For answer Strange grasped the head of the first corpse, pulled open its jabbering jaws and spat inside its mouth. Instantly it began to speak in its native, earthly language – a thick Neapolitan dialect of Italian, which to most people was quite as impenetrable and almost as horrible as the language it had been speaking before. It had the advantage, however, of being perfectly comprehensible to Captain Whyte.

With Captain Whyte’s help Major Grant and Colonel De Lancey interrogated the dead Neapolitans and were highly pleased by the answers they returned. Being dead, the Neapolitans were infinitely more anxious to please their questioners than any living informer could have been. It seemed that shortly before their deaths at the battle of Salamanca, these wretches had each received a secret message from their countrymen hidden in the woods, informing them of the capture of the cannon and telling them to make their way to a village a few leagues north of the city of Salamanca, from where they would easily be able to find the wood by following secret signs chalked on trees and boulders.

Major Grant took a small detachment of cavalry and within a few days he returned with both guns and deserters. Wellington was delighted.

Unfortunately, Strange was entirely unable to discover the spell for sending the dead Neapolitans back to their bitter sleep.4 He made several attempts, but these had very little effect except that once he made all seventeen corpses suddenly shoot up until they were twenty feet tall and strangely transparent, like huge water-colour paintings of themselves done on thin muslin banners. When Strange had returned them to their normal size, the problem of what should be done with them remained.

At first they were placed with the other French prisoners. But the other prisoners protested loudly about being confined with such shambling, shuffling horrors. (“And really,” observed Lord Wellington as he eyed the corpses with distaste, “one cannot blame them.”)

So when the prisoners were sent back to England the dead Neapolitans remained with the Army. All that summer they travelled in a bullock cart and on Lord Wellington’s orders they were shackled. The shackles were intended to restrict their movements and keep them in one place, but the dead Neapolitans were not afraid of pain – indeed they did not seem to feel it – so it was very little trouble to them to extricate themselves from their shackles, sometimes leaving pieces of themselves behind. As soon as they were free they would go in search of Strange and begin pleading with him in the most pitiful manner imaginable to restore them to the fullness of life. They had seen Hell and were not anxious to return there.