Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 370, August 1846

The liability to the lash, inflicted, until very recently, even for the least disgraceful offences, has long been thrown in the teeth of the British soldier by his foreign brethren in arms. That infamous punishment has been utterly disapproved and eloquently argued against by military men of high rank and great abilities, whose enlightened minds and long experience taught them to condemn it. The feeling of the nation is strongly against it, the armies of other countries are seen to flourish and improve without it, and yet it is still maintained, although gradually sinking into disuse, and, we hope and believe, drawing near to its abolition. Unnecessarily cruel as a punishment, ineffectual as an example to repress crime, and stamping the indelible brand of infamy on men the soul of whose profession should be a feeling of honour, why is it so lovingly and tenaciously clung to? "The service would go to the devil – could not be carried on without it – no soldiering without flogging," is the reply of a section of officers – the minority, we assuredly believe. "No one can doubt," says Dr Fergusson, "that for infamous crimes there ought to be infamous punishments, and to them let the lash be restricted." Be it so, but then devise some plan by which the soldier, whose offence is so disgraceful as to need the most humiliating of chastisements, shall be thenceforward excluded from the army. When he leaves the hospital, let his discharge be handed to him. "A fine plan, indeed!" it will be said. "Men will incur a flogging every day to get out of the service." Doubtless they will, so long as service is unlimited. And this is one reason why short enlistments and abolition of corporal punishment should go together. Against desertion, transportation has hitherto been found an ineffectual remedy. If men were enlisted for seven years only, it would cease to be so. Few would then be sufficiently perverse to risk five or seven years' transportation in order to get rid of what remained of their period of service. To flog for drunkenness, however frequent the relapse, is an absurdity, for it usually drives the culprit to habits of increased intemperance, that he may forget the disgraceful punishment he has suffered. In war time, when in the field before the enemy, discipline should assume its most Spartan and inflexible aspect. The deserter, the mutineer, the confirmed marauder, to the provost-marshal and cord. For minor offences, there would be no difficulty in finding appropriate punishments; such as fines, imprisonment in irons, extra guards and pickets, fatigue-duty, and the like. No military offenders should be punished by the cat. It is in direct opposition to the spirit by which armies should be governed: a spirit of honour and self-respect.

"The incorrigible deserter," says Dr Fergusson, "may be safely committed to penal service in the West Indies or the coast of Africa; and should the pseudo-philanthropists interfere with the cant of false humanity, let them be told that the best and bravest of our troops have too often been sent there, as to posts of honour and duty, from which they are hereafter to be saved by the substitution of the criminal and the worthless. The other nations of the Continent, who have not these outlets, conduct the discipline of their armies without flogging; and why should not we? They, it may be said, cultivate the point of honour. And does not the germ of pride and honour reside as well, and better, in the breast of the British soldier, distinguished, as he has ever been, for fidelity to his colours, obedience to his commanders, pride in his corps, and attachment to its very name?"

Mr Marshall's history of punishments in the army is rather to be termed curious than useful. Agreeable it certainly cannot be considered, except by those persons, if such there be, who luxuriate in Fox's Book of Martyrs , or gloat over the annals of the Spanish Inquisition. It shows human ingenuity taxed to the utmost to invent new tortures for the soldier. The last adhered to, and, it may safely be said, the worst devised, is the lash; and we need look back but a very little way to find its infliction carried to a frightful extent. A thousand lashes used to be no unusual award; and it sometimes happened (frequently, Mr Marshall asserts, but this other information induces us to doubt) that a man who had been unable, with safety to his life, to receive the whole of the punishment at one time, was brought out again, as soon as his back was skinned over, to take the rest. At one time there was no limit to the number of lashes that a general court-martial might award. Mr Marshall says, that at Amboyna, in the year 1813 or 1814, he knew three men to be condemned to fifteen hundred lashes each. The whole punishment was inflicted. At Dinapore, on the 12th September 1825, a man was sentenced to nineteen hundred lashes, which sentence the commander-in-chief commuted to twelve hundred. Such sentences, however, were in direct contradiction to the general order of the 30th January 1807, by which "his Majesty was graciously pleased to express his opinion, that no sentence for corporal punishment should exceed one thousand lashes." In 1812, when the powers of a regimental court-martial had been limited to the infliction of three hundred lashes, "many old officers believed, and did not hesitate to say, that such limitation would destroy the discipline of the army." – ( Marshall , p. 185.) We cannot put the same faith that Mr Marshall appears to do in the outrageous narratives of some of his authorities. It is impossible, for instance, to swallow such a tale as we find at page 267 of the Military Miscellany , of seventy men of one battalion being flogged on the line of march in one day. This, however, is only given as an on dit . Equally incredible is the story quoted from the book of a certain Sergeant Teesdale, of ten to twenty-five men being flogged daily for six weeks for coming dirty on parade; and another, which Mr Marshall tells, of seventeen thousand lashes being for some time the monthly allowance of a regiment in India – the said regiment being, we are informed, treated very little worse than its neighbours. The articles of war, as they stand at the present day, restrict the award of corporal punishment, by a general court-martial, to two hundred lashes; by a district court-martial, to one hundred and fifty; and by a regimental court, to one hundred.

