A form of desertion, constituting one of the most curious but least noticed chapters in the history of military discipline, is that of Malingering, or the feigning of sickness, and self-mutilation, disabling from service. The practice goes far back into history. Cicero tells of a man who was sold for a slave for having cut off a finger, in order to escape from a campaign in Sicily. Vegetius, the great authority on Roman discipline, speaks of soldiers who simulated sickness being punished as traitors;[291] and an old English writer on the subject says of the Romans: ‘Whosoever mutilated their own or their children’s bodies so as thereby designedly to render them unfit to carry arms (a practice common enough in those elder times when all were pressed to the wars), were adjudicated to perpetual exile.’[292] The writer here referred to lived long before the days of the conscription, with which he fancied self-mutilation to be connected. And it certainly seems that whereas all the military codes of modern nations contain articles dealing with that offence, and decreeing penalties against it, there was less of it in the days before compulsory service. There is, for instance, no mention of it in the German articles of war of the seventeenth century, though the other military crimes were precisely those that are common enough still.[293] But even in England, where soldiers are not yet military slaves, it has been found necessary to deal, by specific clauses in the army regulations, with a set of facts of which there is no notice in the war articles of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.[294] The inference therefore is, that the conditions of military service have become universally more disagreeable. The clauses in the actual war articles deserve to be quoted, that it may appear, by the provisions against it, to what lengths the arts of self-mutilation are carried by despairing men. The 81st Article of War provides punishment against any soldier in Her Majesty’s army ‘who shall malinger, feign or produce disease or infirmity, or shall wilfully do any act or wilfully disobey any orders whether in hospital or otherwise, thereby producing or aggravating disease or infirmity or delaying his cure, ... or who shall maim or injure himself or any other soldier, whether at the instance of such other soldier or not, or cause himself to be maimed or injured by any other person with intent thereby to render himself or such other soldier unfit for service, ... or who shall tamper with his eyes with intent thereby to render himself unfit for service.’