Man of Honour. Iain Gale
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the bare structure of the whipping block and cursed. It never failed to astonish him that even now, with the army better fed and furnished than ever before, there were still some soldiers within its ranks foolish enough or hungry enough or just stupid enough to risk everything by stealing. And this was the army’s answer.
Slaughter, who was standing to his front spoke without turning his head.
‘It’s a bloody shame, Mister Steel, Sir. A real bloody shame. Dan Cussiter is no more a thief than I am.’
Steel lent over to pat his horse’s head. ‘Careful now, Jacob. That’s seditious talk. You know that the army no longer lives off the country. It is the Duke’s work. Every major or captain has the responsibility of telling every man in his company that if one of them steals so much as an egg they will be either hanged or flogged without mercy. And should that be the case then you know the good Major Jennings will always be on hand to ensure that justice is carried out to the letter of the law and within an inch of your life.’
Steel sat up in the saddle.
Slaughter spoke again, although he was still staring straight ahead. ‘Perhaps one day they’ll reform this army so that them as is good stays from harm and them that’s bad at heart get their just rewards.’
Steel said nothing, but entertained similar thoughts. Perhaps when some were turned to dung on the fields of Germany, then those left behind might yet benefit. But he very much doubted it. Marlborough could do many things, but he could not interfere with the very infrastructure of the army; the fact that everything worked only by example. And that meant punishing some poor bugger today, whether or not he really was a thief. Steel’s thoughts were lost in the growing thunder of a drum roll. Two men had been sentenced. As was the custom when the army was in the field, desperately attempting to preserve its manpower while unable to forgo military justice, only one was to be punished. So the two men had drawn lots to determine who would receive the flogging. The winner, a moon-faced oaf from number three company had been returned to the ranks and now stood smiling with grim satisfaction as he watched his partner in crime being led out into the square.
Cussiter stood between the Grenadiers of the escort with his head hanging down, staring at his feet, waiting for the inevitable. He had been stripped to the waist and his hands bound, ready to receive punishment, and the white of his thin flesh shone horribly stark and raw against the massed red coats of the parade and the grey of the unforgiving morning. A flogging was not the worst punishment that the army had to offer. There was death, of course, by shooting, hanging or breaking on the wheel – in which your bones were smashed with an iron bar before you were cut down and left in the dust of the parade ground to die slowly and in unimaginable agony, or until a merciful officer put his pistol to your head and blew your brains to the air. There were other ingenious punishments to suit particular crimes. Steel was familiar with the rules, some of which had been laid down by Marlborough himself for each offence.
‘All men found gathering peas or beans or under the pretence of rooting to be hanged as marauders without trial.’ There were also clear distinctions between what merited ‘severe punishment’, ‘most severe’ and ‘the utmost punishment’. Flogging, like the other common forms, was brutal and barbaric, yet Steel knew that there was really no other way. But it was hard to wipe from his mind the images of so many punishment parades and their various different methods.
There was the whirligig, in which the prisoner was placed in a wooden cage that was then spun on a spindle until he was so dizzy that at the least he suffered vomiting, involuntary defecation, urination and blinding headaches. At worst he would experience apoplectic seizures, internal bleeding and possibly death. Then there was the wooden horse on which the convicted man was compelled to sit astride while weights were gradually attached to each foot. It didn’t help if your victim happened to be among those administering the punishment, as so often seemed to be the case. It was said that a prolonged spell on the wooden horse could bring about rupture and destroy forever your chances of fathering a family; Steel had seen men very nearly gelded by the revolting contraption. But nothing, felt Steel, no product of the torturer’s ingenuity, could equal for sheer spectacle or barbarity, the horror of a simple flogging.
He wondered whether he was alone in feeling this way about what they were all about to watch. He knew that many officers shrugged it off with the casual nonchalance they might accord chastising a disobedient dog. Others though, he suspected, shared his qualms. Of course it was quite impossible to express such views. And Steel felt at times that perhaps it was a failing on his part. An inability to be quite everything that the men expected in an officer. Looking away from the tripod, Steel’s eye found his Colonel.
James Farquharson was sitting uncomfortably on his horse at the centre of one of the companies, surrounded by his immediate military family. Close to him sat Jennings and for an instant Steel contemplated how they might eventually resolve their quarrel. Whether one or both of them might die in the resolution or whether both might not be killed by the enemy first. Jennings was an unpopular enough officer. Perhaps he would die by a British bullet rather than by one of their enemies’. It happened. All too frequently in fact. Who could say in the heat of battle quite from where the deadly shot had come?
A little back from the punishment block Farquharson still felt too close for comfort and pulling at the reins of his handsome grey mare he coughed, nervously.
‘You know, Aubrey, I really do find all this so very tiresome.’
He belched and wiped his mouth with a white lace handkerchief he kept hidden in his sleeve.
‘I suppose that I must really remain until the end, eh. Until it is erm … finished?’
Jennings smiled. ‘I really don’t see how you can do otherwise, Sir James. It is after all your regiment. Not good for the men to see you go before the … erm … finish, Sir.’
‘Quite so, quite so. It was merely that I remembered a prior engagement you understand. Staff business as it were. You were not to know. It is of no matter, no matter at all. How many lashes did you say?’
‘A round hundred, Sir James. You yourself signed the warrant.’
‘A hundred. Yes indeed. Dreadful crime. Quite dreadful. What was it again?’
Jennings turned back to the parade without answering. He knew the real reason for his commanding officer’s desire to leave. And that it had nothing to do with ‘staff business’. He did not in truth respect Farquharson any more than he respected Steel. Neither, in his opinion, was the sort of officer who was wanted in a modern army. Oh, it would suffice in the sort of army on which Milord Marlborough had set his heart. But Jennings knew that modern warfare needed a quite different sort of man in command. Ruthless, inspiring, pitiless. Certainly Marlborough had shown his grasp of the new warfare at Schellenberg. That was real war. War without mercy. But Jennings could see that their great commander, like the old fools who commanded the majority of his regiments, had no stomach for the sort of warfare he envisaged. The new breed of soldier needed nerves of steel and undaunted courage. And such a soldier could, naturally, only be commanded by men like himself. The square was almost complete now. The remaining officers of the regiment rode into place with their respective companies. Jennings was joined by Charles Frampton who had completed his immediate duties.
‘Good afternoon, Charles.’
‘Aubrey. Sir James. Bloody business this. Can’t say that I really care for it.’
Farquharson smiled. Jennings spoke:
‘Nor I, Charles, in truth. But it is what the army requires. Distasteful business though it is.’
‘Oh, I did not mean that I disapproved of it. Not at all. Quite so. Absolutely necessary. No other way. I was merely hoping to have been able to have spent the morning at drill. Most important you know. Now. Where are we? Where is the dreadful fellow?’
Another rattle of side drums signalled the approach of the prisoner and escort. Dan Cussiter was a scrawny looking Yorkshire-born Private from number three company. According to tradition, he was led by two Grenadiers and Sergeant Stringer, whose weasel face was suffused with a grin. Stringer relished all