"We thought, 'Let’s get the barricades done, let’s do the practical things rather than sit there like sheep and wait to meet our fate.'"

Nick Hayward, a 37-year-old Brit, describes the "can-do attitude" of the "extremely lucky," "very good bunch of people" who holed up in a restaurant inside the Taj:

"Three or four of us were Brits. There were some Irish as well. Most were Indian.

"We’d never met each other but I have to say, it was a true British stiff upper-lip situation. Together, the Brits helped to keep up morale. ...

"We all decided that even though we had alcohol within reach we wouldn’t touch it because it seemed like a bad idea to get drunk.

"But come 5am, we were fairly confident the police were going to get us out, so I marched over to the bar and found a bottle of vintage Cristal champagne and opened it and began pouring it into glasses.

"Then the head waiter came rushing across to me and said, 'No, no, you can’t do that!' and I said, 'Well we’re going to' and he said, 'No sir, those are the wrong type of glasses. I shall find you champagne flutes.'

"And he did. The service was immaculate."

Like a scene in an old-fashioned movie.

Via Blackberry, Hayward got news and encouragement, including, from his boss, some lines from the poem "The Private Of The Buffs," which is about a young British soldier dying rather than kowtowing to the Chinese. What lines? Perhaps:

Yes, honor calls!—with strength like steel
He put the vision by.
Let dusky Indians whine and kneel;
An English lad must die.
And thus, with eyes that would not shrink,
With knee to man unbent,
Unfaltering on its dreadful brink,
To his red grave he went.

"The vision" is the vision of home.