Category Archives: Soldiers

325: Licinius, Constantine’s last obstacle

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On an uncertain date in the spring of 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great had his onetime co-emperor — and now prisoner — Licinius executed for a purportedly treasonable plot.

In the system of tetrarchy whereby the Roman world was divided in two, each half governed by an Augustus with a lieutenant Caesar, Constantine and Licinius had established themselves as masters of the west and the east, respectively.

History, which records Constantine as the vessel of Christianity’s political triumph, recommends religious faction as the cause of the strife between them: the two had jointly promulgated the Edict of Milan establishing religious toleration, but their realms had become poles of the two hostile religions — rising Christendom gathering under Constantine’s banner; the pagan world it would supplant dominant under Licinius. The latter is said to have reneged his toleration, though not necessarily to the extent of a full persecution.

Whether we can accept religious policy as a cause sufficient to throw the Roman world into civil war, or suspect more prosaic rivalries over land and power, the two were at one another’s throats before long. Conflicts, invariably won by Constantine, and truces stabilizing an increasingly one-sided balance of power, punctuated the fraying relationship during the decade before Licinius’ decisive defeat.

Upon his deposition, Licinius was allowed to live, courtesy of the offices of his wife, Constantine’s half-sister — legacy of bygone imperial marital politics — but his confinement in Thessalonica didn’t last long.

Fifth-century Greek historian Socrates Scholasticus describes the former emperor’s allegedly treasonable end:

Accordingly he having taken him alive, treated him with the utmost humanity, and would by no means put him to death, but ordered him to take up his abode and live in tranquillity at Thessalonica. He having, however, remained quiet a short time, managed afterwards to collect some barbarian mercenaries and made an effort to repair his late disaster by a fresh appeal to arms. The emperor being made acquainted with his proceedings, directed that he should be slain, which was carried into effect. Constantine thus became possessed of the sole dominion, and was accordingly proclaimed sovereign Autocrat.

Writing much later, Gibbon had a more skeptical interpretation of this convenient execution:

[Licinius’] confinement was soon terminated by death, and it is doubtful whether a tumult of the soldiers, or a decree of the senate, was suggested as the motive for his execution. According to the rules of tyranny, he was accused of forming a conspiracy, and of holding a treasonable correspondence with the barbarians; but as he was never convicted, either by his own conduct or by any legal evidence, we may perhaps be allowed, from his weakness, to presume his innocence. The memory of Licinius was branded with infamy, his statues were thrown down, and by a hasty edict, of such mischievous tendency that it was almost immediately corrected, all his laws, and all the judicial proceedings of his reign, were at once abolished. By this victory of Constantine, the Roman world was again united under the authority of one emperor, thirty-seven years after Diocletian had divided his power and provinces with his associate Maximian.

It was upon Licinius’ tomb that Constantine built that legacy so fundamental to the western world down to the present day. That same pregnant year of 325, he would summon the Council of Nicea, establishing Christian orthodoxy in a pact with temporal power; soon after, he built up Constantinople, to which he then relocated his court and transferred to the future Byzantine Empire such brio as still persisted in the listing hulk of Rome.

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1689: Kazimierz Lyszczynski, the first Polish atheist

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On this date in 1689, in a Warsaw marketplace, Kazimierz Lyszczynski had his tongue torn out, his head struck off and his body burned to ashes which were shot from a cannon — all for scratching a few words with the whiff of atheism.

Lyszczynski — less dauntingly rendered “Cazimir Liszinski” — was convicted of holding such heretical doctrines as:

God is not the creator of man; but man is the creator of a God gathered together from nothing.

His actual writings are not known directly — his books were burned along with his flesh — but only from the transcripts of his rather hysterical trial, so it’s uncertain what he actually believed; for that matter, he vigorously (albeit unsuccessfully) abjured atheism. Some sources say that he was nailed for as little as irreverent marginal notations in a theological tract he found unconvincing; others report that he actually wrote a heretical text.

According to Valerian Krasinski’s Historical Sketch Of The Rise, Progress And Decline Of The Reformation In Poland V1 (available free from Google books)

