had no chance of being saved.  They would all have been battened down under hatches (this, indeed, was done whenever the Wolf sighted or captured a ship, when mines were being sown, and when gun and other drill was carried on) and armed guards with hand grenades sent among them.  It made us furious to see, as we did many times, our friends being driven below by armed guards.  Their fate, if the Wolf had gone into action, would have been too terrible to contemplate.  For the lifeboats on the Wolf could not possibly have accommodated more than 350 souls, and it is certain no prisoners would have been among this number.

The Captain and officers of the Wolf must have had some very anxious moments on many occasions.  When passing close to other ships, as she had done in the comparatively narrow waters of the Java Sea, all the prisoners were sent below, and we were told that the few officers and crew visible to a passing ship discarded their naval uniform and appeared in kit suitable for the officers and crew of a tramp.  We also heard that on one occasion in narrow waters in the Far East the Wolf passed quite close to a Japanese cruiser at night.  Both ships were in darkness, every man on the Wolf was at his station, and at the slightest sign from the cruiser the Wolf’s guns and torpedoes would have immediately come into action.  But the Wolf’s good luck did not desert her, and the Japanese cruiser passed away into the night without having given any sign that she had seen the raider.

The Wolf, with a company of over seven hundred on board, sailed away on a south-westerly course for the next two days, and the usual routine of the ship went on, but no further gun or other drills took place.  Soon after daybreak on November 10th a sailor came along and locked us all in our cabins, armed guards patrolled the deck, and a short time after an officer came to each cabin and informed us there was a steamer on the starboard side which the Wolf intended to capture.  He told us the Wolf would fire on her to stop, and provided all of us with cotton-wool to insert in our ears while the guns were being fired!  The Germans had had no scruples about firing on the Hitachi, though they could have seen there were women on board, but on this occasion they were so considerate as to give us cotton-wool for our ears, that our nerves might not be shaken—­a truly German touch!  We waited for the sound of the guns, but nothing happened, and in about half an hour the same officer came along and said to us, “Don’t be fearful; the other ship has stopped, and there will be no firing!” Our cabin doors were unlocked, the men on the upper deck were allowed out, the ladies were requested not to show themselves on deck, and another officer ran along the deck saying “We’ve catched her, we’ve catched her; a neutral this time!”