They were so quiet. They handed letters and small bundles and sometimes some of their pay to their comrades or to the passengers looking on and they dropped down that ladder. No one but a sailor could have gone down, for the ships heaved up and down, and sometimes they were bumping and sometimes there was a wide belt of heaving dark water between them, bridged only by that frail ladder. One by one they went, landing on the hostile deck, and were greeted with what were manifestly jeers at their misfortune. The getting down was difficult and more than once a bundle was dropped into the sea and there went up a sigh that was like a wail, for the passengers looking on thought the man was gone, and I do not think there would have been any hope for him between the ships.
Darker and darker it grew. On the Goathied there were the lighted decks, but below on the torpedo boat the men were dim figures, German and English undiscernible in the gloom. On the horizon loomed the sombre bulk of the cruisers, eaeh with a bright light aloft, and all around was the heaving sea, the white tops of the choppy waves showing sinister against the darker hollows.
“Anglisky boys! Anglisky boys!” wailed the Yiddish woman, and her voice cut into the waiting silence. It was their dirge, the dirge for the long, long months of imprisonment that lay before them. And we were hoping for a short war! I could hear the Oxford man drawing a long breath occasionally, steeling himself against the moment when his turn would come.
It never came. Why, I do not know. Perhaps they did not realise his nationality, for being a Scotsman he had entered himself as “British” on the passenger list, and “British” was not such a well-known word as the sons of Britain gathering from all corners of the earth to fight the common foe have made it to-day.
“Puir chappies! Puir chappies! A'm losin' guid comrades,” sighed an elderly man leaning over the side and shouting a farewell to “Andra'.”
I murmured something about “after the war,” but he cut me short sternly. The general opinion was that they would be put to stoke German warships and as the British were sure to beat them they would go down and be ingloriously lost. The thought must have been a bitter one to the men on that torpedo boat. And they took it like heroes.
The last man was gone, and as the torpedo boat drew away a sort of moan went up from the bereft passenger ship and we went on our way, the captain relieved that we were free before a hole had been knocked in our side.
He was so thankful that no worse thing had befallen him that he became quite communicative.
“They are gone to take the Uleaborg,” he said, “and they will blow her up and before to-morrow morning Raumo will be in flames!”
In those days Sweden had great faith in the might of Germany. I hope that faith is getting a little shaken at last. Still that captain declared his intention of warning all the ships he could. There were two Finnish ships of which he knew that he said were coming out of Stockholm that night and he was going to look for them and warn them.