We would put the question to any military man – even to the strongest advocate of flogging – what is the usual effect of corporal punishment on the soldier? Does it make or mar him, improve his character and correct his vices, or render him more reckless and abandoned than before? The conscientious answer would be, we are persuaded, that seldom is a good soldier made of a flogged man. "There is not an instance in a thousand," says Dr Jackson, "where severe punishment (flogging is here referred to) has made a soldier what he ought to be; there are thousands where it has rendered those who were forgetful and careless, rather than vicious, insensible to honour, and abandoned to crime." But then the example is supposed, erroneously, as we believe, to be of good operation. We cannot admit that, to justify the practice of marking a man's shoulders with the ineffaceable stripes of disgrace.

In speaking of corporal punishment, we have considered only its moral effect, and have not touched on the unnecessary and unequal amount of pain it occasions. Much might be said upon this head. "My first objection to flogging," says Sir Charles Napier, in his treatise " On Military Law ," published in 1837, "is, that it is torture," – using the word, no doubt, in the sense of inhumanity, and meaning that more pain than is necessary is inflicted. Sir Charles's second objection is, that it is torture of a very unequal infliction – varying, of course, according to the strength of the drummers or others employed, to the rigour of the drum-major superintending their exertions, and to other circumstances. Mr Marshall tells us that different men suffer in very different degrees from punishment of like severity. Tall slender men, of a sanguine temperament, feel a flogging more severely than short, thickset ones; and instances have been known of soldiers succumbing under a sixth part of the punishment which others have borne and rapidly recovered from. The presence of a surgeon is in many cases no guarantee against a fatal result. "It is impossible to say what may be the effect of corporal infliction with more certainty than to predict the consequences of a surgical operation." – ( Military Miscellany , p. 224.) "No medical officer can answer either for the immediate or ultimate consequences of this species of corporal punishment. Inflammation of the back, or general fever, may occur after a very moderate infliction, and may terminate fatally, notwithstanding the greatest diligence and attention on the part of a well-informed and conscientious surgeon." – ( Ibid. p. 276.) Besides the reasons against corporal punishment above stated, Sir Charles Napier advances and supports by argument six others equally cogent. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, although he introduced into his army the species of flogging known as the gantlope or gauntlet, rarely had recourse to it, being persuaded that "such a disgrace cast a damp upon the soldier's vivacity, and did not well agree with the notions which a high spirit ought to entertain of honour." "Il ne faut point," says Kirckhoff, a medical officer in the army of the king of the Netherlands, quoted by Mr Marshall, "soumettre le soldat fautif à des punitions avilissantes. A quoi bon les coups de bâton qu'on donne trop légèrement au soldat, si ce n'est pour l'abrutir, et pour déshonorer le noble état du defenseur de la patrie? Ce genre de punition déshonorant ne devrait être réservé qu'aux lâches et aux traîtres; et dès qu'une fois un militaire l'aurait subi, il faudrait l'exclure à jamais d'un ordre auquel les destins d'une nation sont confiés; d'un ordre qui a pour base le courage, l'honneur, et toutes les vertus généreuses."