Since the first Geneva Convention of 1864, nations have attempted to codify a system of international law, concerning acceptable limits on the conduct of war. These laws address a range of considerations including declarations of war, acceptance of surrender and proper treatment of prisoners.
Such discussions are nothing new, the earliest examples dating to the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, and to the old testament (Torah) Book of Deuteronomy. The first Caliph, Abu Bakr, laid down ten rules of warfare for his Muslim army, in the 7th century.
In the New World British colony in North America, one of twenty-seven grievances enumerated in the Declaration of Independence was that King George III “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions“.
The American Revolution was on its last legs in December 1776. The year had started out well for the Patriot cause but turned into a string of disasters, beginning in August. Food, ammunition and equipment were in short supply by December. Men were deserting as the string of defeats brought morale to a new low. Most of those who remained, ended enlistments at the end of the year.
General George Washington and a force of 5,000 performed the famous crossing of the Delaware River in the howling blizzard of Christmas day, 1776. The assault on the Hessian garrison at Trenton, was do or die. The cause of Independence needed decisive victory, or it was over. The pass word on that frigid night was “Victory”. There was only one acceptable response: “Or Death”.
The tactical surprise was complete in the early morning hours of December 26. Hessian losses were 22 killed, 92 wounded and 918 captured. Only 400 escaped. The Americans suffered two who had frozen to death in the march on Trenton, and five wounded. It was the colonist’s first major victory of the Revolution.
What to do with all those prisoners was a new problem for Washington, who ordered his troops to treat them with humanity. “Let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands.”
Washington’s position on the treatment of prisoners was clear and consistent. On September 14 of the previous year, the General wrote to Colonel Benedict Arnold then in camp in Cambridge Massachusetts: “Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]…I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require.”
No such consideration was given American prisoners of his Majesty’s government. King George III personally declared American revolutionaries to be traitors in 1775, denying them prisoner of war status. Land based detention facilities in British-occupied cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Charleston quickly filled up when the hulks of spent vessels were brought into service as prison ships, little more than waterlogged coffins.
Conditions on board these prison ships, were gruesome. The stifling hold of HMS Jersey alone held no fewer than 1,000 men in Wallabout Bay, modern-day site of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Authorities were loath to execute detainees for “treason” for fear of inciting sympathy. Prisoners were left instead to wallow in their own filth, starved and tormented by most every disease and parasite, known to modern medicine. The Connecticut Gazette recounted the experience of one Robert Sheffield in July 1778, one of precious few to escape:
The heat was so intense that [the 300-plus prisoners] were all naked, which also served the well to get rid of vermin, but the sick were eaten up alive. Their sickly countenances, and ghastly looks were truly horrible; some swearing and blaspheming; others crying, praying, and wringing their hands; and stalking about like ghosts; others delirious, raving and storming, all panting for breath; some dead, and corrupting. The air was so foul that at times a lamp could not be kept burning, by reason of which the bodies were not missed until they had been dead ten days. One person alone was admitted on deck at a time, after sunset, which occasioned much filth to run into the hold, and mingle with the bilge water …
Bodies of the dead were tossed overboard, ten or fifteen every day from Jersey, alone. Thousands of dead fouled the brackish waters of Wallabout Bay, from which water was drawn to boil “soup” for survivors, more like a toxic sludge, sometimes augmented with moldy bread or rancid meat.
Even after Cornwallis’ surrender in 1781, prisoners languished in the holds of Jersey and other Hell ships until the Treaty of Paris formally ended the war, in 1783.
A host of place names enter the popular imagination, when we think of the American Revolution. Bunker Hill. Trenton. Saratoga. Yorktown. British and American forces and their allies fought no fewer than seventy-one major engagements from the April 19, 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord, to the 1783 Battle of Arkansas Post. The prison ships of the British killed more Americans than every one of them, combined.
Thousands of remains washed up on the shores of Brooklyn. Bones were still being found in 1801, during construction of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Locals collected as many as they could for burial in a local tomb. The bones were eventually moved to a crypt in Fort Greene Park, a half-mile south of Wallabout Bay. Today, a 149-foot martyrs memorial topped with an eight-ton bronze brazier marks the location of their Fort Greene crypt.
