So he went down, and presently they came up together. The Oxford man had been very sea-sick and he thought all the row was caused by the ship having struck a mine, and he felt so ill that if things were to end that way he was accepting it calmly, but being captured by Germans was a different matter. He was the only Englishman in the first class, and when we heard they were coming for the young men we felt sure he would have to go.
Leaning over the rail of the Goathied, we could look down upon the black decks of the torpedo boat, blacker than ever now in the dusk of the evening, for the sun sank and the darkness was coming quickly. A rope ladder was flung over and up came a couple of German officers. They spoke perfect English, and they talked English all the time. They went below, demanded the passenger list and studied it carefully.
“We must take those Englishmen,” said the leader, and then he went through every cabin to see that none was concealed.
The captain made remonstrance, as much remonstrance as an unarmed man can make with three cruisers looking on and a torpedo boat close alongside.
“It is war,” said the German curtly, and in the dusk he ranged the sailor-men along the decks, all fifty-five of them, and picked out those between the ages of nineteen and forty. Indeed one luckless lad of seventeen was taken, but he was a strapping fellow and they said if he was not twenty-one he looked it.
It was tragic. Of course there must have been treachery at work or how should the German squadron have known that the Englishmen were crossing at this very hour? But a few moments before they had been counting on getting home and now they were bound for a German prison! In the gathering darkness they stood on the decks, and the short, choppy sea beat the iron torpedo boat against the ship's side, and the captain in the light from a lantern hung against the little house looked the picture of despair.
“She cannot stand it! She cannot stand it much longer!”
Crash! Crash! Crash!
“She cannot stand it! She was never built for it! And she is old now!”
But the German paid no attention. The possible destruction of a passenger ship was as nothing weighed in the balance with the acquirement of six and thirty fighting men.