Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (20 page)

‘There is no longer a Vendée. She is dead under our free sword with her women and children. I have just buried her in the marshes and woods of Savenay in obedience to the orders you gave me.

I have crushed the children under the feet of the horses and massacred the women, who will breed no more brigands. I have not to reproach myself with a prisoner for I have exterminated all. The roads are strewn with corpses. There are so many in several places that they form pyramids. The shooting by firing squads at Savenay goes on without ceasing, because every minute brigands arrive who pretend to surrender themselves as prisoners. We take no prisoners. It would be necessary to give them the bread of liberty, and pity is not revolutionary.’

At the town of Dove 69 were shot on 17 December, 41 on 18, 58 on 20 and 31 on 22 December. The fusillades usually took place near a quarry called Justices de Fier-Bois. There the dead and dying were pitched pell-mell, and in the evening of an execution one could hear the half-stifled groans issuing from this tomb.

The sheer repetition of the numbers slain numbs one’s mind. On 26 December the military commission went to the prison, interrogated all except those under 18, and the same evening 235 were, on pretence of taking a walk, led by a detachment of 300 soldiers to a field near Munet, where they were shot. On 12 January another 300 were put to death, being made to kneel with their faces towards the Loire, and were shot in the back. The dead and dying were not even buried, but were flung naked into the Loire, a process described by one of the generals as ‘sending them to Nantes by water’, their clothes being torn off their bodies and sold in Angers.

The exact numbers so done to death are unknown. Government Representative Carrier admitted that about 100 to 200 a day were shot, and so great was the slaughter that the burial of the victims could not keep pace with the executions. The Society of Vincent la Montagne stated on 12 January 1794 that the bodies were scarcely covered by a few inches of earth and that ‘one often sees the limbs of the corpses appearing above ground’.

One can hardly visualise such scenes, the printed word being so remote and impersonal, so it is necessary to look through the eyes of those who were actually there in order to comprehend the full horror of it all. The commandant of a battalion of National Guards who escorted a special fusillade of women between 16 and 18 years of age to be shot at Gigant reported:

‘On arrival at this place of horror I saw a sort of gorge, where there was a quarry. There I perceived the bodies of 75 women. They were naked, and by a refinement of barbarism they had been turned over on to their backs.

When our party of unfortunates arrived at this quarry, already strewn with the corpses of those of their own sex, they were ranged in a row and shot, and those who escaped the bullets then watched the guns being loaded which were to finish them off. After these atrocities, those who killed them, stripped them and turned them over on their backs.’

Another eyewitness described watching 28 victims being led, tied together with a single rope, through the streets, accompanied by a band playing the fifty-first Psalm, ‘Have mercy on me, oh God’. On reaching an avenue of sycamores, the ends of the rope were tied to two of the trees, thereby positioning the line of victims along the edge of a specially prepared deep ditch. When the signal was given, the dead and wounded collapsed into the ditch, the volley also being the signal for the poor of Lyons to scramble down into the ditch to strip the corpses of their clothes and valuables.

That particular eyewitness, a boy of 12, more curious at his age than callous or horrified, said that he was at the edge of the trench into which the bodies were being piled, and commented that what had impressed him most in the ghastly drama was not the tragic deaths as much as the appearance of the bodies heaped in the common grave, curved one over the other, and seeming to shudder every time another corpse was thrown on to the yielding and palpitating flesh.

In the wider world the use of firing squads continued. In the 1940s 242 people who had collaborated with the Germans during the German occupation of Belgium faced the rifle and died for their treachery.

In Africa, between 1970 and 1974, 251 criminals condemned to death for crimes of armed robbery were shot in public, ‘the firing going on for several minutes’.

In China pistols were and still are the favoured weapon, crowds of many thousands assembling to watch the victims being marched out, hands pinioned behind their backs, wearing placards displaying their names and crimes, together with the word ‘Death’ circled in red. Kneeling with their backs towards the executioner, they were then shot in the back of the head, a method considered by some to be the quickest and most merciful way to be killed.

In Thailand the ‘squad’ also consisted, until 1984, of just one man. He was Pathom Kruapeng, an expert with 50 executions to his name. A devout Buddhist, he followed a strict ritual on the day of the execution, in which he asked the victim for forgiveness by raising a stone and a yellow flower in the air. No grim courtyard or stone wall here; instead, the victim was strapped to a chair behind a screen which entirely hid him from the executioner. The man’s arms were stretched out along a long pole, holding symbolic flowers and joss-sticks in his hands.

About 8 metres away Pathom positioned himself behind the weapon, a rifle mounted on a stand, its sights trained on a target on the screen, in much the same way as that invented in America to obviate human inaccuracies. When the signal, the lowering of a red flag, was given, Pathom fired the rifle, continuing until being notified that the victim was dead. Sometimes as many as five bullets were needed, doubtless because the exact position of the victim’s heart had not been established beforehand.

