralty. There was another special department of the Admiralty, that for the care of the sick and hurt, into whose charge the prisoners of war passed when they ceased to be “in health.” The following extract gives further details of the Transport Department, on which for twenty years the lot of the prisoners of war so greatly depended. The paragraph was written in 1803, when the war was supposed to be at an end.