hastily round his neck. The men fell back and the women retired below
to get into the boats from the next deck. Two women refused at first
to leave their husbands, but partly by persuasion and partly by force
they were separated from them and sent down to the next deck. I think
that by this time the work on the lifeboats and the separation of men
and women impressed on us slowly the presence of imminent danger, but
it made no difference in the attitude of the crowd: they were just as
prepared to obey orders and to do what came next as when they first
came on deck. I do not mean that they actually reasoned it out: they
were the average Teutonic crowd, with an inborn respect for law and
order and for traditions bequeathed to them by generations of
ancestors: the reasons that made them act as they did were impersonal,
instinctive, hereditary.

But if there were any one who had not by now realized that the ship
was in danger, all doubt on this point was to be set at rest in a
dramatic manner. Suddenly a rush of light from the forward deck, a
hissing roar that made us all turn from watching the boats, and a
rocket leapt upwards to where the stars blinked and twinkled above us.
Up it went, higher and higher, with a sea of faces upturned to watch
it, and then an explosion that seemed to split the silent night in
two, and a shower of stars sank slowly down and went out one by one.
And with a gasping sigh one word escaped the lips of the crowd:
"Rockets!" Anybody knows what rockets at sea mean. And presently
another, and then a third. It is no use denying the dramatic intensity
of the scene: separate it if you can from all the terrible events that
followed, and picture the calmness of the night, the sudden light on
the decks crowded with people in different stages of dress and
undress, the background of huge funnels and tapering masts revealed by
the soaring rocket, whose flash illumined at the same time the faces