Major Bach, as if suddenly inspired, conceived a fiendish means of accentuating the agony of a prisoner condemned to this punishment.  The man would be tied to the post about the middle of the morning.  The summer sun beat fiercely upon the post and the man’s hat was removed.  Consequently, as the poor wretch’s head dropped forward on his chest, its crown became exposed to the fierce heat of the sun.  Thus to the pain of the torture inflicted by the tightly tied ropes, and the strangling sensation produced by the throat pressing against the restraining rope, was added the racking torment of intolerable heat playing upon a sensitive part of the human body.  The astonishing wonder is that none of the unhappy wretches suffered sun-stroke or went crazy while bound up in this manner, because the sun’s heat intensely aggravated the agonies of thirst.  But the sun-bath consummated Major Bach’s greatest ambition.  It caused the victim to writhe and twist more frantically, which in turn forced him to shriek and howl more vociferously and continuously.

When a prisoner was in the height of his torment the eminent Commandant would stroll up, and from a couple of paces away would stand, legs wide apart and hands clasped behind his back, surveying the results of his devilry with the greatest self-satisfaction.  As the prisoner groaned and moaned he would fling coarse joke, badinage, and gibe at the helpless wretch, and when the latter struggled and writhed in order to seek some relief, though in vain, he would laugh uproariously, urge the unhappy man to kick more energetically, and then shriek with delight as his advice was apparently taken to heart only to accentuate the torture.

Sunday was the day of days which the tyrant preferred for meting out this punishment.  In the first place it was a day of rest, and so a prisoner’s time and labour were not lost.  Even if he were strung up to the post all day he could be turned out to work on the Monday morning as usual.  But the governing reason for the selection of this day was because it offered such a novel entertainment for the gaping German crowds.  The public, as already mentioned, were invited to the camp on Sunday mornings to see the prisoners.  Young girls and raw recruits considered a trip to Sennelager on the chance of seeing a writhing, tortured prisoner as one of the delights of the times, and a sight which should not be missed on any account.

They clustered on the path on the opposite side of the road facing the stake, laughing and joking among themselves.  The recruits, who openly manifested their intense amusement, cheered frantically when the trussed wretch gave an abnormally wild and ear-piercing shriek of pain.  At his moans, groans, and desperate abortive attempts to release himself, the girls would laugh as gaily as if witnessing the antics of a clown at a circus, and were quite unrestrained in their jubilant applause.  This was the feature of the punishment which grated upon the nerves of the prisoners who were unable to lift a finger or voice a word in protest.  That a fellow-prisoner should be condemned to suffer such hellish torture as was inflicted was bad enough, but that it should offer a side-show to exuberant Sunday German holiday crowds we considered to be the height of our humiliation and a crown to our sufferings.