Norman Cross

“ This is a fair sample of the French complaints, and of how little foundation was found for most of them when they were investigated. The mortality at Norman Cross was exceptionally high during its first occupation, but the majority of the earliest prisoners were those who had been removed from the prisons, the overcrowded and consequent unhealthy condition of which gave rise to the hurried building of Norman Cross; they were therefore specially liable to disease, and unfit to withstand its ravages. ”

“ The scales of hope went up and down continually at Norman Cross, according to the intelligence that reached the prisoners from each seat of war. The triumphs of Napoleon on the Continent, and the victories of Wellington in the Peninsula, were pondered over with deepest interest by both officers and men. ”

“ Norman Cross is the name given to that part of the parish of Yaxley, in the county of Huntingdon, where that grand old thoroughfare of England, the Great North Road, along which coaches might drive four abreast, is crossed by the Peterborough Road. In one corner, bounded by these two roads, is a large piece of pasture land, some forty acres in extent, which Government purchased in 1796, for the purpose of erecting barracks on it for prisoners of war, then multiplying fast, and for a large number of soldiers to guard them. ”

“ Whether the dog got any share of the 10s. usually given for the recapture of a prisoner is not recorded.
In the register of the Dutch prisoners confined at Norman Cross between 1797 and 1800, is the record of Jan Cramer, one of the sailors who were taken in the great victory of Admiral Duncan off Camperdown, 11th October 1797; he was received at Norman Cross 23rd December of that year, and the four words in the register which describe the method of his leaving the prison, “escaped in a chest,” are sufficient to enable an imaginative writer to compose an exciting narrative “founded on fact.” ”

“ There is every reason to believe that the provisions for the maintenance of the prisoners were carried out with the utmost care and fidelity in Norman Cross and all other prisons, but the complaints of the prisoners gave rise to such prolonged controversy and serious disagreement between the Governments of France and England, that a review of the discussion finds an appropriate place here. The complaints were not confined to one side only, but there is ample documentary evidence that the accusations of the French were greatly exaggerated or absolutely without foundation. ”

“ This is the only recorded civil execution at Norman Cross; there are several recorded instances of summary military justice, prisoners being shot dead in attempts to escape. It must be borne in mind that the prisoners were still our foes, who would, if they could escape, be at once in the ranks of the enemy’s army fighting against us; and to prevent their escape, there was, at Norman Cross, little beyond the muskets and bayonets of the Norman Cross sentries—sixty of them posted round and about the prison. ”

“ Nothing could be less romantic than the appearance of these Norman Cross Barracks. They looked from outside exactly like a vast congeries of large, high, carpenters’ shops, with roofs of glaring red tiles, and surrounded by wooden palisades, very lofty and of prodigious strength. In fact, the place was like an entrenched camp of a rather more permanent type. But if there was no architectural beauty, there was the perfection of security. It looked like business. The prisoners were in no wise to escape:—
p. ”

“ Among the prisoners at Norman Cross were men who, before their enrolment in the French or Dutch army or navy, were workers, skilled in branches of industry unknown in England, and there is a record that, on the 5th April 1808, the agent was instructed to send a French prisoner, Louis Félix Paris, to London, as he was an expert in the “ormolu business.” ”

“ At Norman Cross, a tiny hamlet with a suggestive name, situated about a mile on our way out of Stilton, there are the slight remains of the colony of barracks that were erected in the last century, wherein some thousands of French prisoners were confined during the Napoleonic wars. From Norman Cross we drove merrily along until we came to the pretty village of Water Newton, pleasantly situated by the side of the river Nen, or Nene,—for I find it spelt both ways on my map. ”

“ Scarce had the courserman, who had sped with the news to the duke's castle at Rouen, delivered his message than the boy flamed with rage, and turning to his guardian, Ralph of Wacey, captain-general of the armies of Normandy, he cried:
"Good cousin, this is not to be borne. I have done King Henry's will, and been faithful to my fealty vows, but this passeth even my bent. Fling out our standard. Summon every loyal Norman to our aid—knight and archer and cross-bowman. Cry 'Maslon!' and 'Dix aie!' [J] and let us straight against this dastard rebel at Falaise." ”

“ From the Register of Folksworth, about a mile from the barracks, it would appear that this village was a favourite place for the wives of the married soldiers quartered at Norman Cross to reside; several baptisms of the soldiers’ children, and one or two of the adult soldiers themselves, are there registered.
The prisoners’ cemetery and the barracks were in the mission of the Roman Catholic priest who lived at King’s Cliffe, but no register of deaths kept by him is known to exist, nor is there any record by a minister of religion of any burial service in this cemetery. ”

“ Nay! in this land God gave us and our trusty Norman swords,
Dwell—see thy children’s children these Saxon varlets’ lords.”
XI.
“Nay!” quoth the gentle Guilbert, “by Him that died on cross,
If I could gain all Sussex soil, I’d count it but a loss,
If far away from hope and home for life I so must be,
Far from that Norman maiden who pledged her troth to me.” ”

“ Under the shadow of the Cross now lifted up, a nation that sought life's pleasures has suddenly thrilled with the glory of self-sacrifice. What is it that sustains the men who go down to the earthly hell of ruthless war? It is just this—the consciousness, newly wakened, of how glorious a thing it is to die for King and country, for home and kindred. They are content to be blotted out if only the race will live, to descend to the abyss that the nation may be exalted. Under the shadow of the Cross self-sacrifice has become once more the only rock on which our feet can stand secure. ”