Cazimir Lyszczynski, a noble and landowner of Lithuania, a man of a very respectable character, was perusing a book entitled Theologia Naturalis, by Henry Aldsted, a Protestant divine, and finding that the arguments which the author employed in order to prove the existence of divinity, were so confused that it was possible to deduce from them quite contrary consequences, he added on the margin the following words — “ergo non est Deus,” evidently ridiculing the arguments of the author. This circumstance was found out by Brzoska, nuncio of Brest in Lithuania, a debtor of Lyszczynski, who denouned him as an atheist, delivering, as evidence of his accusation, a copy of the work with the above-mentioned annotation to Witwicki, bishop of Posnania, who took up this affair with the greatest violence … nothing could shelter the unfortunate man against the fanatical rage of the clergy … On the simple accusation of his debtor, supported by the bishops, the affair was brought before the diet of 1689, before which the clergy, and particularly the bishop Zaluski, accused Lyszczynski of having denied the existence of God, and uttered blasphemies against the blessed Virgin and the saints. The unfortunate victim, terrified by his perilous situation, acknowledged all that was imputed to him, made a full recantation of all he might have said and written against the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church, and declared his entire submission to its authority. This was, however, of no avail to him, and his accusers were even scandalized that the diet permitted him to make a defence, and granted the term of three days for collecting evidence of his innocence, as the accusation of the clergy ought, in their judgment, to be sufficient evidence on which to condemn the culprit.

Pope Innocent XI at least salvaged the performance of the Catholic hierarchy in the affair by condemning, rather than promoting, the ambitious bishops.

Whatever the doomed man’s actual doctrines and writings, it is likely not coincidence that one finds this atrocious affair during at the moment of his country’s political collapse. The heretical knight’s 55 years corresponded to Poland’s fall from central Europe’s dominant power into the plaything of neighboring hegemons. The Polish-Lithuanian Empire stood at its maximum extent at his birth; during Lyszczynski’s boyhood, the Zaporozhian Cossacks broke free of Warsaw; as a young man, he saw the Swedes, the Russians, and Poland’s former vassal Prussia strip the empire of peoples and land.

By the time of Lyszczynski’s misfortunate death, Poland was a second-rate power on the brink of irrelevance — an abyss into which it would plunge in the century to come. Corwin’s Political History of Poland (another Google Books freebie) lays the scene:

The constant internal dissensions caused and nourished by foreign intrigues were in no mean measure responsible for the King’s failures in his final campaigns and in his diplomacy. They resulted in the loss of territory and the decline of Poland’s position as a great European power. French and Austrian money supported Polish anarchy. Diets were constantly torn up some even before the presiding officer could be elected. No law could be enacted. Corruption was rampant. Several attempts were made to depose the King. Religious intolerance became intensified and the first and last auto da fe in Poland was executed in 1689, on one Casimir Lyszczynski for his atheistic proclivities. The country became a theatre of constant strife between the various magnate families. At times the clashes resulted in formal civil wars.

It might be small consolation for having one’s head chopped off, but Lyszczynski’s reputation has far outrun his persecutors’, and in the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Empire, he cuts a pathbreaking figure for secularists and freethinkers.

There’s a substantial article about Lyszczynski on a Polish freethinkers’ site. As his hometown Brest lies in modern Belarus, he also enjoys a monumental biography on a Belarussian atheism site (and even favorite-son treatment on the city of Brest’s own page).

Lyszczynski’s gravestone — image (c) Irina Shvets and used with permission. The inscription reads, “Oh, travelers! Do not pass these stones. You will not stumble upon them if you don’t stumble upon the truth. Recognize the truth: for even those who know that it is the truth teach that it is a lie. The teachings of the wise are bound by deceit.”

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1915: Four French Corporals, for cowardice

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On this date in 1915, four French corporals were shot at a farm in Suippes for refusing to advance out of their trenches through the carnage of a World War I no man’s land.

It was not only Corporals Theophile Maupas, Louis Lefoulon, Louis Girard and Lucien Lechat who had refused. The entire 21st Company of the 336th Infantry regiment, exhausted and already decimated by combat, was ordered over the trench at dawn on March 10.

Under withering machine gun fire, and with French artillery carelessly dropping shells just in front of their own lines, the 21st stayed put. Frantic to force the advance, the French commander ordered artillery to drive the troops ahead by shelling his own trenches — an order the artillerists refused to carry out unless someone put it in writing.*

In that slaughterhouse of trench warfare, insubordination in the ranks met stern reprisals. Generals with no strategy but to make mincemeat of their countrymen could not well abide the meat’s reluctance to be minced. Examples must be made, especially inasmuch as the impracticality of executing entire companies impressed even the brass.

On March 16, six corporals and 18 soldiers of the intransigent company faced military trial in the Suippes town hall; the four condemned were shot the next day and buried under dishonorable black crosses.

According to Shot At Dawn, a campaign for rehabilitating soldiers executed during World War I, France carried out some 600 military executions during those bloody years, more than any other country. A 1999 study numbered 550 French executions. In an essay in Handbook on Death and Dying, Prof. J. Robert Lilly suggests that many more “unofficial” executions may have taken place, especially during the war’s panicked opening stages.

