There would necessarily be the same anxious watching on the part of the prisoners of the events of the war; they would probably mock at the 300,000 volunteers, foot and mounted, who came forward and rendered the _levée en masse_ unnecessary. With what elation they must have heard of the Grande Armée de Bretagne, ranged opposite the southern shore of England, separated only by the narrow channel, across which 150,000 French soldiers were to be floated by the 2,000 vessels assembled at Boulogne, ready to transport them so soon as the weather and the supporting fleet for which they were waiting combined to favour the enterprise! That threatened invasion, which hung like a black terror over England in those early years of the nineteenth century, was for them within their prison walls the bright light of hopeful expectation; and when the news of the 21st October reached England, the news which was communicated to Cadet Hopkinson at Verdun, shorn of its glory and its fateful significance to the French in the taunting words, “Votre Nelson est mort,” it would be told to the prisoners at Norman Cross, in words conveying the whole truth, “Our Nelson has fallen, but not before he had destroyed your fleet, and your country is now no longer a naval power.” What despair must have again filled their hearts! If they disbelieved the fact at first, the arrival of Corporal de la Porte and his comrades, followed by crew after crew of the captured sailors and soldiers, must have too surely confirmed the news. As the years of their captivity dragged on, they would hear of the conquests and of the King-making by their idol Buonaparte, now the Emperor Napoleon, and they would look forward in the near future to a Buonaparte on the throne of George III, and to their triumphal progress through the conquered country on the way back to their own dear France. Then their hopes would fade again (as, alas! their bodily comfort would be decreased) as there came crowding in the prisoners sent from the Peninsula by Wellington, who although he had been ordered on the 3rd February 1811 not to send any more prisoners on account of the crowded state of the prisons, in 1811–12 sent 20,000. {250} Later on would spread through the courts the story of the disastrous invasion of Russia and the awful retreat from Moscow. In the next year, 1813, they might hear that Wellington had crossed the Bidassoa, and thus secured for England—their hated hostess in their accursed abode at Norman Cross—the honour of being the first of the European powers to plant its victorious standard on French soil.