The matter-of-fact chronicler records the exact number of killed, wounded, and missing, and of guns, standards, and prisoners captured on either side; but the after-history of those prisoners is left unwritten, their sufferings are unrevealed! And yet, between 1793 and 1815, literally hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were held in captivity by the various nations engaged in the conflict, and this confinement meant for the great bulk of them years of misery, long vistas of monotonous restraint, periods of indifferent treatment, occasionally great physical suffering, and, worse than all, for many, moral deterioration and degradation inseparable from the conditions in which they dragged out their existence. However humane the captors might be, these consequences to the unfortunate captives were inevitable during the protracted Napoleonic Wars of the close of the eighteenth and commencement of the nineteenth centuries; and there is only too much evidence that when matters on which not only the comforts, but the actual lives of the prisoners depended, were being debated by the two hostile Governments, the political and military interests of the nations concerned were regarded before those of the wretched captives. The great Napoleon revolutionised the art of warfare, as the great Gustavus revolutionised the military organisations of Europe, and one result of this revolution was that the chivalrous treatment of prisoners of war and non-combatants, which prevailed up to Napoleon’s accession to power, was materially changed. A great French authority on International Law, writing in 1758, said: “As soon as your enemy has laid down his arms and surrendered his body, you have no longer any right over his life. Prisoners may be secured, and for this purpose may be put into confinement, and even fettered, if there be reason to apprehend that they will rise on their captors, or make their escape. But they are not to be treated harshly, unless personally guilty of some crime against him who has them in his power. . . . “We extol the English and French, we feel our bosoms glow with love for them, when we hear accounts of the treatment which prisoners of war, on both sides, have experienced from those generous nations. And what is more, by a custom which equally displays the honour and humanity of the Europeans, an officer, taken prisoner-of-war, is released on his parole, and enjoys the comfort of passing the time of his captivity in his own country, in the midst of his family; and the party who have thus released him rest as perfectly sure of him as if they had him confined in irons.”