We were forbidden to talk to the crew, but under cover of the darkness some of them, a great number of whom spoke English, were only too glad to speak to us. We learnt from them that the Wolf had been out a year; they were all very "fed up" with it all, tired of the life, tired of the sea, tired of the food, longing to get home, and longing for the war to end. They had, too, no doubts as to how it would end, and were certain that the Wolf would get back to Germany whenever she wished to do so. Of course we assured them that they were utterly mistaken, and that it would be absolutely impossible for the Wolf ever to get through the British blockade or see Germany again.
They were certain three things would bring them victory: their submarines, the defection of Russia, who would soon be made to conclude peace with Germany, and the fact that in their opinion America had entered the war too late. The submarines, too, would not allow a single transport to reach European waters!
While on the Wolf we heard of the great reverse to the Italian arms. We were told that half a million prisoners and thousands of guns were taken, and that there was no longer an Italian army! Germany had strafed one more country and knocked her out of the war. This made their early victory still more certain! Their spirits may be imagined when this news of Italy's disaster was received.
The interests of the Wolf were now, to a certain extent, identical with our own—that we should not meet an Allied cruiser. A notice was posted in some of our cabins saying that in that event the women with their husbands, and some other prisoners, would be put into boats with a white flag, "if weather and other conditions permitted." We often wondered whether they would permit! The other prisoners, however, viz. those under the poop and on the 'tween decks, would have had no chance of being saved. They would all have been battened down under hatches (this, indeed, was done whenever the Wolf sighted or captured a ship, when mines were being sown, and when gun and other drill was carried on) and armed guards with hand grenades sent among them. It made us furious to see, as we did many times, our friends being driven below by armed guards. Their fate, if the Wolf had gone into action, would have been too terrible to contemplate. For the lifeboats on the Wolf could not possibly have accommodated more than 350 souls, and it is certain no prisoners would have been among this number.
The Captain and officers of the Wolf must have had some very anxious moments on many occasions. When passing close to other ships, as she had done in the comparatively narrow waters of the Java Sea, all the prisoners were sent below, and we were told that the few officers and crew visible to a passing ship discarded their naval uniform and appeared in kit suitable for the officers and crew of a tramp. We also heard that on one occasion in narrow waters in the Far East the Wolf passed quite close to a Japanese cruiser at night. Both ships were in darkness, every man on the Wolf was at his station, and at the slightest sign from the cruiser the Wolf's guns and torpedoes would have immediately come into action. But the Wolf's good luck did not desert her, and the Japanese cruiser passed away into the night without having given any sign that she had seen the raider.
The Wolf, with a company of over seven hundred on board, sailed away on a south-westerly course for the next two days, and the usual routine of the ship went on, but no further gun or other drills took place. Soon after daybreak on November 10th a sailor came along and locked us all in our cabins, armed guards patrolled the deck, and a short time after an officer came to each cabin and informed us there was a steamer on the starboard side which the Wolf intended to capture. He told us the Wolf would fire on her to stop, and provided all of us with cotton-wool to insert in our ears while the guns were being fired! The Germans had had no scruples about firing on the Hitachi, though they could have seen there were women on board, but on this occasion they were so considerate as to give us cotton-wool for our ears, that our nerves might not be shaken—a truly German touch! We waited for the sound of the guns, but nothing happened, and in about half an hour the same officer came along and said to us, "Don't be fearful; the other ship has stopped, and there will be no firing!" Our cabin doors were unlocked, the men on the upper deck were allowed out, the ladies were requested not to show themselves on deck, and another officer ran along the deck saying "We've catched her, we've catched her; a neutral this time!"
The "catched" vessel had stopped and was lying very near the Wolf. The name on her stern proclaimed her to be the Igotz Mendi, of Bilbao, and she was flying the Spanish flag. In a short time a prize crew, with Lieutenant Rose in command, left the Wolf in her motor launch, and proceeded to the other ship. After they had been aboard her a few minutes, a message came back that the Spanish ship was from Delagoa Bay to Colombo with a cargo of 5,800 tons of coal for the British Admiralty authorities in Ceylon. So the Germans would not after all have to intern the Wolf and her prize in a neutral country—if she could reach one—at any rate from lack of coal, as we fondly imagined might have been the case. Here was just the cargo our captors wanted to annex, but the chagrin of the Germans may be imagined when they realized that they had captured this ship just three days too late to save the Hitachi. Here was a ship with ample coal which, had it been captured a few days before, would have enabled the Germans to save the Hitachi and take her as a prize to Germany, with all of us on board as prisoners, as they had always desired to do. Other German raiders had occasionally been able to do so with one or two of their prizes. Had the Hitachi arrived in Germany, she would have been rechristened the Luchs, the name of a former German war vessel with which the Prize Captain had had associations.
The Igotz Mendi had left Lourenço Marques on November 5th, and was due at Colombo on the 22nd. Before 9 a.m. on the morning of the capture both ships had turned about, the prize now being in command of the Germans, and were going back on the course the Wolf had followed since the destruction of the Hitachi. Discussion was rife among the prisoners as to what would be done with the new capture, and whether the Commander of the Wolf would redeem his promise to transfer the married couples to the "next ship caught."