Cannonball beheading, from The Patriot
It was a 3” explosive cannonball which killed Gen. Leonidas Polk (CSA, also an Episcopal Bishop), as he was checking potential battle ground elevations beneath Union guns. It was Gen. Oliver Howard (a radical Republican, do-gooder christian puritan, who was active in placing the Freedmen’s bureau crooks, and who founded Howard univ. in DC for... blacks).
The round when through his left arm, passed through his torso and out through his right arm, then exploded against a tree. Polk was nearly torn in half. Artillery rounds of the day— not pretty. Today— nothing left after an HE or white phosphorus, or a fragmentation bomb— shredded person, and horrific. War is not pretty. The brits were serious nasty colonial rulers, but nowhere near as bad as the French or even the Dutch. Such as it is.
Pershings use (through a subordinate who invented it) of burying Moros in the Phillipines inside pig carcasses shut down the revolt— the religious horror of both these “treatments” too much for the insurgents.