However much abuse may have been lavished on France in the time past, and which lives to our shame and sorrow below the surface even now, this is one of the evil heritages of that war-stricken time. This is the recorded story of how the prisoners were treated: “They were consigned in huge batches, like so many convicts, to the hulks at Chatham and Portsmouth, and to inland prisons at Dartmoor and in some rural districts of Scotland. The history of the hulks is one simple tissue of horrors. The Government had no active wish to maltreat its prisoners, but the officials placed in authority over them were often rude, and oftener drunken, and did not understand the character of their guests. Worse than that, they did not care about such understanding; and at the time it was rather patriotic than otherwise to detest a Frenchman. The prisoners were not systematically starved, but they were fed as men-of-war’s men were then victualled--on weevilly biscuit, salt junk, and jury rum. They had no means of cooking their food in their own fashion; they were pent-up between the decks of old vessels, all but deprived of exercise, and denied the commonest appliances of cleanliness. So they had the scurvy, dysentery, typhus, and a host of other ailments; now and then an epidemic would break out among them, and they would die like sheep afflicted by the rot. The most horrible profligacy was rampant on board those floating pandemoniums. The prisoners had nothing whatever to do, and vast numbers of them belonged to the lowest and most ignorant classes. So they swore and gambled, they quarrelled and fought; scarcely a week passed in which some fatal duel did not take place among them. Such were the hulks,--the dreaded _pontons_,--descriptions of which, not much overcharged, were drawn up by the order of Napoleon, and distributed among the French peasantry, in order to inflame their minds against the English.” Can one wonder at the revengeful feeling that lived afterwards? So Thackeray thought, in telling with marvellous brilliancy the fictional story of that 17th of June in Brussels, when “the cannon of Waterloo began to roar,” when “from morning until past sunset” the sound never ceased, and “it was dark when the cannonading stopped all of a sudden.