Whatever their precise number, the shootings, around Europe, of hundreds of men for cowardice — most in obscurity, many chosen arbitrarily, some whose descendants still struggle for recognition to this day — is one of the enduring legacies of World War I: the collision of that most individual penalty with that most faceless and indiscriminate war. A witness to a different French military execution discomfitingly describes the near-total dehumanization of the victims:

The two condemned were tied up from head to toe like sausages. A thick bandage hid their faces. And, a horrible thing, on their chests a square of fabric was placed over their hearts. The unfortunate duo could not move. They had to be carried like two dummies on the open-backed lorry, which bore them to the rifle range. It is impossible to articulate the sinister impression the sight of those two living parcels made on me.

The padre mumbled some words and then went off to eat. Two six-strong platoons appeared, lined up with their backs to the firing posts. The guns lay on the ground. When the condemned had been attached, the men of the platoon who had not been able to see events, responding to a silent gesture, picked up their guns, abruptly turned about, aimed and opened fire. Then they turned their backs on the bodies and the sergeant ordered “Quick march!”

The men marched right passed them, without inspecting their weapons, without turning a head. No military compliments, no parade, no music, no march past; a hideous death without drums or trumpets.

The shootings this day became emblematic of those lost and obscured legions. The circumstances of the “crime” — the senselessness of the advance, the order to bombard their own troops, the fury of the reprisal — recommended it to novelist Humphrey Cobb, and subsequently to a young Stanley Kubrick who adapted a fictionalized form to the 1957 film Paths of Glory. (The title comes from this poem.)

In the film, three soldiers face a firing squad under circumstances very similar to this day’s backstory, including the detail of the general ordering his own men shelled (and that of the order being refused). Kubrick renders the insanity of the resulting court-martial against hapless soldiers each of whom did little but what anyone in their situation would have done, with one of their officers, Kirk Douglas, mounting a vain defense.

This day’s executions, as with many of the others carried out across Europe in those years, sparked a long campaign for posthumous exoneration, in this case led by Maupas’ widow. In 1934, a French panel did exonerate them — awarding the surviving widows a symbolic one franc apiece.

Maupas himself was reinterred in a cemetery in Sartilly, where a monument was erected in honor of the four; just last year, opposite the courthouse where the Frenchmen were condemned, a life-sized white stone sculpture was dedicated, showing Maupas, Girard, Lechat and Lefoulon on their execution posts just after they have been shot.

The surety of the corporals’ posthumous exoneration contrasts intriguingly with the rigor of their sentence and points to the complex and shifting terms upon which the First World War entered subsequent national consciousness in France (and elsewhere) — the never-definitive story of the individual’s right place amid social structures hopelessly beyond individual control.

The history of the struggle over these men’s memory is extensively covered on this French website and the French blog Monuments aux morts pacifistes. The affair also has its own entry on the French wikipedia.

* Wisely.

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1957: Evagoras Pallikarides, teenage guerrilla poet

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On this date in 1957, Cypriot guerrilla Evagoras Pallikarides was hanged by British colonial authorities for gun possession.

As it was throughout the Empire in the middle 20th century, independence was the order of the day in Cyprus. But it was not simply whether there would be self-rule in Cyprus: the form and terms of independence were themselves hotly contested.

Cyprus would be a fresh battleground between those bitter rivals Turkey and Greece, each asserting an interest in their ethnic cousins on the island; overlapping that, it would be a battleground between the institutional Communist opposition AKEL, which opposed military action for separatism, and the nationalist EOKA, demanding not simply independence but enosis, union with Greece as part of the pan-Hellenic project so inflammatory to the Turks.

From 1955 to 1959, EOKA conducted a four-year campaign of bombing, assassinations and military engagements.

As a 17-year-old, Palikarides — already facing trial and likely prison time for his resistance activities — disappeared to join an EOKA guerrilla cell. A poetic young soul, he bid his classmates farewell with this note left to explain his absence on their first morning without him:

Old classmates. At this time, someone is missing from among you, someone who has left in search of freedom’s air, someone who you might not see alive again. Don’t cry at his graveside. It won’t do for you to cry. A few spring flowers scatter on his grave. This is enough for him …

I’ll take an uphill road
I’ll take the paths
To find the stairs
That lead to freedom

I’ll leave brothers, sisters
My mother, my father
In the valleys beyond
And the mountainsides

Searching for freedom
I’ll have as company
The white snow
Mountains and torrents

Even if it’s winter now
The summer will come
Bringing Freedom
To cities and villages

I’ll take an uphill road
I’ll take the paths
To find the stairs
That lead to freedom

I’ll climb the stairs
I’ll enter a palace
I know it will be an illusion
I know it won’t be real

I’ll wonder in the palace
Until I find the throne
Only a queen
Sitting on it

Beautiful daughter, I will say,
Open your wings
And take me in your embrace
That’s all I ask …

Pallikarides fought for a year before being apprehended with a gun illegally in his possession — a hanging crime under British anti-terrorism laws, but as Pallikarides was just the ninth (and last) EOKA man executed, it seems plain that law was not receiving draconian enforcement. At least one author claims that the authorities threw the book at him on the gun charge because of a murder they believed he committed as a guerrilla but could not prove.