“ And as humanity will realise its horror, the word sin will once more burn red before men's eyes, and there will arise that passion for righteousness which will lay sin low even as the dust. There will ring round the world the compelling cry that this power of hell must not for ever hold humanity in its grip—that ruthless ambition, militarism, despotism must be made to cease from the face of the earth. Once more the shadow of the Cross will mean salvation to men. ”

“ How can there be lasting peace in a world of conflicting ideals? Can Christianity be at peace with Mohammedanism stained with the blood of millions of Armenians; with paganism still brooding over the ideal of an empire based on force? Can the ideals of unselfish service and of pride and greed lie down in peace together? There can be no peace until humanity is brought into a unity of the soul—of allegiance to one King, of obedience to one law. The only hand worthy to wield the sceptre of the world is the hand that was nailed to a Cross. ”

“ And that humanity which named His name was driven once more to the holocaust of war—ten millions of men consigned to the hell of reeking trenches. In the midst of the world the Cross stands as never before, bearing its awful woe. In the seeing of the whole world the Eternal Love is crucified. It was its shadow that fell on her whose lips trembled as she sat on the mort-safe over against the locked and barred door of the House of God. ”

“ It is death that has saved us all from that. Were man's location here for ever, the world would be his god. A world without death would be a world with no room for the Cross. Men climbed the heights of nobility as they defied death. The crackling flames were unable to silence the martyrs' song; the march of the hosts of devouring tyranny could not move the hearts that chose death rather than slavery; the generations sealed with their blood their testimony that truth and loyalty to truth are more precious than life, and so met death with a smile ”

“ Off the main harbor-front thoroughfare streets lie empty to the eye for half hours at a time. Chinese merchants sit at the doorways of their shops, waiting for trade. Now and then broad pools of sunlight flow over the gayly flowered dresses of a group of native women, scarcely to be seen otherwise as they move slowly through tunnels of moist green gloom; or a small schooner, like a detail gifted with sudden mobility in a picture, will back away from shore, cross the harbor, bright with the reflections of clouds, and stand out to sea. ”

“ And in this return to God the soul is ever led on from glory to glory. That is the alluring power of Christianity. The Shepherd of souls leads us ever on until we come to the Cross and realise that the God of heaven and earth is the God of sacrifice; that His love stoops to agony that He may save. And onward from the Cross He leads until on our enraptured hearts there rises the vision of the Cross abiding still in the heart of God, and our eyes behold over all the universe the sheen of that love which still stoops to death that it may save. ”

“ A man might cross—submerged somewhat above the knees, no more; but in the clinging grip and tug of the current his footing would be delicately precarious, and the issue of a misstep, a stumble, a lost balance, would be a desperate chance, with the wager heavily on grim Death.
It was perilous water—the noisy, sucking white rush of it, frothing over the boulders, and running, icy cold, in choppy, crested waves, where the channel was a bed of stones and gravel. Yet the path to the tilt at Poor Luck Barrens lay across and beyond Ha-ha Shallow of Rattle Water. ”

“ It looked as if Christianity were on the eve of being stamped out in Kintyre. To Columba in Ireland there came the cry of his kinsmen's woe—'Come over and help us.' To a man burning with ardour and longing for new fields to conquer for his Master, that cry was like a bugle summoning to battle. He came to their help, but not with spears and arrows. He came with the might of the Cross. The greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that instead of material weapons he went straight to the fountain-head of the misery. ”

“ When that other man who called himself a king came here, it was with a measure of pomp and dignity. He had followers; he had the driving purpose of religious fanaticism, but when King Norman came, it was without the fervor of a pilgrim seeking new soil for his faith and deeds, without a follower except the shy little girl with the great blue eyes and blue-black hair, her face whitened by infancy spent in a convent school, and the sooty-faced ruffian in the fire-hole of the rickety tug which Eldred wheeled out of the straits himself—for that was all men called him when he came: Norman Eldred. ”

“ At the root of the great difference between the two there was on the one side the Norman's centralization of the world in himself, as being for himself, and on the other the Latin's power and readiness to forget himself in the imaginations of an ideal state.
"Men are talking of a second Crusade," said Arnold, one day, when he and Gilbert had chanced to meet in the garden court of Saint Peter's. ”

“ It deserves to be noted here that in all of Norman’s spoken or written messages, telling of his experiences in France, there is nowhere to be found a note of doubt or discouragement or a word denoting any lack of confidence in the ultimate triumph of the cause for which he was fighting. The Allies might meet repeated reverses, and tremendous sacrifices of blood and treasure might have to be made, before a decisive victory could be achieved, but he never doubted the final outcome of the war. ”

“ And so King Norman ruled, sufficient unto himself, with the commerce of an every-day world slipping past his dominion, amassing wealth, making his position more secure, the great passion for the girl growing with the years, standing now and again on the decks of his tugs as they passed the lake ships, the broad brim of his black, round-crowned hat blown back, hands clasped lightly behind him, head forward—truly a kingly figure, powerful, aloof, unchallenged. ”

“ But it was not till the beginning of the tenth century that the Normans settled in that part of the mainland of Gaul which from them took the name of Normandy. The English had thus been living for six hundred years in their land, when the Normans had been living only about a hundred and fifty years in theirs. The English therefore in the eleventh century were more thoroughly at home in England than the Normans were in Normandy. Among the English the adventurous spirit of new settlers had spent itself in the long wars with the Welsh which established the English dominion in Britain. ”

“ But, even with his own Normans, he had a restless life. They were always hungering and thirsting for the riches of the English; and the more he gave, the more they wanted. His priests were as greedy as his soldiers. We know of only one Norman who plainly told his master, the King, that he had come with him to England to do his duty as a faithful servant, and that property taken by force from other men had no charms for him. His name was Guilbert. We should not forget his name, for it is good to remember and to honor honest men. ”