EN ROUTE FOR RUHLEBEN--VIA ICELAND
A last effort was made to persuade the Captain to ask the _Wolf's_
Commander to release the Spanish ship here, take all the prize crew off,
and send us back to Cape Town (which would have suited the plans of
every one of us), for a suspicion began to grow in our minds that
Germany, and nowhere else, was the destination intended for us. But our
Captain would not listen to this suggestion, and said he was sure the
Spanish Captain would not go back to Cape Town even if he promised to do
so.
On the next day, January 24th, relief seemed nearer than it had done
since our capture four months before. I was sitting on the starboard
deck, when suddenly, about 3.30 p.m., I saw coming up out of the mist,
close to our starboard bow, what looked like a cruiser with four
funnels. The Spanish officer on the bridge had apparently not seen it,
or did not want to! Neither, apparently, had the German sailor, if,
indeed, he was even on the bridge at that moment. I rushed to inform the
American sailing ship Captain of my discovery, and he confirmed my
opinion that it was a four-funnelled warship. The Germans were by this
time fully alarmed, and the ship slowed down a little; the Captain,
evidently also thinking that the vessel was a cruiser, went to his cabin
to dispose of the ship's papers, the crew got into their best uniform to
surrender, and it looked as if help were at hand at last. We got our
precious packages together, put them in our pockets, and got everything
ready to leave the ship. We were all out on deck, delighted beyond words
(our elation can be imagined), and saw the ship--it must be remembered
that it was a very misty day--resolve itself into two two-funnelled
ships, apparently transports, one seemingly in distress and very much
camouflaged, and the other standing by. Soon, however, they proceeded on
their course and crossed our bows fairly close. We were then all ordered
to our cabins, and we saw the two ships steam off to the westward,
without having spoken us or given any evidence of having seen us at
all.
It was a most bitter disappointment to us, comparable to that of
shipwrecked sailors on a desert island watching a ship expected to
deliver them pass out of sight. Our hopes, raised to such a high pitch,
were indeed dashed--we felt very low after this. Would help never come?
Better we had not seen the ships than to be deceived and disappointed in
this way. But it was a great relief to the Germans. We never discovered
what ships they were, but the American said he believed them to be
American transports and that each mounted a gun. If only we had seen
them the day before, when we were in company with the _Wolf_, they might
have been suspicious, and probably have been of some help to us. The
Captain was very worried by their appearance, and did not feel that all
danger was passed even when the ships disappeared. He feared they might
communicate with some armed vessel met with, and give them a description
and the position of his ship. Also, had these two ships seen the _Wolf_,
from which we had parted only twenty-four hours before?
In the middle of the excitement the Spanish chief mate had rushed on to
the bridge into the wireless room, and while the wireless operator was
out of the room, or his attention had been diverted, he took from their
place all the six or eight bombs on board and threw them overboard. They
fell into the sea with a great splash just near where I was standing,
but I did not then know it was the bombs which were being got rid of. It
was a plucky act, for had he been discovered by the armed sentry while
doing it he would have undoubtedly been shot on the spot. On the next
day, on the morning of which we saw two sailing ships far distant, an
inquiry was held as to the disappearance of the bombs, which would, of
course, have been used to sink the ship, and the chief mate owned up. He
said that he did it for the sake of the women and children on board; as
the sea was rough, their lives would have been in danger if they had
been put in the lifeboats when the ship was bombed. He was confined to
his cabin for the rest of the voyage, but we managed to see and talk to
him from time to time, and thanked him for his bravery. Later he was
sentenced by the Commander of the _Wolf_ to three years' imprisonment in
Germany and a fine of 2,000 marks. From this time all the Spanish
officers were relieved of their duties.
The Germans had told us that, in the event of the prize being captured
while the weather was rough, the ship would not be bombed or sunk, as
they had no desire to endanger the lives of the women or children
amongst us. In fact, so they said, the ship would not be bombed under
any conditions when once the _Wolf_ had got all the coal she wanted. It
was indeed difficult to see what purpose would be served by the Germans
sinking the Spanish ship, if she were overhauled by an Allied cruiser.