The fact that he turned 19 a fortnight before his execution likewise did not avail him clemency — as the young rebel predicted in court:

I know you will hang me. Whatever I did, I did as a Cypriot Greek fighting for liberty.

As youthful martyrs to nationhood are wont to become, Pallikarides (along with his poetry) lives on as a potent symbol to Greek Cypriots. Shortly after Cyprus achieved independence in 1960, his name and visage were affiliated with a Cyprus football club, Evagoras (which later merged with another club to become AEP Paphos).

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1963: Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, model for the Jackal

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On this date in 1963, clutching a rosary, French officer Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry was shot by a firing squad in the Paris suburb Ivry-sur-Seine for attempting to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.

Perhaps no anticolonial struggle left a more considerable intellectual and cultural footprint than the Algerian War of Independence against France. It gashed the French polity as well; the right violently rejected the swelling sentiment to end their country’s 132-year occupation. It is often said that the conservative Charles de Gaulle was the only man who could have engineered the departure with the support of a sufficient portion of the populace — but a sufficient portion by no means meant all, and every blunder multiplying the [French] body count was laid on de Gaulle’s head besides.

On August 22, 1962 — just weeks after that war successfully expelled the European power — an assassins’ team led by Bastien-Thiry (collaborating with the far-right Organisation de l’armée secrète) unleashed a machine gun fusillade at de Gaulle’s car. Hundreds of shots were fired; miraculously, the president and all his aides all escaped unharmed.

Although the actual gunmen were reprieved by their intended target, their manager was not. Said de Gaulle,

The French need martyrs … I gave them Bastien-Thiry. They’ll be able to make a martyr of him. He deserves it.

Certainly Bastien-Thiry had that in mind. At his trial (as recorded by a sympathetic French-language website), he addressed his conduct to posterity:

Nous avons exercé le droit de légitime défense contre un homme, au nom de ses victimes, au nom de nos concitoyens et au nom de nos enfants ; cet homme est ruisselant de sang français et il représente la honte actuelle de la France. Il n’est pas bon, il n’est pas moral, il n’est pas légal que cet homme reste longtemps à la tête de la France ; la morale, le droit et la raison humaine s’unissent pour le condamner. La vérité que nous avons dite, et que bien d’autres que nous ont dite avant nous, restera attachée au nom de cet homme, où qu’il aille et quoi qu’il fasse. Un jour cet homme rendra compte de ses crimes : devant Dieu, sinon devant les hommes.

Bastien-Thiry’s sensational plot, and the ongoing efforts of the OAS to murder de Gaulle, inspired Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal, and a classic 1973 film of the same title:

Part of the Themed Set: The Written Word.

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1952: Jurgen Stroop, the Warsaw Ghetto’s destroyer

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On this date in 1952, SS Gruppenfuhrer Jurgen Stroop was hanged in Poland near the site of the Warsaw Ghetto he had liquidated nine years before.

A World War I veteran, Stroop caught the Nazi star as it ascended and was carried to various wartime posts in occupied Poland. The experience he thereby garnered in countering partisans made him a hot ticket when the Warsaw Ghetto revolted. Dissatisfied with the slow suppression of the Jewish quarter, Heinrich Himmler put Stroop in charge in April 1943.

Stroop got results: unburdened by the slightest need to save the village or win hearts and minds, he simply put it to the sword. Wholesale slaughter followed vicious house-to-house urban warfare, with buildings torched or demolished to drive out defenders. By mid-May, the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw had not been pacified: it had been annihilated.

His “Stroop Report”, a masterpiece of oblivious horror in the clipped narrative of the military bureaucracy, helped to hang him* with entries like this:

Progress of large-scale operation on 16 May 1943, start 1000 hours.

180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw Synagogue.

…

Total number of Jews dealt with 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved.

In one of those ironies history is so unnervingly fond of, Stroop was imprisoned in Communist-controlled Poland in the same cell with a resistance fighter from the anti-Communist Home Army.**

Kazimierz Moczarski, who survived a death sentence of his own, infiltrated this bizarre roommate scenario into the (nonfiction) literary canon with his Conversations with an Executioner — published in the 1970s.

