Yet in back of the desolation and despair, the men also felt a kind of relief. They had been locked in the pack for twenty-one months, but now their period of inaction, of waiting and wondering in hapless drift, of suffering the tedium of a monotone imprisonment, was finally over. They knew what lay before them. They had only a few months to save themselves. They realized they were facing an epic struggle for survival—and yet they were anxious to get going.
