TABUK, (via Damascus,) May 8, noon.--They're still asleep. Last night
the joy lasted a long while. But I couldn't help admiring the
discipline, which did not break down even on that well-deserved joy
day. Earnestness, the basic characteristic of the soldier, lay under
all their merriment. As the engine was reported to be ready to start,
Mücke called out: "All abroad! Youngsters, only once in my life do I
command a railroad train." Then he and the officers sat down among the
sailors. At every station they made jokes, because they were real
stations that followed one another automatically and without the
danger of adventures!
But all have only one wish--to get quickly back to Germany. Mücke
wants to shorten all the festivities in his honor; he longs for
nothing more than a command in the North Sea. I go down the aisle of
the cars and watch them sleeping--comrades held together by the bonds
of nine months on seas and desert, and I think how young they all are.
None of them over 30, and their commander only 33. Of the officers,
only Lieutenant von Gyssing was on the Emden. Wellman joined the party
at Padang, Dr. Lang and Lieutenant Gerdts were taken over from the
steamer Choising. This steamer of the North German Lloyd, the third
and last ship to carry the expeditionary corps of the Emden, took over
the men and provisions on Dec. 16, and on the same evening the Ayesha
was sunk. On Jan. 9 they left this ship, too, before Hodeida, in the
hope of being able to take the overland route through Arabia. After
the loss of two months, on March 17, they again had to take a small
sailboat of 75 feet length and beat about the Red Sea amid new
adventures. All are in good health and spirits; they're astonished,
however, and laugh, because they see themselves featured as heroes in
the papers.