* Stroop was also condemned to death for war crimes by an American tribunal prior to being repatriated to Poland. He was separately convicted in Poland and hanged under that latter sentence.

** These pages have previously taken note of the anti-Nazi partisans’ rivalries.

Part of the Themed Set: The Written Word.

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1902: Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock, “scapegoats for Empire”

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On this date in 1902, two Australian officers were shot in virtual secrecy at Pretoria for atrocities they committed in service of the crown during the Second Boer War.

Harry “Breaker” Morant — he got the nickname from his aptitude with horses — was the famous one of the pair and the reason the date is so well-known to posterity as to merit its own cinematic treatment (review):

A colorful son of the Commonwealth’s hardscrabble strata, Breaker Morant led a life that has been improved into mythology, not least by his own efforts. Impoverished but educated, he migrated in 1883 from England to Australia where he carved out a larger-than-life profile as a bush poet, married the (subsequently) famous anthropologist Daisy Bates and eventually — fatefully — volunteered for service in South Africa.

The Second Boer War, Britain’s (ultimately successful) fight to corral the Dutch-descended Boer republics into the empire, started sunnily enough for the English, but as the Boers abandoned a conventional war they could not win and adopted guerrilla tactics, it descended into an exceedingly dirty conflict — notable for Britain’s pioneering use of concentration camps.

It was also notable for savagery between combatants. When Morant’s best friend in the unit was tortured and mutilated by Boer guerrillas, the poet went on a rampage, ordering a number of prisoners’ summary executions over a period of weeks. It was for this that he and his confederate were shot this day. The fact of his confinement was not communicated to the Australian government; Peter Handcock’s wife only learned of his execution weeks later, from press reports.

The defendants maintained that there was a standing order from the top to kill any Boer caught wearing British khaki, a tactic the Boers were known to employ, and that the order was frequently enforced. Though the prosecution strenuously maintained otherwise at trial, the existence of that (unwritten) directive has become accepted to posterity.

What remains murky is the matter of why — why these two, why now? And is Breaker Morant a hero or a villain? Those questions are also prisms for the many currents of Morant’s case so strikingly prescient for the century that lay ahead.*

Asymmetric warfare and the legal status of guerrillas. Human rights and war crimes. Corruption and plausible deniability. The moral culpability of subordinates for the orders of the brass. And certainly all the contradictory forces of empire and resistance entailed by an Australian adventurer shot by a Scottish detachment for killing Dutchmen in Africa at the behest of London.** It was an old-time colonial war in a world becoming, for we of the early 21st century, recognizably modern.

Hard-living to his dying breath, Morant stayed up the night before he was shot scribbling his last poem — piquantly titled “Butchered to Make a Dutchman’s Holiday”.

In prison cell I sadly sit,
A d__d crest-fallen chappie!
And own to you I feel a bit-
A little bit – unhappy!

It really ain’t the place nor time
To reel off rhyming diction –
But yet we’ll write a final rhyme
Whilst waiting cru-ci-fixion!

No matter what “end” they decide –
Quick-lime or “b’iling ile,” sir?
We’ll do our best when crucified
To finish off in style, sir!

But we bequeath a parting tip
For sound advice of such men,
Who come across in transport ship
To polish off the Dutchmen!

If you encounter any Boers
You really must not loot ’em!
And if you wish to leave these shores,
For pity’s sake, DON’T SHOOT ‘EM!!

And if you’d earn a D.S.O.,
Why every British sinner
Should know the proper way to go
Is: “ASK THE BOER TO DINNER!”

Let’s toss a bumper down our throat, –
Before we pass to Heaven,
And toast: “The trim-set petticoat
We leave behind in Devon.”

His last words were hurled at his firing squad: “Shoot straight, you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!”

* It is no coincidence that the Australian film excerpted in this post was released while the Vietnam War was still a fresh memory.

** Breaker Morant’s memory would develop into a point of Australian suspicion towards the British military, especially after Morant’s persecutor helped author World War I’s infamous hecatomb of Australian (and New Zealand) troops at Gallipoli. Morant and Handcock turned out to be the last Australians executed by the British military.

Update: Via Airminded, an Australian history program took a skeptical look at the Breaker Morant myth a few years ago.

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1953: Emil August Fieldorf, Polish anti-Communist

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On this date in 1953, Polish Home Army General Emil August Fieldorf was hanged at Warsaw’s Mokotow Prison by the Polish Communist government as a “fascist-Hitlerite criminal.”

The officer suffered a hard fate for the geopolitical jostling of great powers in its neighborhood. He had escaped German detention to become a Brigadier General and the second-in-command of the Polish Home Army, the occupied country’s resistance movement answerable to its government in exile.

