00:02:41.140being uh sentenced to 700 lashes and surviving but that was extremely extremely rare uh there's
00:02:49.940something like only a few dozen or maybe 50 guys ever were sentenced to 1200 lashes built like a
00:02:55.260bull yeah it's massive apparently a massive massive dude anyway uh only a few handful of
00:03:00.200guys were ever sentenced to 1200 lashes but it would that's death and um if you pass out or the
00:03:07.940surgeon decides you can't take anymore they might stop for a while or even for the day but you come
00:03:12.800back later and receive the rest of them and if you die they keep lashing your dead body until all the
00:03:19.400lashes are done now that's really that's medieval as barbaric yeah it's really but it's not that
00:03:26.940long ago right it's the late 18th century or they kept doing it into the early 19th century
00:03:30.240And Wellesley himself was a big fan of flogging, so for Sharp to be sentenced to 2,000 is ridiculous on a couple of levels, but it's a death sentence.0.53
00:03:44.240It would absolutely be a death sentence.0.65
00:03:46.240And they mean for it to be so. They mean for Sharp to not walk away from this.
00:03:50.240Yeah. And even as they're... I can't remember, but one of his men just, you know, getting Sharp to drink as much alcohol as he can to just get him drunk as anything.
00:04:01.240It's like Sharp's just in his head going, don't feel any different. Just don't. I'm not even slightly drunk.
00:04:07.240I'm just so focused on what's ahead of me that my mind can't focus on anything else apart from the, you know, torture that's going to be going ahead.
00:04:17.240ahead. And they make drummer boys do it, don't they? Yes. Probably about 15 or 16. But they
00:04:22.200make them do it as hard as they can. And Obadiah purposely picks out the tallest and strongest
00:04:29.080looking drummer boys out of the selection. Probably drum boys would always carry a whip
00:04:33.160in there, like have a sack sort of thing. Yeah. And if the drum boy isn't doing it hard enough,
00:04:38.120they get they get in trouble. They'll be at least chewed out in front of everyone. So
00:04:43.720So, again, I just want to pause on it for a moment.
00:04:49.140The brutality of it, you're going to get a 16-year-old boy
00:04:53.680to whip another man to death in front of an entire regiment of men.
00:04:59.340And if he doesn't go as hard as he can, he's in trouble.
00:05:03.180This is really, really quite barbaric,
00:05:05.720really quite sort of medieval ancient world stuff.0.93
00:05:10.020Although I guess that's the point.0.99
00:05:11.880It's to keep these criminals and scumbags who make up the ranks0.98
00:05:16.840and the privates of the British Army in line so that, yeah,0.99
00:05:20.640if you break the law or break the code or talk back to a senior officer even,
00:06:05.880I mean, Cornwell's writing is tremendously graphic.
00:06:08.880But the whole thing is stopped by Arthur Wellesley himself, by Wellington, who is looking quite
00:06:20.240livid about the entire thing, and basically says, you know, Mr. Sharp, can you hear me?
00:06:28.240And it's like, yes, and everything, absolutely at death's door, and it says, right, I want
00:06:32.840says to a doctor, I want this man able to have his wits within the hour, and then I want him sent to General Harris's tent. And so doctor performs a minor miracle, though he's a very terrible doctor, is a note that's made. I mean, throughout the beating as well. It's like, you know, the whole point is that the doctor should be able to say, oh, that's too much. You've killed him. And he just doesn't throughout the whole thing. He's really neglectful of the wounded and the patient.
00:07:02.720But anyway, Sharpe goes to the tent, and this is where he finds, first of all, what Lawford was
00:07:08.800dragged away for when he was supposed to be defending Sharpe at the trial. And that is the
00:07:14.880fact that Colonel McCandless, who has been taken prisoner and now finds himself in Syringapotam,
00:07:22.640is the uncle of Lieutenant Lawford. And they need Lawford. They need him back. And if you can't
00:07:31.120rescue Lawford, sorry, if you can't rescue McCandless, we at least need to know what
00:07:36.520he knew, what intelligence he gathered before he was taken away.
00:07:42.180And so this becomes an espionage mission and an escape attempt to try and get McCandless
00:07:49.400And they feel, I mean, first of all, they say, well, on the one hand, we have a problem because
00:07:55.540a white man going in there is going to look suspicious and it's going to draw a lot of0.88
00:08:01.580attention but also we can't trust it to a sepoi so we need to send someone in and so we're thinking1.00
00:08:09.940of sending lawford in but lawford is very very green and he doesn't have the experience and
00:08:17.200it's lawford who says i will go it i will only go in if you allow me to take richard sharp as well
00:08:23.840And so George Harris says, right, we'll say that, you know, we shortened your sentence of lashes because of your heroics in battle, right, whatever.
00:08:35.460But Wellington, sorry, Wellesley, Wellesley's livid, absolutely livid that these lashings were stopped.
00:08:42.080like he's just really and this was one of the things that i was so surprised like joyfully
00:08:49.100surprised about the way that cornwell writes the beginning of that relationship between sharp and
00:08:55.820wellesley when you know where it's going to go and to see how much wellesley resents sharp
00:09:02.160from the first moment he meets him is such a brilliant turn so the bit from this passage that