For his efforts Pathom received about £40 for each execution, and no doubt his conscience was eased by not being informed of the identity of the condemned man until the following day.

One wonders whether it was he who dispatched a drug-dealer in March 1965, the execution being shown live on television, or that of the 46-year-old man who, in April 1977, was found guilty of possessing 14 kilograms of heroin.

No ceremony accompanied the execution on Christmas Day 1989 when President Ceausescu and his wife Elena paid the price following revolution in Romania. After interrogation by a military court, they were taken to an adjoining area and shot, the firing squad consisting of one officer and two soldiers armed with machine-guns. It was later reported that the soldiers opened fire before being ordered, emptying their magazines and aiming so wildly that others present received bullet wounds.

That particular head of state was not the only one to look down muzzles of guns. Ferdinand-Joseph Maximilian, younger brother of Francis-Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, became an Austrian admiral and in 1864 was offered, and accepted, the crown of Mexico. But the spirit of independence burned so brightly in that country that Napoleon III, whose troops had been supporting the emperor, had to withdraw them.

However, Maximilian, loyal to those who had stood by him, refused to flee and, with 8,000 of his followers, defended the town of Queretaro against the insurgents. But in May 1867 he was betrayed and paid the price, facing the firing squad with consummate bravery.

FLAYED ALIVE

The parental threat ‘I’ll skin you alive’ is, of course, uttered without any conception of the actuality of the deed, for this method of execution was one of the worst ever devised by man.

Dating from at least the second century
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, it was practised not only in Turkey against pirates operating off that nation’s seaboard but also in China and other eastern countries. Few instances were reported from Europe, one being that of the execution of brothers Jacopo and David Perrin during the persecution of the Waldenses in 1655. Both suffered under the scalpel-like blade as their skins were peeled away, strip by strip, dying as their flesh was laid bloodily bare.

In the same way the chamberlain of Count de Rouci expired in 1356, while Paolo Garnier of Roras was first castrated then endured the removal of his entire skin while still alive.

Prisoners of war captured by the Assyrians usually suffered the fate of being flayed alive, the sculptures of Nineveh showing the appalling process in great detail. And when a town was captured, the Assyrians would put the inhabitants to torture, pyramids of heads being stacked high in the market-square, children burned alive, men impaled, flayed alive, blinded, or having their limbs, ears and noses ruthlessly amputated.

FRIED TO DEATH

‘A fire was then kindled, and by the flames he was so burned that his bowels appeared, yet was his mind unmoved.’

A culinary method adapted to torture and kill Christian martyrs in particular, frying a victim to death called for no special equipment, simply a large, shallow receptacle filled with oil, pitch, resin or sulphur, plus, of course, a fire.

When the liquid started to boil, the victim, of either sex, ‘such as had persisted, steadfastly and boldly, in the professing of Christ’s faith to the end’, were fried, like fishes cast into boiling oil.

Sometimes they were put into the pan on their backs. Others were relatively more fortunate, one being St Euphemia, who was sentenced by Priscus the Proconsul to be first quartered with knives, her severed limbs then being thrown into the pan and fried.

The savage executions of a mother and her seven sons by Antiochus during the slaughter of the Maccabees, as penned by Flavius Josephus, describes, among others, the fate of four of the victims.

Maccabeus, the eldest, was stripped and racked, being stretched around the circumference of a wheel, his hands being secured above his head and weights tied to his ankles, ‘and so stretched round about it that his sinews and entrails brake. A fire was then kindled, and by the flames he was so burned that his bowels appeared, yet was his mind unmoved. Then he was taken from the fire and slain alive, his tongue being pulled out of his head, and he was then put into the frying-pan, to the end.’

Antiochus had devised a novel torture for the third, Machir, who was tied in such a way over a large globe that all his joints were dislocated; then the skin of his head and face was pulled off, and his tongue was cut out before he too was dispatched in the frying-pan.

Areth, the fifth son, fared little better. After being tied, head down, to a pillar, and near enough to a fire to be singed but not burned to death, he was pricked with sharp-pointed instruments in most parts of his body, had his tongue torn out with red-hot pincers, and was finally thrown into the frying-pan.

Their mother had been left to the last, but eventually she was ordered to be stripped, hung by her hands and cruelly whipped. Her breasts were then cut off before she too was consigned to the bubbling liquids and fried to death.

The method was also used by the Spanish Inquisition to torture and eventually kill heretics in The Netherlands, then part of the Spanish empire. Large chafing-dishes full of smouldering charcoal were held close to the heretics’ feet and other parts of their bodies. So that the searing heat could penetrate quickly, lard was lavishly smeared over the victim, bringing a slow and agonising death.