Polish-Russian animosity is an ancient and fragrant vintage, just the sort of intoxicant to lend an especial bloodthirstiness to the ample brutality of politicking under Stalin’s sway.

As the Red Army threw back the Wehrmacht, the rivalry between the government in exile, (organically descended from the less-than-liberal prewar Polish government) and Poland’s Communist soon-to-be occupiers escalated.

Diplomatically, the government in exile engaged a (losing) joust with Stalin over the postwar Polish state’s borders and political structure; on the ground, Polish and Russian forces nominally united against Hitler maneuvered against one another — and at least one researcher has characterized their enmity as an outright dirty war.

Fieldorf had been detained by the NKVD at the war’s end, but he passed under an assumed name and therefore survived an internment in the Soviet Union. Shortly after his return, a sham offer of “amnesty” to Home Army survivors induced him to reveal himself under his true identity. He was convicted in a show trial of authorizing the killing of Soviet partisans. The post-Communist Polish government posthumously pardoned him.

It would be safe to say that “forgive and forget” is not a governing principle in the current memory of Soviet-Polish relations. Fieldorf’s fate is one more bill on the indictment, and in his case, quite literally so: spurred by the general’s daughter, Poland has doggedly pursued the extradition of Fieldorf’s prosecutor, Helena Wolinska Brus, now an octogenarian pensioner in Britain.

The years-long legal duel between these two women has ballooned into a sort of proxy fight over the still-sensitive definition of heroism and victimhood in the Poland of Hitler and Stalin.

The Jewish* Brus, who narrowly escaped the Nazis to join a leftist partisan unit, is contemptuous of the charge. To some, she is shamelessly exploiting her Jewishness to escape her own culpability. To others — aided not a little by the general’s daughter’s own remarks — the charge springs from a Polish polity whose own insistence upon victimhood (of Communism) has authorized historical forgetfulness over its complicity in genocide.

Someday soon — in a year or two, or five or ten; in England or Poland or some other spot — Helena Wolinska Brus will follow the man she hanged into the clay that awaits all us wretches. So will the general’s daughter, only a few years the junior of her foe. The bitter specter of wrongs that can never be righted is sure to long outlive their passing.

* Jewish partisans form a distinct population whose membership will make all-too-predictable appearances in these pages. Communist units were generally happy to have them, while Catholic Poles fighting for the anti-Semitic ancien regime were generally not — although in some instances, all-Jewish partisan bands organized outside these two forces.

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1803: Edward Marcus Despard, a patriot without a nation

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On this date in 1803, during an era ruled by an Empire’s rough assertion of security against instability abroad, Britain hung its liberal-minded former governor of Belize — along with six others — for treason.

Book CoverThis ought-to-be-memorable occasion lies half-lost in time’s shifting sands, retrieved in part only by the oddity of being the last sentence of drawing and quartering handed down in Britain. (The sentence was moderated to simple hanging and posthumous beheading.)

But there was much more to be said about Despard than his sentence. Today, Executed Today is pleased to feature Col. Edward Marcus Despard as remembered by his biographer, Mike Jay.

Guest-posted here with permission is the prologue to his The Unfortunate Colonel Despard. (A chapter on Despard’s remarkable marriage to a black woman is also available on MikeJay.net.) Following the prologue is an Executed Today interview with the author.

The day Colonel Edward Marcus Despard was executed was one of the most dramatic, and strangely forgotten, in British history. In this, as in much else, his death mirrored his life.

He was to be publicly hung, drawn and quartered for high treason, a punishment which had barely been carried out in London within living memory. Its most vivid associations were still with the Jacobite rebellions over fifty years before: the days when the British state’s greatest fear had been that a Catholic monarch might seize the throne. Those days were now long gone and, many thought, the old ceremony with them; Despard, as it turned out, would be the last person on whom the sentence would ever be passed. As specified by the Lord Chief Justice, the Colonel and his six confederates were ‘to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are quite dead, then to be cut down and your bowels taken out and cast into the fire before your faces; your heads to be taken off and your bodies quartered’.

Intimations of the drama had already begun to transform the city the day before: Sunday 20 February 1803. At first light, carpenters had begun to assemble scaffold and gallows, large enough to accommodate the seven men, on the roof of Surrey County Jail in Horsemonger Lane, just south of the Thames in Southwark. The jail was a plain barracks-style building, recently constructed to replace the old prison which had been torn down in the Gordon Riots some twenty years before. The roof had been built flat for precisely this purpose, and this was the first occasion for its use. The main gates of the jail opened to admit seven plain wooden coffins.

