The timing of the execution was American-style. It was generally carried out at about one o'clock in the morning. Another custom which was strange to me was the practice of laying on a mighty feast before the execution. We were eating badly in this country at the time, but at an American execution you could be sure of the best running buffet and unlimited canned beer. The part of the routine which I found it hardest to acclimatize myself to was the, to me, sickening interval between my introduction to the prisoner and his death. Under British custom I was working to the sort of timing where the drop fell between eight and twenty seconds after I had entered the condemned cell. Under the American system, after I had pinioned the prisoner, he had to stand on the drop for perhaps six minutes while his charge sheet was read out. sentence spelled out, he was asked if he had anything to say . . . and after that I was instructed to get on with the job. Even a few seconds can be a long time when a man is waiting to die. On my first execution in Shepton Mallet, long before the drop fell, the officer of the escorting party surrounding the scaffold was flat on the floor in collapse. Afterwards, at the continuation of the feast, a soldier said to me of the fainting officer: Just imagine a man like that leading you into battle!' I did not think his scorn was justified. A man can fight like a hero and still be unable to face the death of a comrade in cold blood.

At the end of the war came the treason trials, and spaced between the execution of the sentences passed at these tribunals I was called to Germany to hang the so-called Beasts of Belsen. The name today has the whiff of the extravagance of a horror comic. Nobody thought so then. The staff of Belsen, who were identified at their trial as having previously served at other extermination camps, had in their charge, on the day they fled from the advancing British troops, forty thousand live detainees and the unburied corpses of thirteen thousand more who had died too recently for them to be buried. Once the British took over, another thirteen thousand