Free The Prussian Girls by P. N. Dedeaux Page A

usually a moment of camaraderie and affection, for though all looked up to the Frau Direktrice they did so with an admiring glow. This period was also, however, that allotted to “Head's corrections,” namely by the birch.
    So far this term there had only been one of these but it had been, as always, a salutory spectacle. It had involved a sturdily built seventeen-year-old, one Joyce Hall, daughter of the British Ambassador to Pomerania (now ceded to Prussia), and with a niece of Charles XII of Sweden one of the most distinguished foreigners attending the academy. In brief, Joyce had been found secreting cakes from the dining-table in her knickers and eating them under her sheets, after Lights Out.
    These birchings were notoriously elaborate, involving much ritual, so much so that after Frau Grumkow's long lecture even the most steel-hearted were longing for the cuts to begin, and to get it over with. For the Schloss endeavored to harden and prepare their charges for life in ways both mental as well as physical. Even an experienced Senior could be reduced to a jelly of nervous emotion by one of the Headmistress's addresses. Joyce, a generally liked girl despite her nationality, endured hers phlegmatically, and stark naked in the center of Great Hall, save for high heels and smoky stockings, high-tethered by her garters. Perhaps this was partly due to the fact that German was not her native tongue. She had thin fairish hair which must have been bleached in the sun since her bush was a short crisp curly black, flattened to her belly by her wearing of panties. Her thighs were particularly well-muscled-she was a strong runner-and her arse-cheeks solid; she was a girl, most would have said, destined to grow stout later in life, altogether an appetizing specimen to flog with the birch, and more than one eye of those watching this flesh which seemed to challenge the rod was bright. But her sentence produced no less than a gasp around the hall; it was thirty-five strokes with the birch, plus five of the celebrated “master's stripes,” and three days' solitary confinement. The girl's eyes blinked unbelievingly when she heard it. After further preliminaries she was bent over the block-“All ass,” as Ingeborg Untermacher remarked to her friend Maria Daunitz after-her thick cheeks awaiting the achingly long twigs which Fraulein Katte, allotted the first dozen, drew dripping from a tub.
    These branches stung like fury and it was not long before little spasmodic clenchings were visible testimony of their bite. They hissed like asps in the silence. The hands, manacled behind, fisted and scratched. But she endured her first dozen without a sound. A second mistress came forward for the second and, anxious to show her mettle, soon drew up lively wales and grazed blisters of skin. The twigs dug in pitilessly on the right as the punishment began to be worthy of the name. Each cut now drew a violent jerk and a strangled gasp. The buttock masses tightened frantically and the mistress was able to draw out the strokes considerably. A skilful bircher could keep a girl at the summit of pain with no more than four a minute, though the pace was usually faster than this in order to effect that psychological and most absolute victory of correction-when the whipped girl simply could not get her senses to believe she could take another. This final stage of utter absolution was effected for Joyce by the third mistress, who delivered the last eleven after the girl had been thoroughly revived for the ordeal with smelling salts and a bucket of brine emptied over her buttocks.
    These were now, on the right at least, a hatched crisscrossing of purplish wales and weals, flecked with ruby pearls where the skin had broken under some particularly toughly pickled bud. These final strokes, of supreme severity, drove all color from the faces of the junior classes watching. They ended in a flurry of passionate tears from the victim, a sudden sobbing that broke out