The Allies could not keep her, as she would have to be restored to
Spain; the Germans said they would not keep her, but return her to her
owners. To have deliberately sunk her would only have meant a gratuitous
offence to Spain. Nevertheless, the next time we met the _Wolf_ a new
supply of bombs and hand grenades was put on board our ship. At the same
time an extra Lieutenant came on board, additional neutrals were sent
over to help work the ship, and the prize crew was increased from nine
to nineteen. All the prize crew now wore caps with the words "S.M.S.
_Otter_" inscribed thereon. Somewhere about this time the American
Captain and the second mate of one of the captured ships had returned to
them their instruments which had been taken from them at the time of
their capture.
The Kaiser's birthday, which fell on a Sunday, was honoured by the
sacrifice of the last calf, and was marked by a most terrific storm. The
wind was raging for hours at a hurricane force between eleven and
twelve, the seas were between thirty and forty feet high, and it seemed
impossible that the ship could live in such a sea. It seemed that she
must inevitably founder. But notwithstanding terrible rolling, she
shipped very little water, but all of the prisoners were alarmed at the
rough weather and the rolling of the ship. The wireless aerials were
brought down by the storm, and any seas that did come on board smashed
whatever deck hamper had been left about.
From this day onwards we lived in a condition of great misery, and death
stared us in the face many times. The prospect was a gloomy one: just
when my wife and I had reached the time to which we had been looking
forward for many years it seemed daily increasingly unlikely that our
lives could escape a violent and brutal ending. Such thoughts inevitably
occurred to our minds during these dark and anxious days. But there was
still to come even worse than we had yet experienced. It got colder and
colder every day for a considerable time; the food got worse and worse,
and we were on short rations; the ship became more and more dirty,
smokes ran short--only some ancient dusty shag brought from Germany by
the _Wolf_ and some virulent native tobacco from New Guinea
remained--and conditions generally became almost beyond endurance.
Darkness fell very early in these far northern latitudes, and the long
nights were very dreary and miserable. What wretched nights we spent in
that crowded saloon--crushed round the table attempting to read or play
cards! It was too dismal and uncomfortable for words, but we had either
to endure that or our cold, wet cabins. Sundays seemed to be the days on
which the worst storms occurred, though on very few of the days from
this time onwards did we have anything but very dirty weather. The
Australian stewardess became very ill with asthma, and with no adequate
medicine supply on board, no suitable food, and no warm or dry cabin for
her, it is indeed a miracle that she lived through these last few weeks.
She owes her life to the devotion of the Australian Major of the A.M.C.
on board and the lady prisoners who assisted in nursing her.
On February 5th we again met the _Wolf_--we had sighted her on the
evening of the 4th, but it was too rough then to communicate, and, it
was said, the _Wolf_ did not recognize our rocket signals. With the
_Wolf's_ usual luck, the weather moderated next day, and the ships
stopped. Just as the Germans on land always seemed to get the weather
they wanted, so they were equally favoured at sea. This was noticed over
and over again, and the _Hitachi_ passengers had very good reason to be
sick about this. The two days previous to her capture the sea had been
so rough that the "bird" could not go up, but on the actual day of the
capture the sea had very much calmed down, enabling the seaplane to go
up and spot the _Hitachi's_ position.
Those who had written letters to be sent on the _Wolf_ sent them over on
this day, and the Spanish chief mate expected to be sent on the _Wolf_,
as we might not meet her again. Luckily for him, however, for some
reason or other he was not transferred that day, and neither he nor we
ever saw the _Wolf_ again after the morning of February 6th. Doubtless
the _Wolf_ expected to meet us again before the final separation
occurred, when the transference of the officer would have been effected.
We heard from the _Wolf_ that she was getting very short of food, and
that there was much sickness, including many cases of scurvy, on board.
