Mutilation to escape conscription recurred across Napoleonic, Russian, and British armies.

Evidence

Interestingly, this seems to have been the case when any government resorted to universal conscription. For this practice in the Napoleonic armies, see Forrest, Conscripts and Deserters, p. 136; for a similar reaction by Russian serfs in the nineteenth century and, significantly, self-inflicted wounds (SIW) among British troops during the First World War, see John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 275n. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 593

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s interest in the army’s actual performance and the human cost of building it; the comparison to British WWI self-inflicted wounds is striking.