Morbid Fact Du Jour For March 2, 2011
Today’s Awful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In England in 1812, records show that enlisted men were flogged for the smallest offences, and for the graver ones often flogged to death, the number of lashes being awarded by court martial. One eyewitness described how he had seen ‘men suffer five hundred and even seven hundred strokes before being taken down, the blood running down into their shoes, their backs flayed like raw, red, chopped-sausage meat’. He continued:
Some bore this awful punishment without flinching, for two or three hundred lashes, chewing a musket ball or a bit of leather to stifle or prevent their cries of agony. After two hundred lashes they did not seem to feel the same torture. Sometimes the head dropped over to one side but the lashing went on, the surgeon in attendance examining the patient from time to time to see what more he could bear. I DID see, with horror, one prisoner take seven hundred before being taken down, this sentence being carried out before the whole brigade.
Culled from: The Book Of Execution
