Through an oily sea we sailed south and west toward the Falkland
Islands. Many a time had I passed this way in the old days when
bound for Cape Horn. These islands of the South Atlantic have long
been the base for whaling schooners. But to every German the
Falklands will be forever memorable as the scene of a one-sided naval
engagement in which one of our best beloved admirals was overwhelmed
by a British fleet.
Had you seen our deck as we sailed south during these days, you might
have wondered what we were about. Along with other plunder, we had
looted captured ships of several great sheets of iron. We had ripped
them from iron walls and roofs of forecastles and stowed them on our
deck. Now the mechanics of the _Seeadler's_ motor crew got busy with
acetylene torches, and from those sheets of metal they welded a great
iron cross, ten feet high.
We drew near a spot on that lonely ocean just a bit to the east of
the Falkland Islands. My navigation officer and I figured out the
point carefully on our chart, and when our instruments told us we
were there, I called all hands on deck. Somewhere far below on the
floor of the ocean were the bodies of hundreds of our comrades and
the battered hulks of a once proud German fleet. It was in these
very waters that our gallant Pacific Squadron under Count von Spee
sank in three thousand fathoms. For here it was that our light
cruisers, the _Scharnhorst_, _Gneisenau_, _Nuremburg_, and _Leipsic_,
with odds against them, fought it out with a more powerful British
squadron.
With flag at half mast, we stood at solemn attention. The sky was
gray and melancholy. The sea rolled with a gentle swell. In our
mind's eye we could picture that disastrous day when, outranged by
the guns of the great British warships, our cruisers, two large and
three small, had fought a losing and hopeless fight. One, a scout
cruiser, escaped. The others went down. Pounded from the distance,
they trembled under the blows of the shells that rained down upon
them. Exploding projectiles raked the decks and pierced the hulls of
the ill-fated vessels. As if in a last struggle, trying to keep
afloat for one more shot at the enemy, they staggered, lurched, and
then, one after the other, plunged into the depths, entering port on
their final voyage far below on the ocean floor, eighteen thousand
feet beneath the surface. Every man aboard three of the ships was
lost. A high sea happened to be running at the time, so the victors
had little chance to rescue the men from the doomed ships. Two
hundred and fifty members of the crew of the _Gneisenau_ were picked
up and got to the Falklands alive.
As if in a dream, I thought of the last time I saw my friend Count
von Spee. It was in the days before the world went mad. The Navy
Yard at Kiel was in gala mood. Every warship in the harbour had sent
three hundred men. They stood at rigid attention while Von Spee and
his staff strode by. Then he addressed them.
"By order of the Emperor, I am to take command of our cruisers in
Chinese waters. My officers and men sail with me to-morrow."
The sailors all give three cheers. They think the Admiral and his
men are merely going for a pleasant vacation to the Orient. It is in
1913. No war is in sight. Yet a darker note intrudes: Even then
military and naval men were unable to escape the thought of war:
"We are leaving home and country for two years. We who part from you
to-morrow will do our duty, knowing that every man at home will do
his. If war should come, we will be across the world and you will be
here. We will be too far away to lend a hand to you, and there is
little that you will be able to do for us.
"Ours is a young navy, but we have had a great teacher. When England
built her mighty fleet, she taught us how to build ours. The English
have great naval traditions, and both their fleet and traditions have
been our model. If war should come before we meet again, we along
the far-off China coast may be but a few ships against many enemies,
but from you of the High Sea Fleet we expect great deeds."
We of the German Navy knew and constantly gave expression to the
thought that Britain was our guide on the sea. Her great seafaring
tradition was our conscious and admitted pattern. We German naval
men liked the English and were in sympathy with them. Our navies
were alike in spirit. The French Navy was somewhat different. Its
morale was perhaps not so good. French naval officers all come up
from the ranks. The British and German come from cadet schools and
are recruited mostly from the first families. That is best. It
provides a finer corps of officers. I, myself, came up from the
forecastle, but I believe that, unless you have officers and men from
different worlds, your men will have little respect for their
commanders. It must either be that, or your officers must inspire
respect with their fists as in the old sailing-ship days. The French
Navy no longer has a rich tradition. It is true that the French had
far greater sea fighters than we in past centuries, and they had
their fine old naval traditions. But during the Revolution the old
Royal Navy of France was swept away and remained abolished for twenty
years. At the end of that time, a new navy was formed, but by then
the fine old French traditions seem to have been forgotten and new
traditions had to be formed. We Germans, with a new fleet, took over
the old, solid tradition of the British and made it our own. We did
everything we could to implant it in our men, and make it a real,
living thing ingrained in our people. Our sea leaders understood the
importance of a tradition. That was why we were determined to keep a
fleet after the war. When our great ships went down at Scapa Flow,
our Socialists favoured the total abandonment of the naval arm, but
fortunately enough of our people came out of their post-war trance
long enough to prevent such a fatal error. Perhaps it might be only
a few small ships that we could retain, but it would serve to keep
traditions alive until we could again build up a fleet as great or
even greater than the one we lost.
Von Spee was a sailor's admiral. He was a seaman by temperament,
open, honest, and jovial, uncomfortable on land and only himself when
on the bridge of his flagship. Too many of our professional fighting
men, I regret to say, were more ornamental than useful. They were
good at wearing gold lace and that is about all. But not Von Spee.
He was at his best on a quarter-deck in a storm. I still can see him
pacing back and forth, with his bushy brows and piercing blue eyes.
The day after he said _auf wiedersehen_ to us at Kiel, he and his
officers and men left by transport for the Orient, there to relieve
the officers and men aboard the cruisers of our small Pacific
Squadron at Tsing Tao. What was to have been their two-year term
overseas began as commonplace, quiet routine. It ended under the
salvos of British guns off the Falkland Islands.