The pigeons must have gone the way of all flesh by this time, and
perhaps the dachshunds had too--in the form of German sausages! Some of
the prisoners, we knew, had very little clothing, and positively none
for cold weather, and our hearts were sore at the thought of so many of
our fellow-countrymen, many of whom we had known, in good and ill
fortune, being taken into captivity in Germany.
The next day we entered the Arctic Circle. The cold was intense, the
cabins were icy, the temperature falling as low as 14° F. in some of
them. There was no heating apparatus on the ship, with the exception of
a couple of small heating pipes in the saloon. These were usually
covered with the officers' thick clothes, and some of the passengers'
garments drying. The cabin curtains froze to the ports; all the cabin
roofs leaked, and it was impossible to keep the floors and bedding dry;
and in our cabin, in addition, we had water constantly flowing and
swishing backwards and forwards between the iron deck of the ship and
the wooden floor of the cabin. This oozed up through the floor and
accumulated under the settee, and on many nights we emptied five or six
buckets full of icy water from under the settee, which had also to be
used as a bed. At last I persuaded the Captain to allow one of the
sailors to drill a hole in the side of the cabin so that the water could
have an outlet on to the deck. I had asked that this might be done
directly the water appeared in our cabin, but was told it was _against
the regulations of the Board of Trade_! Quoting the Board of Trade under
such conditions--was this a sample of German humour? We managed to
secure a piece of matting for our cabin floor--it was soaked through
every day, but we had it dried daily in the engine-room. Since the great
storm on the Kaiser's birthday our feet had never been dry or warm, and
were in this condition till some hours after we got ashore.
The ports of the cabins had all long ago been painted black in order
that no light might show through, and the darkness at night, especially
in these stormy seas, was always very sinister and ugly, not to say
dangerous--not a spark of light showing on deck. We had to sit in these
cold and dark cabins during the day. The weather prevented us from being
on deck, which was often covered with frost and snow, and often there
was nowhere else to sit. The electric light was on for only a limited
time each day, so, as the ports could not be opened, it being far too
cold, we asked and obtained permission to scratch a little of the paint
off the ports in our cabin. This made things a little more bearable, but
it can easily be imagined how people who had been living in tropical
climates for many years fared under such conditions. As for our own
case, my wife had spent only two winters out of Siam during the last
twenty years, while I had spent none during the last twenty-one, and it
is no exaggeration to say that we suffered agonies with the cold. It was
nothing short of cruel to expose women and children to this after they
had been dragged in captivity over the seas for many months. The Captain
had ordered a part of the bunkers to be cleared, so that the prisoners
might sit there in the cold weather. But the place was so dirty and
uncomfortable, and difficult of access, in addition to it being in
darkness, and quite unprovided with seats, that most of the prisoners
preferred the crowded little saloon. Luchs was provided with a swanky
kennel for the cold weather. The Spanish carpenter contrived it, and it
looked like a small model of a Norwegian church--painted the Allied
grey! Even the Captain's dog was more comfortable than we were!
On the morning of February 7th we for the first time encountered
icefloes, when attempting the northern passage between Greenland and
Iceland. About 11 a.m. we stopped and hooted for the _Wolf_, as a fog
had come on--the first time we had heard a steamer's siren since the day
of our capture. We waited for some hours in the ice, but no answering
signal came, so the Captain decided to turn back, as he thought it
impossible to force his way through the ice. We therefore went back
again on our course, the Captain hoping that the wind would change and
cease blowing the icefloes from off the shores of Greenland.
That morning is unforgettable. The cold fog, the great bergs of ice
floating by the ship and sometimes crashing into her, the dreary sea,
the cold, filthy, miserable ship, our hopeless condition, all helped to
lower our spirits, and we felt we had plumbed the very depths of misery.
After a day or two slow steaming on this course and occasional stopping
altogether--what dreary, miserable, hopeless days!--we resumed our
attempt to go to the north of Iceland, evidently to escape the attention
of the British ships which the Germans expected to encounter between the
south of Iceland and the Faroes. But before long it became evident that
ice was still about, and in the darkness of the early morning of
February 11th we bumped heavily against icebergs several times. This
threw some of us out of our bunks; once again there was no more sleep
during the night. This time the Captain abandoned his attempt to go
through the northern passage, and turned the ship round to try his luck
in the passage he did not expect to be so free from British attentions.
