here the link to listen
Again very worthwhile to listen. I wonder how soldiers could survive such harsh treatment of punishment - like 1500 lashes, even when split into several series and why the officers in general found it quite convenient to do so, to keep it as tool for keeping up the discipline in the Army.
In case I understood correctly sadistic inclined officers could initiate flogging within his company. Did the regimental commander stood aloof?
There must be quite some unjustified floggings as well, which would brake the morale of the affected soldiers.
While beating a soldier - was not uncommon in other armies as well, I cannot find such excessive numbers.
You're really suggesting that Picton was worse than Napoleon? Oh, for heavens' sake.
If he was a flawed human being, he was also a brave and extremely competent soldier - and one of the few men to have probably suffered a mortal wound in two separate battles a couple of days apart (I forget who it was now, but a prominent modern surgeon has examined all the records of his Quatre Bras wound and suggested that internal bleeding and other injuries would have killed him within the week, anyway).
Sorry, but as a former lawyer I'm not a fan of condemning people for living by the standards of their own time, rather than ours - whether Picton or Napoleon, There is a reason that no CIVILISED legal system allows retrospective conviction for acts that were not crimes at the time they were performed.
Interesting that nobody has mentioned that flogging was common in civilian society throughout Great Britain and Ireland - I suspect quite a few of the "bad apples" who were flogged in the Army were no strangers to the cat from their civilian life. Convicted civilians - women included - would be marched through the nearest conurbation stripped to the waist to receive their punishment in a town square or market place. Given that most people could not afford a fine, and putting them in prison was expensive, I suspect that civilian society quite possibly flogged offenders rather more than the Army did (in much the same way that the WW1 Army spared the lives of men convicted of capital crimes more than civilian society of the time did).
Incidentally, during his time as Governor of Trinidad, Picton hanged a Royal Artillery sergeant for raping a black woman; when four men were later found to have assisted the rapist, they were all sentenced to 1,500 lashes each.
Right to the heart of a complicated and emotive theme, then as now.
Following the notorious death in 1846 of Frederick White, 7th Hussars, after receiving 150 lashes, the Duke of Wellington the C-in-C ordered that punishments should be restricted to 50 lashes and medically supervised. Flogging had been a source of controversy since the end of the Napoleonic war, the cause given impetus by the publication of John Shipp's memoirs in 1829 and his public letter Flogging and its Substitute: a Voice from the Ranks. 1841 Lord Cardigan CO of the 11th Hussars made his own contribution to the issue by having a soldier flogged on a Sunday immediately after regimental church parade. In 1846 the Prime Minister, Lord Russell, observing that military corporal punishment was in marked decline, stated that he looked forward to its abolition but that he and the C-in-C believed it remained necessary until other measures in place to promote discipline took effect. White's death lead to the founding of the Flogging Abolition Society. In 1859, corporal punishment was restricted in peacetime to men considered of "bad character." It remained available in wartime. In 1868 it was restricted further to mutiny or "aggravated insubordination and disgraceful conduct" in peacetime, and available in times of war for desertion, drunkenness and neglect of duty. It was finally abolished in 1881
Q – Why is a soldier like a mouse?
Oman reckoned that the sentence to 1,200 lashes was delivered ‘9 or 10 times’ during the Peninsular War and 1,000 lashes were administered about 50 times. Peter Burroughs (‘Crime and Punishment in the British Army, 1815-70’ English Historical Review) says flogging in the range of 300 to 700 lashes was usual. Wellington later said, ‘British soldiers are taken entirely from the lowest order of society, … I do not see how you can have an Army at all unless you preserve it in a state of discipline, nor how you can have a state of discipline, unless you have some punishment … There is no punishment which makes an impression upon anybody except corporal punishment. … I have no idea of any great effect being produced by anything but the fear of immediate corporal punishment …’ As late as 1846 Frederick John White died after receiving 150 lashes. In 1828, two NCOs in Ireland were sentenced to 1,000 lashes apiece for “writing deceitful letters.”
Alexander Alexander, a recruit in the Royal Artillery at Woolrich in 1801-2, reported in his memoir “there was scarce a day in which we did not see one or more of the soldiers get from three to seven hundred lashes.” John Shipp an infantry drummer during the same period estimated he inflicted flogging three times a week. (The Early Nineteenth-Century Campaign against Flogging in the ArmyJ. R. Dinwiddy The English Historical Review Vol. 97, No. 383 (Apr., 1982), pp. 308-331)
The British Army not only flogged soldiers, but branded them as well-with a “D” for deserter, or “BC” for bad character. Branding wasn’t abolished until 1871. Flogging was banned in 1881.
A – Because he lives in constant terror of the cat!
Thanks Hans-Karl. A couple of things: Firstly 1500 lashes was never actually inflicted in the period I looked at. There was also actually a change in the law which meant that in practice, by this point, if a soldier could not take the full punishment in one go, then the remainder was remitted.
Regarding sadistic officers - no, that's really what I'm suggesting - regimental courts martial had to be convened (and their sentences had to be approved by) the regiment's commanding officer. The Company Courts Martial dealt with minor offences (burning food, dirtiness, refusal to wash, etc), and handed out physical punishments short of flogging.
There would, of course, have been miscarriages of justice, as in any legal system, I know of a couple of instances where people ended up taking the blame, but there was a process of appeal - regimental court martial decisions could be appealed to General Courts Martial, and GCM decision were reviewed by the regional commander, or the Judge Advocate General back home, so there were some safeguards in place to deal with it as best they could.
With regards to beating soldiers, I think its worth bearing in mind that we are dealing with something distinct from a casual beating - this is punishment for breaking the law, not casualised violence. While informal punishments did exist, striking a soldier was generally frowned upon as 'ungentlemanly'. Interestingly, the tendency that was more commonplace in the German states of striking a soldier across the backside with the flat of the sword was discouraged by Wellington. The use of flogging varied, of course, but the issue we have is knowing how representative our surviving sources are. The available information for the French army is fragmentary (Michael Hughes mentions this in Forging Napoleon's Grande Armee), so we can't build a complete picture. The French attitude to living off the land was also more lax than in the British army, where it was not tolerated. The Prussian system is often regarded as having been particularly brutal, but Ilya Berkovich (Motivation in Warfare) has questioned this. The issue we have is that no-one has ever done an equivalent for the other armies so its hard to achieve a definite comparison. The impact that a conscription system had on this is open to interpretation.