Then he calmed himself a little, and repeated the words in the native tongue, explaining to the crowd that German dignity should be upheld at all costs.

“Fetch him down from there,” he ordered.

Schubert sprang on the table and knocked the condemned man off it with a blow of his fist.  With hands bound behind him the poor fellow had no power of balance, and though he jumped clear he fell face-downward, skinning his cheek on the gravel.  The commandant promptly put a foot on his neck and pinned him down.

“Flog him!” he ordered.  “Two hundred lashes!”

It was done in silence, except for the corporal’s labored breathing and the commandant’s incessant sharp commands to “beat harder—­harder—­harder.  A sergeant stood by counting.  The crack of the whip divided up the silence into periods of agony.

When the count was done the victim was still conscious.  Schubert and a sergeant dragged him to his feet, and hauled him to the table.  Four other men—­two sergeants and two natives—­passed a rope round the table legs.  Schubert lifted the victim by the elbows so that his head could pass through the noose, and when that was accomplished the man had to stand on tiptoe on the soap-box in order to breathe at all.

“All ready!” announced Schubert, and jumped off with a laugh, his white tunic bloody from contact with the victim’s tortured back.

“Los!” roared the commandant

The men hauled on the rope.  Table and soap-box came tumbling away, and the victim spun in the air on nothing, spinning round, and round, and round—­slower and slower and slower—­then back the other way round faster and faster.  They say hanging is a merciful death—­that the pressure of rope on two arteries produces anesthesia, but few are reported to have come back to tell of the experience.  At any rate, as is not the case with shooting, it is easy to know when the victim is really dead.

For seconds that seemed minutes—­for minutes that seemed hours the poor wretch spun, his elbows out, his knees up, his tongue out, his face wrinkled into tortured shapes, and his toes pointed upward so sharply that they almost touched his shins.  Then suddenly the toes turned downward and the knees relapsed.  The corpse hung limp, and the Crowd sighed miserably, to the last man, woman and child, turning its back on what to them must have symbolized German rule.

They left the corpse hanging there.  It was to be there until evening, some one said, for an example to frequenters of the market-place.  The crowd trailed away, none glancing back.  The pattering of feet ceased.  The market-place across the square resumed its hum and activity.  Then a native orderly came down the steps and touched me on the elbow.  I struggled to my feet and limped after him up the steps.

Practically at the mercy of the doctor, I made up my mind to be civil to him whether that suited me or not.  I rather expected he would come to meet me, perhaps help me to chair, and I wondered how, in my ignorance of German, I should contrive to answer his questions.