Again, Flogging

Reactionary Hungary prepared for a step back 74 years last week. 1855. In her gilded coach the young, radiant, newlywed Empress Elizabeth rode out from the Imperial Hofburg, heard frightful screams from a nearby barracks square. They were men's screams. "Stop! Call the guard!" cried the Empress. "Something terrible is happening!'' "Your Majesty need experience no alarm," soothed a punctilious equerry. "This is merely the hour for flogging military delinquents." Flashing-eyed, the petite Empress insisted on alighting from her coach. Amid courtier consternation she actually walked the short distance back to the Hofburg, rushed impulsively up the marble stairs to find her young husband Franz--remembered today as the venerable, majestic Emperor Franz Josef of Austria Hungary. "You must stop them from flogging your soldiers!" cried Elizabeth. To Franz Josef this was an astonishing, irrational request. For centuries Hungarian soldiers had been flogged "when delinquent." But on the spot, he humored his pink-cheeked, starry-eyed wife by signing a decree which has kept Hungarian soldiers from being flogged ever since. 1929. In Budapest last week Hungary's new War Minister Julius ("No Mattresses!") Goembos,* laid before Parliament a new, drastic military penal code restoring the penalty of flogging. The measure is as good as passed since it was introduced with the full approval of Dictator Stephen Bethlen./- Soon many a Hungarian soldier will receive an old fangled flogging thus: He strips to the waist. Meanwhile whips have been doled out to the men of his company and they line up in double ranks, facing inward. Down the alley of whips the delinquent must march, not too slowly, or a soldier who follows will bayonet him in the back, not too fast, or a second soldier who precedes the delinquent will jab him in the ribs. Whips fall in time with the brisk beating of a drum. Sonorously War Minister Julius Goembos read out to Parliament the preamble to his flogging bill: ". . . Whereas the penalty of imprisonment completely failed of effect in wartime, as the soldiers preferred a well-warmed prison to the discomforts of the trenches, now therefore. . . ." They will be flogged for offenses punished at present by prison sentences ranging up to ten years.

*He denounced his predecessor for ordering mattresses (TIME, Oct. 21), will continue the tradition of keeping Hungarian soldiers "hard" by making them sleep on bags stuffed with straw or worse. /-Plays written by the Countess Margit Bethlen and produced in Italy are sure of extravagant praise from Dictator Mussolini, now angling for an alliance with Dictator Bethlen.