But over and above the intrinsic disadvantages of military service, it would almost seem as if the war-presiding genii had of set purpose essayed to make it as distasteful as possible to mankind. For they have made discipline not merely a curtailment of liberty and a forfeiture of rights, but, as it were, an experiment on the extreme limits of human endurance. There has been no tyranny in the world, political, judicial, or ecclesiastical, but has had its parent and pattern in some military system. It has been from its armies more than from its kings that our world has learnt its lesson of arbitrary tribunals, tortures, and cruel punishments. The Inquisition itself could scarcely have devised a more excruciating punishment than the old English military one of riding the Wooden Horse, when the victim was made to sit astride planks nailed together in a sharp ridge, so as roughly to resemble a horse, with his hands tied behind him, and muskets fixed to his legs to drag them downwards; or again, than the punishment of the Picket, in which the hand was fastened to a hook in a post above the head, and the man’s suspended body left to be supported by his bare heel resting on a wooden stump, of which the end was cut to the sharpness of a sword point.[279] The punishment of running the gauntlet (from the German _Gassenlaufen_, street running, because the victim ran through the street between two lines of soldiers who tormented him on his course) is said to have been invented by Gustavus Adolphus; and is perhaps, from the fact of thus bringing the cruelty of many men to bear on a single comrade, the most cowardly form of torture that has ever yet found favour among military authorities.[280] But the penal part of military discipline, with its red-hot irons, its floggings, and its various forms of death, is too repulsive to do more than glance at as testimony of the cruelty and despotism that have never been separated from the calling of arms. The art of the disciplinarian has ever been to bring such a series of miseries to bear upon a man’s life that the prospect of death upon the battle-field should have for him rather charms than terrors; and the tale of the soldier who, when his regiment was to be decimated, drew a blank without the fatal D upon it, and immediately offered it to a comrade, who had not yet drawn, for half-a-crown, shows at how cheap a rate men may be reduced to value their lives after experience of the realities of a military career.