Cabrera

I've just finished reading The Prisoners of Cabrera by Denis Smith. It's an interesting little book about French prisoners of war, captured during the Peninsula War, when Wellington was marauding around Spain and Portugal. Several thousand French troops were taken following a particularly inept manoevre by their leaders at the battle of Bailen. They were held, for a time, in an old fort, then left to rot on prison ships, old hulks, stripped of their masts. Eventually, however, the majority of them were moved to Cabrera (Goat Island) in the Ballearics, and left there. There was no hope of rescue by sea, because the Royal Navy had a squadron in the area keeping Napoleon's Mediterranean fleet bottled up. They received minimal supplies, weekly from the Spanish island of Majorca, but often the supplies were late, hindered by bad weather or political in-fighting. Over a period of about five years, twelve thousand Napoleonic soldiers, mostly French and Italian, were placed on the island. Over half of them died, mainly of a combination of malnutrition and preventable disease. When, eventually, they were returned to France, the vessels that carried them bore the Bourbon flag, the newly-restored monarchy against which many of them had spent their youth fighting in the name of the Revolution.
What strikes me most forcibly about the story is the ability of ordinary people to commit horrible crimes against natural law. The people of Majorca were overwhelmingly Christian, as were their Spanish overlords, and the British who prevented escape. Individually, they would never have countenanced leaving fellow-human beings to die on a barren rock, almost entirely devoid of shelter with only minimal supplies of water. And yet, that is exactly what they did when they acted politically. The Majorcans blamed the mainland Spanish for foisting this expense on to them; the Spanish blamed the English for not repatriating the soldiers, as had originally been agreed. The English blamed the ineptitude and corruption of the Spanish authorities. To a degree, they were all right. But they were also all wrong. Nothing could justify the neglect, the lack of basic human compassion, to which the soldiers of Cabrera were subjected. The people were largely blind to their fate, just as we are blind to some of the truly awful situations in our world today, such as in Dafur.
Perhaps, then, Calvin was correct to remind us of the corruption of the human heart, and of our tendency towards evil. Left to our own devices, we are capable of anything. That's why our trust must, ultimately, not be in a human institution, no matter how well-intentioned. Our trust must not be in ourselves, either, since we too are marred by the Fall. Our trust can only be placed, legitimately, in God. He is the only one whose love is untainted by self-interest.
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