The accountant officer had voiced the sentiments of his fellow-captives. Optimism, a sure faith that all's well with the Navy, had evidently gripped their minds, but beyond that there was a vague suspicion that a brake was being applied to the enormous sea-power at the Empire's command.
Conversation proceeded briskly until the clanging of a bell announced that tea—the last meal of the day—was to be served. Into a dining-hall trooped the prisoners—to be counted en route for the third time in sixteen hours.
"Tea" consisted of a nasty beverage made from acorn "coffee" and chicory, with black bread and margarine. This was supplemented by delicacies that had been sent from home, all supplies from that source being placed into a common stock. The quantity received, however, represented but a small proportion of that sent, for although everything entrusted to American societies reached their destination safely—a large camp not far from Berlin—pilfering by the German authorities during the additional journey to Sylt was a most frequent occurrence.
At sunset the prisoners were ordered to bed. No lights were allowed. The dormitory was divided into cubicles, two officers being put in each. Privacy there was none, as the doors were only four feet in height and a couple of sentries continually paced up and down the dividing corridor.
Ronald Tressidar's cubicle was shared with a young flight sub-lieutenant R.N.R., John Fuller by name, who three months previously had fallen into the hands of the enemy on the occasion of a raid upon the fortifications of Borkum. At an altitude of less than a thousand feet a piece of shrapnel had pierced the petrol tank of Fuller's biplane, compelling the machine to alight in the sea within a mile of the coast. With a steady off-shore wind there was a chance of the seaplane drifting to within reach of the waiting destroyers, but for the fact that one of the floats had been perforated on the underside by a fragment of shell. In a waterlogged condition the crippled aeroplane's plight was observed by a German patrol boat, and, half dead with cold and exposure, Fuller was haled into captivity.
Doubtless owing to the fact that the flight-sub. had succeeded in dropping his bombs with disastrous results to the German works, his captors had transferred him to Sylt, where he stood a good chance of forming an integral part of a target for his brother-airmen in an expected raid.
"You'll find it desperately slow work, Tressidar," remarked Fuller "This is my eighty-second night in this hole, and it seems like a dozen years."
"Suppose you haven't tried to get away?"
"There's not a dog's chance, believe me," replied the flight-sub. "Apart from the risk of being plugged by a bullet from the sentry's rifle, the almost certainty of getting brought up all standing on the live wire——"
"The live wire?" repeated Tressidar.