We thought perhaps that as we were on short rations and even drinking
water was running short, and the case of us all really desperate, the
Captain would land us and give up the ship at Reykjavik, leaving us
there to be rescued. Even a stay in Iceland would be better than one in
Germany, for which country we now all suspected we were bound. The
uncertainty concerning our ultimate destination added to our miseries,
and these were not lessened when on February 11th the Captain told us,
_for the first time_ that it was, and always had been, the intention to
take us on the _Igotz Mendi_ to Germany, there to be interned in
civilian prisoners' camps. He told us, too, that the women and those of
the men over military age would be released at once, but we all declined
to believe anything else our captors told us, as they had deliberately
and repeatedly deceived us by assuring us at various times they were
going to land us in Spain, or Norway, or some other neutral country. The
string of German lies must surely by now be ended. But no! There were
still more to come, as will be seen later on.
At daylight on the 11th we were still among icefloes, but going away
from instead of meeting them, and on that morning we saw in the distance
the coast of Iceland, which the Germans tried to persuade us was the
sails of fishing boats, as they did not wish us to think we were so near
the Icelandic coast, the first land that we had seen since the Maldive
Islands, a week after our capture, i.e. more than four months before. We
also saw a few fishing boats off the coast.
We now shaped a course for the coast of Norway, keeping to the north of
the Faroes. On Sunday, the 17th, we again ran into a very heavy storm.
Ever since the storm on January 27th the propeller had been constantly
racing and sending shudders through the ship from stem to stern. On this
day this feature, which was always disconcerting and to a certain extent
alarming, became more marked, and the thud with which the ship met the
seas more and more loud, so loud indeed that on one occasion the Captain
thought we had struck a mine, and rushed from the saloon to the bridge
to ascertain what damage had been done. Luckily for us, the engines were
British made. No inferior workmanship could possibly have stood the
terrific strain put on these engines during these weeks of terrible
storms. The Captain and crew had by this time become very anxious as to
the fate of the _Wolf_, as no news had been received concerning her. Day
after day the Captain told us he expected news, but they went by without
any being received. But on the evening of the 19th the Captain informed
us that he had received a wireless message announcing the safe arrival
of the _Wolf_ at a German port. The Germans seemed singularly little
elated at the news, and hardly ever mentioned the subject again after
that evening. This was so different from what we had expected that most
of the prisoners did not believe the _Wolf_ had got home. We hoped that
she had been intercepted and captured by a British cruiser, and that
with any luck a similar fate might be in store for us.
The _Wolf_ had certainly made a wonderful cruise, and the Germans were
naturally very proud of it--almost the only exploit of their navy of
which they reasonably could be proud. They had successfully evaded the
enemy for fifteen months, and had kept their ship in good repair, for
they had first-class mechanics and engineers on board. But she must have
been very weather-worn and partly crippled before she arrived at a home
port. She had touched at no port or no shore from the day she left
Germany till the day she returned to the Fatherland. She was, too, the
only German raider which had extended her operations beyond the
Atlantic. The _Wolf_ had cruised and raided in the Indian and Pacific
Oceans as well. She had sunk seven steamers and seven sailing ships, and
claimed many more ships sunk as a result of her mine-laying. Besides the
prizes already named, she had captured and sunk the _Turritella_,
_Wordsworth_, _Jumna_, _Dee_, _Winslow_, and _Encore_, the last three of
which were sailing vessels. Her first prize, the _Turritella_, taken in
February 1917 in the Indian Ocean, was originally a German ship, a
sister of the _Wolf_, captured by the British. On her recapture by the
Germans, she was equipped as a raider and mine-layer, and sent off on an
expedition by herself. But soon afterwards near Aden she encountered a
British warship, when the prize crew scuttled her and surrendered.