Prisoners of War

Abstract

These verses written by Samuel Oakes, a Royal Marine imprisoned in France, provide a moving depiction of the prisoner of war’s plight. The intensification of conflict in this period and the consequent transformation in the conventions governing the exchange of prisoners of war meant that Oakes, alongside thousands of British soldiers, sailors and civilians, endured a captivity of much greater duration than had been the norm in previous European wars. Many did, as Oakes feared, die before they saw their home again.Oakes’ lament is an example of a text intimately shaped by the context in which it was produced. An acrostic, the first letter of each line spells out the site of the unfortunate prisoner’s captivity: Givet Prison. It is part of a corpus of accounts structured by the experience of imprisonment in the period 1793 and 1815. While the number of British prisoners in France was comparatively small - an estimated sixteen thousand - many wrote poetry, kept journals or published retrospective memoirs of their experiences. Relatively little recent attention has been paid to these texts: the last major study was published over fifty years ago.2 Yet prisoner of war narratives foreground several issues critical to our understanding of the ambivalence of wartime identities. Imprisonment undermined detainees’ personal identity as they lost many of the status signifiers they enjoyed at home or in their professional life; it also involved the imposition of a collective identity as military and civilians alike were classified as agents of the British armed nation.