Word: headsman
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Conqueror Napoleon introduced the French guillotine into Prussia. Last week Captain Göring banished it by decree. He substituted the medieval chopping block and headsman's axe. The headsman, he prescribed, must always wear impeccable evening dress...
...England, lost themselves in low clouds over Nairobi. A stiff wind blew them off-course, crashed their plane into a boulder-studded ridge. For two days planes from Nairobi scoured the wild Kenya country, finally spotted the wreck. Meanwhile Miss Sale-Barker, searching for water, had encountered a Masai headsman, sent him to Nairobi with a note written with lipstick. Rescuers took out Miss Sale-Barker by automobile, Miss Page, whose leg was broken, by plane...
Fourteen Chinese had been arrested for the murder of a French planter. Six were sentenced by a French court to Death. Anxious that the execution should be comme il faut, reflecting that the condemned men were Orientals, the French Court sent for an Oriental headsman, obtained after some difficulty a scowling Japanese adept with his great broad blade...
...Francisco's Chinatown. Then the Chinese Minister at Washington, Dr. C. C. Wu, announced Vice Consul Kao's suspension. The Kuomintang of America, branch of the potent political organization behind the Nanking government, demanded their recall to China for trial. The impression spread that certain death, from a headsman's sword cleaving into the back of her bent neck, awaited Mrs. Kao if she were deported. Although Minister Wu, taking pains to announce that decapitation was not China's penalty for opium smuggling,* requested deportation, in the absence of an extradition treaty between the U. S. and China it seemed...
...your last number appeared an article on decapitation in China. When I was in China, the technique of beheading was explained to me as follows: Under the Empire, the headsman was a professional man, who used his great beheading sword in one hand, holding the handle as one would a dagger with the back of the blade extending back parallel to his forearm. Beheading was done by a single slice with the long blade instead of a chop. For a consideration from the condemned or his friends the headsman would leave a small piece of skin remaining so that...