The earliest known user of the phrase was the British novelist, short-story writer and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) in The Light That Failed, published in instalments in several newspapers in 1890 for example, on 14 th December of that year, The Post-Dispatch (St. Without the bullet a man is likely to bite his tongue off, as I saw happen once in China, when the man at the end of the flogging turned and grinned at the Colonel with his bleeding tongue between his teeth-a disgusting sight. Sometimes a man bites through and through the bullet in his pain, and I’ve seen some of them spit it out all chewed to lead dust when the flogging was over. The poor fellow puts a bullet between his teeth and takes a firm grip of it, and this helps him to keep his mouth shut. “It’s considered bad form to groan or cry out when under the cat,” said a Sergeant of the Connaught Rangers, “and you rarely hear a soldier hollering, particularly an Irishman. Likewise, on 2 nd November 1890, The Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois) published Soldiers’ Punishment, about “ the dreaded cat-o’-nine tails in the British army”: In all these cases the muscles are placed on their guard, and, being elastic, a great deal of injury might be inflicted without sensible harm. In operations, before the blessings of chloroform were known, the patient about to be operated on grasped with a death-like grip the table whereon he was placed and the same sort of condition was intended to be brought about by the biting of the bullet placed in the mouth of the soldier about to flogged. When a man is about to receive a blow, he puts himself on his guard and his muscles also he plants his foot firmly and contracts his whole muscular system. There is spasm of the whole muscles of the back, especially the deep ones. We are anxious to point out that the results apparent to the naked eye are a not sufficient guage of the intensity of the punishment, or of the changes produced in the tissues of the body. The lashes of the cat were nearly a yard long, and at the extremity of each were three hard knots. Last week, two garotters received at Leeds Gaol a couple of dozen lashes a-piece, and those who have read the accounts have doubtless been surprised at the apparently slight effects produced upon the skin. It is very interesting to note the effects of the application of the cat. For instance, this is from The Fife Herald (Cupar, Fife, Scotland) of 31 st January 1867: I have found several mentions from the second half of the 19 th century of the practice of biting on a bullet when being flogged. A soldier tied to the halberts in order to be whipped: his attitude bearing some likeness to that figure, as painted on signs. In the same edition of the dictionary, Grose explained the manner in which halberds were used in corporal punishments: It is a point of honour in some regiments, among the grenadiers, never to cry out, or become nightingales, whilst under the discipline of the cat of nine tails to avoid which, they chew a bullet. A soldier who, as the term is, sings out at the halberts. The English antiquary and lexicographer Francis Grose (1731-91), who had been a soldier, mentioned it in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (2 nd edition – London, 1788): It originated in the practice consisting, for a soldier, in biting on a bullet when being flogged. Biting the Bullet is a trailblazing account of a life full of tackling dacoits, encounters, shootouts and terror attacks, all the while giving an insight into the mind and heart of this police officer as he makes life-changing decisions.The phrase to bite ( on) the bullet means to confront a painful situation with fortitude. In the pages of this searing memoir, readers will be treated with the inside story of the creation of Special Task Force, of the elimination of the dreaded Shri Prakash Shukla, the exposing of the match-fixing scandal, the hunting down of ISI terrorist Ghazi Baba and the dynamic response to the 2001 Parliament attack, amongst many others. He also stood at the helm of the world’s largest border force, which secures India’s borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh. He was handpicked to lead the Delhi Police Force at a time when India’s capital was in a crisis. Country’s top cop Ajai Raj Sharma’s journey started with policing small towns of Uttar Pradesh, fighting bandits and goons of the notorious Chambal Valley, taking on the responsibility of politically sensitive and communally volatile districts.
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