The commander's order was:
"Any man found with firearms or heliograph will be shot summarily." Nobody tried to hold anything out on him after that. The Germans mean what they say.
Every neutral was given a white band to wear around his left arm, and this allowed us more liberty than the other men and officers enjoyed. The belligerents were all obliged to take their air and exercise on the well deck aft, while we were allowed to go up on the head while on deck. I talked to many of the German sailors, and it was one of them who told me how the Georgic had been taken.
II—"WHAT THE OFFICERS TOLD ME"
"We are sneaking along at night," he said in very fair English. He told me later he had once been on a Hamburg-American merchantman regularly out of New York. "We haven't a light showing. The ship's as black as the water around us, and there's not a pipe or a cigar lit on the deck.
"All of a sudden the lookout calls and we see your lights. Keeping them low on the horizon we steam along all night waiting for daylight to run in on you. After that it was simple. You know what happened then. (I certainly did know.) What fools you were to run with lights!"
One of the officers from the Voltaire, already taken and sunk, told me that afterward while the Germans were chasing us a sailor went below and informed the prisoners that the raider was overhauling the White Star steamship Georgic. The name had been chipped off the Georgic's counter and lifeboats and the only conceivable way they could have identified us was by intercepting wireless messages. For that, they must have had the British code. The incident lends color to the story that the Germans had the code when the Lusitania made her last trip and sent a message to the Captain to slow down to eighteen knots. There are many stories among seamen in England to-day that Capt. Turner of the Lusitania punished at least one member of his crew for treachery before he abandoned his ship.
"When we came aboard the raider," the officer from the late Voltaire continued, "one of the Germans said to me:
"'Where were you? You are twenty-four hours late.'