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George Orwell - A hanging (1931)

Liebe Leserinnen, Liebe Leser,

George Orwell war, lange bevor er als Freiwilliger in den spanischen Bürgerkrieg zog und lange bevor er Animal Farm und 1984 geschrieben hat, als Kolonialbeamter im britischen Empire unterwegs. In dieser Reportage berichtet er über den Ablauf einer Hinrichtung, welcher er in offizieller Funktion begleitete.

Länge: 2,5 Seiten, 1950 Wörter

It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like  yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We  were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with  double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet  by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of  drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the  inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the  condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny  wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick,  sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the  moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were  guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by  with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed  a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed  his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with  their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all  the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men  handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water.  But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes,  as though he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air,  floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who  was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with  his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a  grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God's sake hurry up,  Francis,’ he said irritably. ‘The man ought to have been dead by this  time. Aren't you ready yet?’

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold  spectacles, waved his black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ he bubbled. ‘All  iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.’

‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's over.’

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the  prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close  against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing  and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed  behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped  short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a  dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came  bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us  wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings  together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a  moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it  had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face.  Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

‘Who let that bloody brute in here?’ said the superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone!’

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but  it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part  of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and  tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us  again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp  of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another  formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed  to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and  moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back  of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his  bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who  never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into  place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet  printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who  gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a  puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means  to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside  to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of  cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he  was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were  working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing,  tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would  still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through  the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel  and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned —  reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking  together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in  two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind  less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the  prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection  like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two  beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired  convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his  machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word  from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than  ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily  up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the  prisoner's neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough  circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the  prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of  ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for  help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The  dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the  gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down  over the prisoner's face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still  persisted, over and over again: ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes  seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and  on, ‘Ram! Ram! Ram!’ never faltering for an instant. The  superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with  his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a  fixed number — fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed  colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the  bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the  drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of life; the  same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over,  stop that abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he  made a swift motion with his stick. ‘Chalo!’ he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had  vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and  it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got  there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the  yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We  went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner's body. He was dangling  with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead  as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body;  it oscillated, slightly. ‘He's all right,’ said the superintendent. He  backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody  look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his  wrist-watch. ‘Eight minutes past eight. Well, that's all for this  morning, thank God.’

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and  conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out  of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting  prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under  the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their  breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin,  while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed  quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had  come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to  break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering  gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come,  with a knowing smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead  man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the  floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir.  Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two  rupees eight annas. Classy European style.’

Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. ‘Well,  sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all  finished — flick! like that. It iss not always so — oah, no! I have  known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and  pull the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!’

‘Wriggling about, eh? That's bad,’ said the superintendent.

‘Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall,  clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will  scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three  pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said,  “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he  would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!’

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even  the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You'd better all come out  and have a drink,’ he said quite genially. ‘I've got a bottle of whisky  in the car. We could do with it.’

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road.  ‘Pulling at his legs!’ exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and  burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment  Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink  together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a  hundred yards away.

1931

THE END