The prisoners began to prepare for departure. Some would set to work with a will to finish articles which had been bespoken, or which they wished to put in the market before their departure. Some could afford to take their stock of knick-knacks home, and would have money to draw from the agent and clerks—money they had realised by their work during the past eleven years. Undoubtedly, in some instances, the sum earned amounted to as much as one, two, or three hundred pounds, but without seeing the banking account, it will hardly be credited that any prisoner had actually made the rumoured thousand pounds. {252} Others would pack the articles they were taking home as memorials of their long sojourn in the land of their enemy. Every one would be in some way preparing for departure. Some permitted on parole would have to bid farewell to the friends they had made within their bounds, others would have to write to friends made in the market or in conversations surreptitiously carried on through the pales of the stockade fences. Speedily, detachments began to move off. The Depot had been costing £300,000 a year, and every day it remained full represented a large sum. The local newspapers, where formerly they described the prisoners making their weary way under a strong escort from the coast to Norman Cross were now filled with reports of parties of released prisoners marching to the coast in comparative freedom. One paper notes how, of a detachment of 500, some got so drunk (is it much to be wondered at?) that they could not go on; while, on the contrary on 6th May, according to the _Cambridge Chronicle_, another detachment of 200, which was to embark from Chatham, passing through Cambridge on their way to that port, walked about the town and the University buildings, conducting themselves in an orderly manner. So detachment followed detachment, until in the _Times_ of 19th August 1814 appeared a paragraph, “Of all the great body of Prisoners of War, who were lately at Norman Cross Barracks, at this time only one single prisoner remains, and he, in consequence of illness preventing his removal.” What must have been this poor fellow’s feelings when he knew that all his fellow prisoners had left for their native country. Was he happily unconscious? We are sure that everything possible would be done to lighten his sad fate. Probably he was the last of his countrymen to be laid in the now desolate cemetery. {253a} One shudders to think that his disappointment may have been as heartrending as that of the poor prisoner whose fate is narrated by Basil Thomson.