A Hanging is a short non-fiction essay written by George Orwell about the execution of a criminal that he claimed to have witnessed. Orwell served in the British Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927, and the cadet supervision of executions was commonplace at the time, "as a kind of initiation". The condemned man is given no name, nor is the crime that he allegedly committed explained. The sentence is carried out, after which the dead man is left hanging while those present leave the uncomfortable and macabre situation. ""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."