Hello,
I was reading The Recollections of Rifleman Harris a while ago, and one quote from page 78 of the 2019 edition (in chapter XII) stood out to me. In this quote, the army has stopped to prepare to give a man lashes for insulting Major-General Craufurd
"There was some difficulty in finding a place to tie Howans up, as the light bridgade carried no halberts. However, they led him to a slender ash tree which grew near at hand."
From a quick google search it looks like this could be referring to a halberd carried by an NCO - but how does this connect to preparing to lash this soldier? Tying him to a halberd seems unlikely as I can't imagine they were particularly thick, and at the same time using a halberd to clear branches off of a tree seems unlikely as the engineers must have had axes. How do halberds connect here, or is Harris not actually talking about a halberd at all?
I can answer this one - the “halberts” were the Sargent’s halberds (yes, the hafted weapon) which was, quite literally, used (lashed together) to form a construction known as “the triangles”, to which the unfortunate prisoner was tied before being beaten.
Their use is described in Charles Dupin, A Tour Through the Naval and Military Establishments of Great Britain in the Years 1816-1820 (Sir Richard Phillips and Co., 1822) at p. 105 as follows:
“Care has been taken to retain the punishment of the lash: when a soldier is condemned to the lash, three serjant’s halbreds are thrust into the ground, and their steel points fastened together with a cord, which serves, at the same time, to bind the prisoner’s wrists above his head. The three halbreds thus placed, resemble the three edges of a triangular pyramid uniting at the vertex, and are generally known in England by the name of the triangles. Across two of the halbreds already fixed, a fourth is fastened horizontally, as high as the prisoner’s waist, against which he leans, his feet being attached to the two halbreds just mentioned.”
In short, the hafts of these weapons are used as a sort of erector set, to build a framework on which to tie the unfortunate soldier ... but when halbreds are lacking, branches (or an ash tree) must do.