According to contemporary witnesses, even as the preparations began, ‘vast multitudes of people immediately began to assemble’. It was noted that the throng consisted ‘chiefly of the lowest of the vulgar’, but that, unusually for a public execution, ‘a considerable number of persons of genteel appearance were observable’. The forces of law and order, too, were out in unprecedented force. Every single member of the Bow Street police patrol, the other London patrols at Queen Street, Marlborough Street and Hatton Gardens, and a ‘numerous tribe’ of petty constables from the outlying London boroughs, were placed on duty. The jail and its surrounds were emphatically staked out, surrounded by a cordon two officers deep. All ‘the public houses and other places of resort for the disaffected’ bristled with police. A detachment of mounted Horse-Guard cavalry clopped into Horsemonger Lane; all the infantry regiments in the city, at the Tower of London and Knightsbridge Barracks, were placed on the highest alert. The head keeper of the jail was issued with six sky rockets, each containing a pound of explosives, ‘to be let off as a signal to the military, in case of any disturbance’. London’s entire martial forces were instructed not to leave their posts until the danger was past.

The impending execution had dominated the news all week. The Times had led its news pages with testy dismissals of the rumours which were spreading around the city: that Despard and his confederates were being cruelly chained together, that they were being tortured for their confessions, that a last-minute reprieve was in the air. It was beginning to dawn on the authorities that the graphic medieval ritual they had scheduled might be counterproductive, inflammatory and unpredictably dangerous. The Police Magistrate of Southwark had expressed grave concerns, pointing out that the question which had been on the common people’s lips during the week was ‘When are these poor men to be murdered?’. It had been hard, apparently, even to find labourers prepared to erect the scaffold. When the warrant for the execution was issued on the morning of 20 February, it became clear that these anxieties had led to a change in the sentence. Exercising their statutory discretion, the magistrates announced: ‘we have thought fit to remit part of the sentence, viz. the taking out and burning their bowels before their faces, and dividing the body severally into four parts’. Despard would now be drawn –- to the place of execution on a carriage without wheels –- hung until dead, and then beheaded. The Observer commented with relief that ‘the cutting out of the heart of the malefactor, quartering &c is very humanely and properly to be dispensed with’.

On the day of the execution, 21 February 1803, the pace quickened long before dawn. ‘A vast number of police officers’ were soon massively outnumbered by the spectators streaming through the bitter cold and darkness. Southwark was a hard area to police at the best of times, a hinterland to the city of London proper dominated by the unedifying activities which were prohibited across the Thames. A warren of timber shacks among the marshy waste ground and garbage landfills, it had long been a teeming red light district; in recent times it had become dominated by malodorous and insanitary industries — distilleries, tanneries and vinegar mills — which were forced south of the river by City of London edicts. It also had a long history of insurrection. In 1381, Wat Tyler had led the Peasant’s Revolt through the same streets; in 1450, Jack Cade had set up camp here with his Kentish rebel army. Despard’s sentence of high treason had more powerful resonances with this period than it did with the freshly-minted nineteenth century. Most of the crowd had never seen a treason execution; now, jostling to witness one, they were passing shops selling roller-skates, umbrellas, toothbrushes, matches, alarm clocks, condoms, Twining’s Tea and Pears’ Soap. Part of the appeal of the spectacle must have been this lurid collision of the old and the new; part, also, the uncertainty on all sides as to whether the crowd had really assembled only to stand and watch. It was widely rumoured that the execution would not take place as scheduled — or, if it did, that the main event would turn out to be an entirely unscheduled one. The people of London had rioted countless times over much less — and, given the nature of Despard’s alleged crime, there were an unknown number among the crowd who might attempt to turn a riot into a full-scale revolution.

The character of execution crowds seems, as with most crowds, to have been largely in the eye of the beholder. For many, they were simply the scum of society: crude, vulgar, leering, gawping, sadistic. For others, though, they were the salt of the earth, good men and true come to witness and legitimise the exercise of state power. Despite the rough spectacle that they presented, they were often visibly civic-minded: rescuing stranded children, or crying ‘shame’ if one of their number insulted a woman. The beholder’s view of such crowds tended to reflect their attitude to public execution itself, as the most graphic and visceral demonstration of the ultimate power of the state. There were many who were already campaigning for its abolition on the grounds, as one put it, that ‘the real effect of these scenes is to torture the compassionate and harden the obdurate’. There were many more, though, who thronged to such occasions in high spirits. Their hilarity and ribaldry –- the proverbial ‘gallows humour’ – may have been heartless mockery, but it may also have been a response to the unspoken but unmissable tension between the pomp and solemnity of the occasion and ghastly reality of the act.

