Lieutenant Tanner, R.N.R., captain of the _Tara_ in her merchant marine days, I found in his home at Holyhead. Through the window of his cosy library, where he spun his yarn, I could look out across the rocky coast of Anglesea to where the slate-coloured patrol-boats kept guard in St. George's Channel. "Lieutenant Tanner," I asked him, "what did the men of the _Tara_ talk about and think about, once the excitement of the sinking, and the landing, and the march was over and you were all settled down to the routine of 'prison life'?" "First and always--food," he replied, promptly. "We were famishing for the whole four months and more. For a while we thought and talked a good deal of the possibility of rescue; but as the weeks went by that hope gradually died out, and our speculations--perhaps more in thought than in word--were of how the end would come. It was only during the last couple of months that the men came to speak often on this subject, and they were, not unnaturally, most prone to discuss it in the intervals of deeper depression following the death of one of their mates. We seemed to divide into two sharply differentiated parties on this issue, the optimists holding that our heritage of civilization and our discipline would enable us to meet the worst bravely and resignedly, while the pessimists maintained that we would gradually slough off our civilized restraint--just as our clothes and our conventions had gone already--and end by fighting for life like a pack of wolves. The rate at which the bickerings and petty quarrels over trivialities increased as the days went by inclined more and more of the men to the latter theory, but a few of us never wavered in our belief, but it would be the man in us, and not the beast, that would be supreme at the last. "We--the officers--made a point of imposing no discipline whatever upon the men, this extending even to non-interference in their increasingly frequent disputes. We held--and rightly, I am convinced--that anything calculated to give an outlet to their feelings would make them less likely to become a prey to gloomy thought. Sullen, silent brooding was what we feared more than anything else. Consequently, therefore, we rather welcomed the occasional bouts of fisticuffs that marked the later stages of our imprisonment. They unquestionably acted as safety-valves to prevent more dangerous explosions. "I also made what effort I could to keep the minds of the men occupied. Every Sunday evening we met and sang hymns, and on these occasions I usually read from my Prayer Book and invited discussion on some text I had given out the previous Sunday. Here"--turning to his diary--"are some of the things we debated in our weekly desert 'forums' by the old Roman wells:-- "'More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.'--From 'The Passing of Arthur.' "'Love took up the glass of time.'--From 'Locksley Hall.'