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Updated: June 4, 2025
Or they would drive wedges into your thighs and split the bones. They would crush your thumbs in the thumbscrew. Or they would singe all the hair off your epidermis with a poker, or roll up the skin from your abdomen and leave you with a kind of apron.
The vagabond knaves had already been put to the torture in my brother's presence, but they had confessed nothing of their guilt; inasmuch, indeed, as in our dungeon there were none other instruments of torture than the rack, the thumbscrew, and scourges needful for the Bamberg torture, and a Pomeranian cap, made to crush the head somewhat; but in Nuremberg there was a store, less mild and of more active effect.
Toleration does not mean simply abstinence from the thumbscrew and the rack or even the repeal of the Conventicle or the Five Mile Act, but appreciation of the religious opinions and practices of others, and due respect for them.
He was turning through the letters and telegrams which had arrived during his absence when the visitor laid hand to the bell. No sound of ringing followed this application to the thumbscrew arrangement on the door, for the colonel had taken the bell away long ago.
They have no more relations to the civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a gorilla, a Judas, a hyena, a thumbscrew, a scalping knife in the hands of a savage. These brutes must be cast out of society. Some of us, hoping against hope, after the reluctant confession of the truth of the German atrocities, have appealed to education.
They spoke of Antonoff, who was subjected to the thumbscrew, had red-hot wires thrust under his nails, and when his torturers gave him a little respite he would scratch on his plate cipher signals to his comrades. The account of the cause and origin of the revolutionary movement and its subsequent history, which sparkled with heroic deeds, was told in a quiet, unostentatious manner.
Eels are skinned alive, and witnesses are sacrificed, and no one's blood curdles at the sight, no soft heart is sickened at the cruelty. To apply the thumbscrew, the boot, and the rack to the victim before him was the work of Mr. Chaffanbrass's life. And it may be said of him that the labour he delighted in physicked pain.
A variation of this was to place the leg in an iron boot and slowly heat it over a fire. There was the thumbscrew, an instrument which smashed the thumb to pulp by the turning of a screw. More barbarous still was the bridle. This was an iron hoop passing over the head, with four prongs, two pointing to the tongue and palate, and one to either cheek.
I heard that one man was kept six days with his arms bound backward round a barrel; and it is the universal report that every gendarme in the South Seas is equipped with something in the nature of a thumbscrew. I do not know this. Perhaps worse still, not only the accused, but sometimes his wife, his mistress, or his friend, is subjected to the same hardships.
This is the usual temper of the odium theologicum. It would, if it could, grasp the thumbscrew and the rack of mediaeval Inquisitors, and would, in the last resource, hand over all opponents to the scaffold or the stake. Those whose intellects have thus been petrified by custom and advancing years are, of all others, the most hopeless to deal with.
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