There was a buzz of excited voices which would not easily be hushed. At last the never-diminished tension of four long days of inaction was broken. They were going to move, to do something. No longer were they to lie there, waiting, waiting, while perhaps at any minute destruction was creeping stealthily towards them under the surface of the water. They forgot the wearing vigils of the previous weeks at sea, the unrelieved strain of watching the horizon for a grey spot in daytime or a blur closer at hand in the obscurity of the night. They forgot the awful minutes which dragged out, heavy with their lives, as they approached an unknown ship, forgot the paralysing uncertainty when the wireless began on its mysterious message, reporting her. They forgot the night alarms, the perpetual dodging of the hostile cruisers, the chases and the escapes and the last fierce pursuit, which had driven them, all but out of coal, behind the shelter of Borkum Island. The memory of these things was blotted out by the nerve-sapping suspense of the past four days, while they waited for a chance to elude the hostile cruisers watching for them in the offing. Now they experienced the gladness of a release as from an untangible but none the less close prison. Nevertheless, all of this emotional and mental strain was marked in eyes dark-rimmed and faces that had grown thinner. The alacrity of their movements now was not the alacrity of men who leap, calm-souled and confident, to test their strength in a crisis; it was the fussiness of neurotics who are glad to translate their nerve force into physical action as an escape from the barren travail of their brains. Volumes of black smoke rolled heavily from the four funnels of the cruiser, were blown rapidly by the gale in one thick all-obliterating mist towards the low shores. An engine-room telegraph clanged harshly while the port anchor, dripping black mud, came slowly up to the hawse-hole. Again the telegraph clanged. There was a flurry in the water astern, and the long grey cruiser commenced to move along the dark fairway into the stormy grey of the autumn afternoon.