Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels

The Flogging of Soldiers

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" Nr. 405 vom 31. August 1855]

London, August 28. One institution of the British army suffices to characterise the class from which the British soldier is recruited. We mean the punishment of flogging. Corporal punishment no longer exists in the French, Prussian, and several smaller armies. Even in Austria, where the greater part of the recruits consist of semi-barbarians, there is an evident striving to abolish it; thus, the punishment of running the gauntlet was lately struck out of the Austrian military code. In England, by contrast, the “cat-o‘-nine-tails” (the nine-tailed cat) has been preserved in full force – an instrument of torture fully equal to the Russian knout. Whenever a reform of the military penal law was broached in Parliament, all the old feather-hats got heated in defence of the “cat”, none more passionately than old Wellington. For them, a soldier who had not been flogged was an incomprehensible being. Bravery, discipline, and invincibility were in their eyes the exclusive attributes of men who bear the scars of at least 50 lashes on their posteriors, as the retainers of old bore their coat of arms.

The only reform was the limitation of the number of lashes to 50. The effectiveness of this reform may be gathered from the fact that about a week ago at Aldershot a private breathed his last shortly after receiving 30 lashes. On this occasion the favourite method was employed of soaking the “cat-o‘-nine-tails” in urine. The application of urine to the raw and bleeding flesh is an infallible recipe for torturing the patient into insanity. The nine-tailed cat is not only an instrument of torture, it leaves indelible scars, it brands a man for life. Even in the English army such branding is an ever-oppressive disgrace. The flogged soldier falls below the level of his comrades. But according to the British military code, punishment in the presence of the enemy consists almost exclusively in flogging, and thus the punishment that is vaunted by its defenders as the only means of maintaining discipline at the decisive moment is the surest means of destroying discipline, by breaking the morale and the point d‘honneur of the soldier.

This explains two curious facts. Firstly: The large number of English deserters before Sevastopol. In the winter, when the British soldiers had to make superhuman exertions to guard the trenches, those who could not manage to keep themselves awake for 48–60 hours were flogged. Only think! To flog heroes like the British soldiers who had proved themselves in the trenches before Sevastopol and on the day of Inkerman! But the articles of war left no choice. The best men in the army, when overcome by fatigue, were flogged, and, disgraced as they were, they deserted to the Russians. No more telling condemnation of the system is possible than these facts. In no previous war have troops of any nation deserted to the Russians in appreciable numbers. They knew that they would be treated worse than in the national ranks. It was reserved for the English army to furnish the first large contingent of such deserters, and, by the admission of the English themselves, it was the “cat-o‘-nine-tails” that recruited these deserters for Russia.

The other fact is the difficulty which England encounters at every attempt to form foreign legions. Already during the Anti-Jacobin war, although the British articles of war nominally applied to the foreign corps, flogging had to be dropped in practice. At the beginning of this century, several heterodox English generals, among others Sir Robert Wilson, published critical pamphlets against the corporal punishment of soldiers. Sir Francis Burdett, for more than ten years, thundered in Parliament against the “cat-o‘-nine-tails” and berated the English nation as “a flogged nation”. In the House of Commons he found energetic seconders in Lord Folkestone and the celebrated Lord Cochrane (now Admiral Earl of Dundonald). In the press, Cobbett waged a terrible polemic against the “cat”, for which he paid with two years’ imprisonment. For a moment, during the last years of the war against Napoleon, the bitterness in the nation and the army rose to such a pitch that the Duke of York – equally notorious for his bigoted adherence to barrack-square drill, his flight before the French, and his amours with Madame Clarke – was compelled to issue an order of the day, in which all officers were given notice that frequent recourse to flogging in their respective commands would be a hindrance to their promotion.

How then is it to be explained that the “cat-o‘-nine-tails” has victoriously weathered all these storms of half a century? Very simply. It is the instrument by which the aristocratic character of the English army is maintained, by which all higher posts, from the ensign upwards, are secured as an apanage for the younger sons of the aristocracy and the gentry. With the abolition of the “cat-o‘-nine-tails”, the immense gulf between privates and officers, which splits the army into two formally distinct races, would fall away. At the same time, its ranks would open to higher popular elements than those from which it has hitherto been recruited. It would then be all over with the old constitution of the English army. It would be revolutionised from the ground up. The nine-tailed cat is the Cerberus that guards the treasure of the aristocracy.