“I have another message,” Stendel tapped out. “Will you take it?—very short.”
“G.G.F.,” replied Rodwell, which in the war-code meant “Am ready to receive message.”
Then came the following from beneath the cold waters which divided the two nations at war, a combination of German words and the numerical code—
“J.S.F.: 26378: Möwe: (sea-gull) J.S.J.J: schimpflich (infamous) Ozstc: 32; Schandfleck (blot) tollkühn (foolhardy).”
And it was followed by the affix of the sender, “10,111, and the word zerren” (pull).
Again Rodwell tore off the piece of pale green “tape” and placed it carefully in his pocket, in order to decode it later on.
Then he leisurely finished his bacon and declared to Tom that he felt the better for it.
“I ’ear as ’ow the pay-pers are a sayin’ that the German submarines are a torpedoin’ our ships ’olesale, sir,” remarked old Tom, when the recorder was silent again. “It’s a great shame, surely. That ain’t war—to kill women an’ children on board ship. Why, the most brutal of all foreigners in the world would go out and rescue women an’ children from a sinkin’ ship!”
“It’s war, my dear man—war?” replied Rodwell. “You people, living on the shores of England, don’t yet know what war means. It means that, at all hazards and at all costs, you must vanquish your enemy. No kid-glove or polite speeches. The silly peace ideas of humanity, and all that rubbish, don’t count nowadays. The German super-man does not understand such silly manoeuvres when he is out to vanquish his enemy. Why, you and your daughter and Ted would be far better off under our own Kaiser than you are to-day, with all this shuttlecock policy of your out-of-date rule-of-thumb Government, and your strangulating taxation consequent upon it. Your English sovereign is only worth fifteen shillings to-day.”
“Yes, but I don’t understand how it is that you German people have put us under your thumbs, as you have done.”