In eight years, an estimated eleven to twelve thousand men perished of the filth, abuse, neglect and disease of these Hell Ships. Untold thousands more passed through their stinking holds, and lived to tell the tale.
That such men ever lived, may be counted among the blessings of Liberty.
Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Martin “Marty” Maher is quoted in Smithsonian.com: “These were ordinary citizens, fighting for a country that had barely been born. Every man was offered freedom if he would swear to stop fighting. But there’s no record that anyone took up the offer. No prisoner renounced the revolution to gain his freedom. Not one.”
On the Western Front, it rained for much of November and December that first year. The no man’s land between British and German trenches was a wasteland of mud and barbed wire. Christmas Eve, 1914 dawned cold and clear. The frozen ground allowed men to move about for the first time in weeks. That evening, English soldiers heard singing. The low sound of a Christmas carol, drifting across no man’s land…Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht…Silent Night.
Captain Sir Edward Hulse Bart reported a sing-song which “ended up with ‘Auld lang syne’ which we all, English, Scots, Irish, Prussians, Wurttenbergers, etc, joined in. It was absolutely astounding, and if I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked!”
The Feast of St. Nicholas took hold around the 6th of December. Children and other marginal groups such as old women and slaves could receive gifts, but only by demanding them. The secret giving of gifts appeared sometime around the year 1200.
The unknown genius who published and illustrated 
Be that at it as it may, the animal is a voracious herbivore, spending daylight hours at the bottom of rivers & lakes, happily munching on vegetation.
During the 2nd Boer war, the pair had sworn to kill each other. In 1910, these two men became partners in a mission to bring hippos, to America’s dinner table.
The terrain was considered unsuitable for such an attack. The tactical surprise was complete, British and American forces separated and driven back, their positions forming an inward “bulge” on wartime battle maps.
Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote “Band of Brothers” nearly fifty years later, a non-fiction account later broadcast as an HBO mini-series, of the same name. The story refers to a black nurse named Anna. There is a brief appearance and then she is gone. No one knew who Anna was, or even if she was real.
Augusta Chiwy came back to Belgium when she was nine, one of the luckier of thousands born to European fathers, and African mothers. Back to the doctor’s home in Bastogne, a small town of 9,000 where Augusta was loved and cared for by her father and his sister, whom the girl knew as “aunt Caroline”.
Augusta Chiwy was in a neighboring building at the time. The explosion blew the petite nurse through a wall but, unhurt, she picked herself up and went back to work. There were grisly injuries and many died due to inadequate medical facilities, but many lived, their families reunited thanks to the tireless work of Dr. Jack Prior, and nurse Augusta Chiwy.
Augusta Chiwy suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition poorly understood at that time. She would go long periods without speaking, becoming quiet and withdrawn even years later. She married a Belgian soldier in 1959 and the couple had two children. It would be twenty years, before she resumed her nursing career. She almost never spoke of her experience in Bastogne.
Albert II of Belgium. Six months later she received the U.S. Army’s Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service. And on March 21, 2014, Augusta was recognized by her hometown as a Bastogne Citizen of Honor”. 
Turns out that Mary Bateman, the bird’s owner and a serial fraudster, was writing these messages with some kind of “corrosive ink”, maybe an acid, and reinserting them into the poor chicken. The “Yorkshire Witch” met her end on a gibbet, hanged for the poisoned pudding she gave that couple to relieve their chest pain. But I digress.
5,000 years ago, the Mayan civilization of modern-day Mexico and Central America developed a sophisticated calendar, working with a base numerical system of 20.
On a lighter note, town government sold the jail once. To a sixteen-year-old kid. For a buck and a half and he sold it to a dummy, but now I’m getting ahead of the story.
The celebrity novelist enjoyed the finest sights of Boston and New York, and took in a steamship ride, down the Mississippi. He visited one of the great wonders of the natural world, the spectacular Niagara Falls.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
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