A Soldier Held a Funeral for His Own Severed Arm—His Hidden Memoir Reveals Why It Still Haunted Him

5 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:After dodging multiple brushes with death during the War of 1812, British soldier Shadrack Byfield’s left forearm was shattered by a musket ball in 1814 and needed to be amputated.Returning to England as a disabled veteran, Byfield found he needed to fight for a fair pension and was often denied equal pay by employers because of his missing arm.While his first memoir portrayed him as heroic, Byfield admitted to frustration and even physical violence in his second, a harsh revelation of the realities faced by disabled veterans.When Shadrack Byfield took a musket ball to the arm while fighting in the War of 1812, the 24-year-old British soldier initially had a chance to escape amputation. Then gangrene set in. As his shattered forearm was sawn off below the elbow, Byfield endured the brutal operation rather nonchalantly for someone having a limb severed without anesthesia. What really bothered him was how the infected arm was then unceremoniously dumped in a dung heap.Byfield seemed to have nine lives. He’d already had a brush with death when he was shot in the neck at the Battle of Frenchtown a year earlier, though he miraculously recovered and was soon well enough to return to the battlefield. Not long afterward, he had another close call. The British lost the Battle of the Thames in 1813, but the private in the 41st Regiment of Foot evaded capture and rejoined what remained of his regiment for several more raids and battles. He survived a night of confusion fighting at Lundy’s Lane in July 1814, where a voice in the darkness called his captain by name and an unseen enemy volley killed two corporals in his company.But nine days later, at a skirmish on Conjocta Creek, his luck ran out. He was shot during an unsuccessful British raid preceding the Siege of Fort Erie, and this time the wound cost him the arm. Byfield had survived everything the war could throw at him. What he could not abide was the dung heap. Horrified that his amputated forearm had been discarded like refuse, he fished it out and built it a crude coffin from a few boards he nailed together. The arm was given its own funeral.Funerals for amputated limbs were not unheard of back then. But while officers were granted the privilege of mourning their lost limbs, soldiers of lesser rank saw theirs thrown unceremoniously onto piles. The limbs of enlisted men were seen more as rubbish than as human remains. The contrast with officers’ limb burials is vividly illustrated by the famous case of Henry William Paget, better known as Lord Uxbridge, a lieutenant general whose leg was nearly blown off by a cannon in the Battle of Waterloo. The leg was properly interred after the amputation and became something of a macabre shrine for tourists. Byfield saw no reason why someone like Uxbridge should be allowed to bury his limb in a garden with its own tombstone bearing the vainglorious epitaph, “Here lies the Leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge,” while his own arm wasn’t even treated as something human.Byfield felt an overwhelming urge to strike the medical orderly who’d disposed of his arm, but he restrained himself. He returned to England as a disabled soldier who was honorably discharged. While he became an almost mythical figure over a century later, portrayed in books, museum exhibits and documentaries as a stoic and relentless veteran who refused to complain, this understanding of Byfield was mostly taken from the man himself’s first memoir, as well as the imaginations of authors and filmmakers. This portrayal also relied heavily on Byfield’s 1840 memoir, in which he presented himself as dutiful and obedient. In contrast to the heroic narrator of that memoir, Byfield’s 1851 autobiography, A Narrative of a Light Company Soldier’s Service, was a rewrite that shouted out the gruesome reality of war and a scorned veteran’s struggle to be paid the pension he deserved.“The second memoir dwells on periods of indebtedness, illness, and adversity—including underemployment—during the same timeframe,” wrote Cambridge University Historian Dr. Eamonn O’Keeffe in a paper recently published in Journal of British Studies. “These tales of hardship undoubtedly reflected the reality of working-class life, yet their narrative prominence also echoes the tendency of spiritual autobiographies to present Earthly existence as a succession of trials endured in preparation for eternal rest.”Disclosing the truth meant including incidents that put Byfield in an unflattering light. While denouncing plunder and desertion in his first memoir, in the second he admitted to sneaking out of camp with other soldiers to embark on a plundering expedition. He described his amputation as something he accepted with remarkable courage (and without a blindfold) in the first memoir. Most of this is probably true, but he shows a different attitude towards pain in History and Conversion, where he gripes about “violent rheumatic pain” where a musket ball had struck his right shoulder. The pain endured for years and was often so severe that Byfield was unable to so much as bring a teacup to his lips. Pain aside, the shoulder injury was still nothing in comparison to his enduring struggle for a fair pension and fair pay from employers.Nothing plagued Byfield more than being denied what he was owed. History and Conversion, which was unknown until now, reveals how relentlessly he pressed employers and public officials—sometimes violently—for the pension and pay he deserved, until he finally secured a patron. He literally fought for his rights. Entangled in a chapel riot that he possibly incited by pushing several people, Byfield slashed someone across the face with the iron hook of the prosthetic arm he was wearing. His run-ins with authority didn’t end there. When Sergeant Sidney Short came to serve a summons the next day, Byfield and two allies spat on him and chased him into the street, Byfield accusing the officer of having lied under oath at his drunkenness trial two years earlier. No one was convicted over the riot—all charges were dropped in an arbitration deal—but it cost him his job. Eighteen parishioners, several of them his chapel-feud enemies, petitioned the Duke of Beaufort to dismiss Byfield as monument keeper for “being at the head of so much disturbance.” His employment was terminated in July 1853, a month after the riot.He spent his remaining two decades petitioning for a pension increase he never received and peddling one more memoir, The Forlorn Hope, of which not a single copy survives. But in February 1860, when his old patron Sir William Napier was buried in London, Byfield made the journey from Wiltshire and declared he would walk the whole way if he had to. He knew what it meant to see a proper burial.Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.