Von Spee's plan, when the war caught him 15,000 miles from German
waters, was to harass the Allies in the Pacific and then try to slip
back through the North Sea to Kiel. Lady Luck smiled on him for a
little while and then deserted him. After crossing the Pacific, he
caught Craddock, the British admiral, off the coast of Chile. Von
Spee's star was in its ascendancy at this time and Craddock's on the
wane. A German secret agent in Chile flashed a wireless to Von Spee
giving him the information that Craddock was waiting for the arrival
of the big but old battleship _Canopus_ that was rounding the Horn.
Without the _Canopus_, Craddock's forces were weaker than Von Spee's,
and Von Spee instantly dashed to the attack so as to engage Craddock
before the _Canopus_ came up. Craddock and his men met their fate
like true British sailors. Outgunned, the British cruisers continued
to fire until they sank. Only one, a small boat, got away. But
their conqueror's days were numbered.
Von Spee now began his long race toward Kiel. Only two routes were
possible, one by Cape Horn and the other by the Cape of Good Hope.
Of course, he knew the British would be laying for him at both
places. He knew also that they would be after him with swifter and
more powerful ships than his own. His one chance was to beat them to
Cape Horn, lose himself in the broad Atlantic, make a run for it, and
probably fight his way through the blockade.
By now he was short of both munitions and coal. A wireless from
Germany brought the good news that a supply ship had slipped through
the blockade and was now on its way out to meet him. What a
tremendous voyage he might now have made! What a hair-raising dash
at the Allied blockade line he might have made! But he never got the
chance.
As he rounded the Horn, Dame Fortune tempted him, and he made what
proved to be a fatal error. He stopped a British collier and took
all her coal. This delayed him for three days. Meanwhile, a fleet
of Britain's mightiest battle cruisers had arrived at the Falklands.
He still might have run by them unnoticed had he not determined to
shell and destroy the wireless station on the Falklands. Thus he
stumbled into that nest of battle cruisers. He tried to run, but
they caught and sank him. That day the British had their sea giants,
the _Indefatigable_, the _Invincible_, the _Indomitable_, and along
with them a number of other battle cruisers, that later were to fight
gallantly at Jutland, and then find their way to rest on the floor of
the North Sea.
Only one of Von Spee's ships, the light but fleet cruiser _Dresden_,
showed her heels to the British leviathans and slipped back around
Cape Horn, But the Fates were merely playing with the poor _Dresden_,
and a few days later she was sunk by the more powerful British
cruiser _Kent_ off San Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe's island, in
the Pacific. She was lying in neutral waters and should have been
sheltered by the laws of war. Her captain signalled to the commander
of the _Kent_:
"We are in Chilean territory."
"My orders are to sink you on sight," replied the _Kent_, "and no
matter where you are."
The captain of the _Dresden_ blew up his ship, and with his officers
and crew swam ashore. The island was not quite so deserted after
this shipwreck as it was in Robinson Crusoe's day!
That in brief was the story of the plucky Von Spee and his gallant
men. Hence this dreary waste of waters off the Falklands was sacred
to us. We hove to, and from my quarter-deck I presided over a brief
memorial service above the watery graves of our comrades and their
ships. First I told my boys the story of my friend Count von Spee
and his men, and every one of us knew that we, too, might soon be on
our way to join them. But with the difference that we might not even
have a chance to fight it out.
On German ships, the captain is also the chaplain. Every Sunday
aboard the _Seeadler_ we had our hour of prayer and song. When we
had "guests" aboard from enemy ships, we invited them to join with us
in the worship of the Great Ruler of the Waves. Our service followed
the ritual of no particular creed. It was as simple as we simple
seamen could make it. The table which bore the ship's Bible was
draped not only with our German flag but also with the flags of all
the Allied nations whose ships we had captured and under whose
colours our prisoners had sailed. I wanted to make our prisoners
feel that the service was as much theirs as it was ours, and that we
did not feel ourselves any more a chosen people before the Altar of
God than any other people.
My life has not been altogether a pious one. On the contrary, it had
been decidedly blasphemous. My character was then, and still is, far
from saintly. However, I may not have been wholly unfit for the
office of ship's chaplain. I am religious at heart, easily swayed by
sentimental appeal. Had I not been a member of the Salvation Army in
Australia? Those testimonial meetings in Fremantle were still vivid
memories to me. So I was not exactly a greenhorn at conducting a
prayer meeting.
Before concluding our little memorial service, I addressed our
comrades three thousand fathoms below us. No mounds were raised over
their graves, no green grass or kindly flowers had been placed to
cheer them on their journey to the land from which no traveller has
yet returned. Only the waves of the sea. I spoke to them as though
my voice could somehow find its way to their resting place among the
mountain ranges at the bottom of the South Atlantic:
"Glorious fallen comrades, we bring you a message from home. Your
comrades have kept their promise to your commander. On sea and on
land they are fighting for the Fatherland. We of the _Seeadler_
salute you and solemnly swear that we, too, will endeavour to live
and die as gloriously as you. We, too, are hunted on the sea, even
as you were. So perhaps it will not be long ere we join you down
there in Davy Jones's Locker. If we do, our one hope is that we will
be able to fight our last fight as gallantly as did you."
I then led the sailors in a prayer that we repeated aloud, and while
the chorused invocation travelled southward on the winds that blew
toward the Antarctic, four men came forward bearing the great iron
cross.
"A decoration for the graves of heroes!"
At this signal from me the massive emblem slid into the water with
scarcely a splash and flashed swiftly down, down, three thousand
fathoms, to carry our message to Admiral Count von Spee and his men.