This tension reached its high water mark with Despard’s execution. There had been a long observed trend in Britain towards public disrespect at hangings: the victim cheered, the executioner and officials booed and mocked. But the crime of high treason placed an unprecedented focus on the legitimacy of the act a focus sharpened still further by the fact that the majority of the onlookers believed Despard to be innocent of it. He had been accused and convicted of a shocking, cold-blooded plot to overthrow the state, an accusation which he had consistently and calmly denied. Now, at the moment of the state’s cold-blooded retribution, he had a final chance to speak the case for his defence. Part of the unique appeal of executions was always that the victims, in the moments before their death, might say anything; it was often the only time that the unspeakable could be spoken in public. But if Despard chose to speak the unspeakable, it would be more than a howl of rage, a fruity obscenity or a cheeky quip. The danger he posed might yet be far from over.

The bell of St.George’s Church began tolling at five, and continued for about an hour. By the time it finished, every conceivable vantage point was packed solid. It was estimated that there were twenty thousand people jammed into the carriageway of Horsemonger Lane and spilling onto every nearby roof and patch of open ground ‘that afforded the least prospect’. It was evident, too, that this was no ordinary gallows crowd, just as it was no ordinary hanging. The packed observers were almost completely silent: ‘no tumult, no disorder appeared among the multitude … all was stillness and expectation of the approaching event’. For the massed guards and officers, this must have been considerably more unnerving than the unruly mob which they had feared. It might be an expression of uncertainty, of a crowd unsure of the tone of the event, and too diffident to break the silence. But it could equally, and perhaps more plausibly, be read as a mute but chilling sign of pre-arranged intent.

Inside Surrey County Jail, as the prison bell struck seven, Despard was invited into the chapel for a service of last rites. He politely refused the invitation, and remained in his cell. At seven thirty, his arms were bound with ropes and he was led out into the walled and enclosed prison yard. He was still a colonel, and still entitled to wear the uniform of his rank, but he appeared instead in his favourite dark greatcoat and boots, bare-headed, without wig or powder. His solicitor was waiting for him outside his cell and, manoeuvering around his ropes, he shook hands with him ‘very cordially’.

Awaiting Despard in the prison yard was a very strange sight indeed. Two horses were harnessed to a small cart which contained two trusses of clean straw, and whose floor rested directly on the ground. Behind the cart stood the Sheriff of Surrey; behind him a fully-robed priest, and behind the priest the head keeper of the jail, Mr.Ives, solemnly holding a white wand. Behind Ives stood a line of high constables, and behind them a line of duty policemen. Bringing up the rear was the executioner, holding up a drawn sword.

The quartering and dismembering had been waived, but there had never been an execution for high treason without the victim first being drawn through the streets to the scaffold. It was integral to the ceremony, but today it was out of the question. The ritual was intended to allow the people to vent their feelings towards the traitor, to abuse him and spit on him; today, though, no-one was minded to test how the ominously silent crowd outside would react if Despard was paraded among them. Apart from anything else, the packed streets made it logistically impossible. It had hastily been decided to switch the ritual to the privacy of the prison yard.

Outside the yard, the traditional gallows humour may have been conspicuously absent, but Despard himself was unable to keep a straight face at the display of furtive pomp that confronted him. ‘Ha! ha!’, he laughed, ‘what nonsensical mummery is this?’ The solemn procession was not programmed to respond. Despard was ushered into the cart, seated backwards on the straw bales and, as the dawn spread grey over the prison walls, bumped around the cobbled yard until it was deemed that the drawing had been completed. There was to be no thwarting of justice, but neither would the ancient ritual of drawing a traitor survive that morning’s embarrassment and ridicule. Despard, though powerless against it, had nevertheless passed a sentence of death on the sentence itself.

(Click to continue reading on page 2).

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1973: Francisco Caamaño, the Dominican Republic’s would-be Fidel

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On this date in 1973, Col. Francisco Caamano was (perhaps*) captured by forces of the Dominican dictatorship and summarily executed while trying to organize a guerrilla resistance.

Caamano was heir to a long family military tradition; his father had been a Defense Minister for the dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Unsteady governments followed Trujillo’s 1961 assassination. Caamano came to prominence by mounting a 1965 coup against a military junta and in favor of the constitutional regime it had overthrown two years earlier. The coup was an initial success — Caamano was temporarily the de facto head of state — but also triggered an American intervention against the distrusted leftist government.

Caamano licked his wounds in Cuba for a few years before mounting a small landing in early February 1973 with a handful of followers, looking to foment a peasant revolution — a play right out of the Cuban Revolution, but considerably less successful. Harried by the military, the operation was crushed within weeks with only three survivors.

A Spanish-language tribute to Caamano is here. Another more general educational page (also in Spanish) is here.

* This is the guerrillas’ version. The government’s version was that Caamano was killed in battle.

Note: Title corrected.

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