“You see, my dear Sir, since our selection of the invalids, and the benefit of warm weather, we have had but one death this ten days. If another batch of those vagabonds, who by their bad conduct defy all the benefits the Benevolence of this country bestows upon them, were to be sent away in September next, we might expect great benefit from it in the winter, for to a certainty all these blackguards will die in the winter. Compare sixty a week with one in ten days.” From this scrap we learn how terrible was the mortality, and how bad was the character of these wretched men; we learn also that when all the steps taken to reform them had failed, some system of segregation and removal to the hulks or elsewhere was finally recommended. There is evidence in a letter of M. Otto’s that a large number of invalids and men of the class spoken of as “Les Misérables,” or less sympathetically by the surgeon as “these blackguards,” was sent back to France. Two years after this pencilled note was written, all the prisons, both in Britain and France, were emptied, and the prisoners restored to their native countries; but when they refilled after the renewal of the war in 1803 under the same conditions, the same depravity and suffering developed. At Dartmoor, 1809 to 1816, there are records, especially those of the Americans, which furnish full particulars of the internal life of that prison, particulars which in the case of Norman Cross can only be gathered from scraps such as the pencilled note just referred to. Mr. Basil Thomson has permitted the reprint in this history of his chapter on these reprobates in Dartmoor. It is terrible reading, but I avail myself of Mr. Thomson’s permission, because there is little doubt that much of the description of these self-styled “Romans” at Dartmoor would apply equally to “Les Misérables” at Norman Cross, and that the Norman Cross “Blackguards” were, like the “Romans,” ostracised by their fellow prisoners, and were in a similar, if in a less systematic fashion than their Dartmoor brethren, segregated by natural selection from their comrades, and herded together in special parts of the prisons. From a careful perusal of the death certificates for the year 1801, when the terrible epidemic, commencing in November 1800, carried off a thousand victims, it would appear that Block 13, that behind the hospital caserns in the north-east quadrangle, was the habitat of “Les Misérables.” There are constantly recurring notes at the end of the certificate to the effect: “This prisoner had sold his clothes and rations; he was from No. 13.” The cause of death given was debility. There are other entries, with the simple note, “Debility, from 13.” {111} CHAPTER VI “LES MISÉRABLES” AND THE “ROMANS” OF DARTMOOR What are these So wither’d and so wild in their attire, That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth, And yet are on’t?