somewhere about noon. As it was not for an hour or two after that time
that our divergent courses had taken us out of sight of each other,
we had a good view of the early stages of the action. Here again the
Huns opened with their usual spectacularity, and I think I am correct
in saying that I saw one of their eight-point-twos crash home on the
_Invincible_ before either of them had been struck by a twelve-inch
shell from the battle cruisers. The balance was redressed a few
minutes later, and long before the action became to us four lines of
flame-splashed smoke on the distant horizon, it was plain that the Huns
were already beaten. The _Scharnhorst_, Von Spee's Flagship, which had
come in for rather more than her share of the fire up to that time,
went down with her flag flying at about four o'clock. The _Gneisenau_
kept up a brave but unequal fight for two hours longer, which gave the
_Carnarvon_ time to come up and help administer the _coup de grâce_.
"Until our closing up on the _Leipzig_ made it necessary to call the
men to action stations, those who were free to do so had swarmed over
the ship in search of the best points of vantage from which to watch
the fight between the heavy cruisers. They couldn't have cheered with
more enthusiasm if it had been a football game and the flame-shot
smoke-spurts when the battle cruisers' shells exploded on the Huns
were goals for the ship's team. They went down eagerly enough when
'Action Stations!' sounded, but it was because I knew that, even in
the heat of their own fight, they must be wondering how that other one
was progressing that I had the word passed round to them when, about
six-thirty, the wireless brought the stirring news that the battle
cruisers had finished their work and the _Scharnhorst_ and _Gneisenau_
were no more. Well--it was a great moment when the _Leipzig_ went down
an hour later, but I am not sure that even that sight stirred me more
deeply than did those muffled but still ringing cheers that came welling
up to my ears from those brave lads, sweating in their stuffy 'tween
decks stations, when they heard of the success of the _Invincible_ and
_Inflexible_.
"When the last of the survivors of the _Leipzig_ had been picked up in
the gathering darkness, we put the old _Cornwall_ about and headed back
to Port Stanley. Short of coal, and with a heavy list to port where the
_Leipzig's_ shells had let water into the bunkers, ten knots was about
as fast as I cared to steam her. That, and a thick fog for a part of the
time, was responsible for the fact that we were twenty-four hours in
returning a distance we had negotiated, with all our zigzaging, in less
then ten on the way to the fight. The day following our arrival I found
'rest and change' in a wild-goose hunt in the marshes not far from Port
Stanley."
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Admiral Sturdee has since assured me that he distinctly recalls
seeing his Flagship cut down a drifting lighter as he put to sea in
pursuit of Von Spee.
THE STORY OF THE _SYDNEY_
I. THE SIGNALMAN'S TALE
It may be that it is because, since the outbreak of the war, the British
sailor has constantly been riding the crest of the wave of great events,
that he is so prone to regard even the most dramatic and historic
actions in which he has chanced to figure as little or nothing removed
from the ordinary run of his existence, as only a slightly different
screening of the regular grist of the mill of his daily service. Thus,
I once heard a young officer describing a night destroyer action in
which he had played a notable part as having been "like a hot game of
rugger, only not quite so dirty," and another assert that his most vivid
recollection of a day in which he had performed a deed of personal
daring that had carried his name to the end of the civilised world was
of how "jolly good" his dinner tasted that night.
It was this attitude which was largely responsible for the fact that,
although there were upwards of the three or four score officers and men
who had taken part in the sinking of the _Emden_ still in her, I spent
several days in the _Sydney_ before I found any one who appeared to
consider that stirring action as anything other than the mustiest of
ancient history, and, as such, of no conceivable interest at a time when
every thought was centred upon the vital present and the pregnant future
rather than upon the irrevocably buried past. And in the end it was more
by luck than deliberate design that the two actors in the historic drama
which I had set myself the task of learning something of at the first
hand came to tell me of the parts they had played. That they were the
two who had had what were perhaps more comprehensive opportunities for
observation than any others was my sheer good fortune.
It was toward midnight of a day of light-cruiser "exercises" that
I first stumbled upon the trail which I had hitherto sought vainly
to uncover. With all hands at "Night Defence" stations and steaming
at half speed through the almost impenetrable blackness, we were
groping blindly for an uncertainly located target in an endeavour
to reproduce the conditions under which enemy destroyers might be
expected to be encountered in the darkness. Suddenly the sharp bang
of a small calibre gun sounded, followed by the shriek of a speeding
projectile, and presently the glare of a down-floating star-shell
shed its golden-grey radiance over the misty surface of the sea.
Instantly the unleashed searchlight beams leapt to a distant little
patch of rectangular canvas gliding along through the luminous fog on
our port beam, and the fraction of a second later--following the red
flame-stabs and the thunderous crashes of a broadside--it disappeared
in the midst of ghostly green-white geysers of tossing spray. It was
while--flash-blinded and gun-deafened--I fumbled about on the deck of
the signal bridge for the "ear-defender" that the nervous jerk of my
head had flirted loose, that I heard a quiet voice speaking in the
darkness beside me as a hard hand brushed mine in the search.
"You'll find, sir, that cotton wool's a good sight better than one of
them patent ear protectors," it said. "I suppose it was one of them
'Mallet-Armours' that you plug in. I had a pair of that kind when we
went after the _Emden_, and they kicked out just like yours did at
the first salvo. You can bet I was deaf as a toad before we finished
polishing her off.
"I was watching the whole of that show, sir, from just where you're
standing now," the voice went on after the lost "defender" had been
found and replaced, "and it was just behind you that the shell that
sheared off our range-finder and killed the range-taker passed on
through the screen and into the sea. It was either that shell or the
fragment of another (I could never quite make sure which) that cut off
and carried away one half of a pair of prism glasses hanging there,
leaving the other just as good as ever. We still have the remnant in our
mess as a memento."
Flash and roar and that spectral upheaving of foam-fountains in the
converging rays of the searchlights crowded most other things out of the
next hour or two, and it was only when the night-firing was over and we
were headed back for our anchorage in the cold light of the early dawn
that I discovered that it was a young signalman who had been standing
watch beside me during the exercises. Keen and alert he looked in spite
of the sleepless night behind him, and it was easy to believe him when
he told me that his had been the honour of being the first man in the
_Sydney_ to sight the "strange ship" which subsequently turned out to be
the long-sought-for _Emden_.
"It was just the luck of my chancing to be on watch with a good pair
of glasses," he said modestly; "but that was by no means the limit of
my luck in connexion with the _Emden_ show. When we went to 'Action
Stations,' I was ordered to come up here and do nothing but keep an eye
on the collier that had been standing-by the _Emden_ at first, but which
got away under full steam just as soon as it was plain we were going to
give her 'whats for.' I carried out orders all right as far as keeping
an eye on the collier was concerned, but my other eye, and my mind, were
on the _Emden_ ring of the circus. I don't really suppose there was
another man on the _Sydney_ who had as little to do, and therefore as
much time to see what was going on, as I did. But that wasn't the end of
my luck, for I was one of the party that went ashore the next morning to
round up the Huns that had landed on Direction Island, and then, after
that, I was in the first boat that went to bring off prisoners from the
_Emden_. So you see I had a fairly good-all-round kind of a 'look see.'
My training as a signalman made it natural for me to jot down things as
I saw them, and I think that I still have a page of memorandum where I
made notes during the fight of what time some of the things happened. If
you'd like to see it, sir----"
Then I knew that I at last had the sort of story I had been looking
for in prospect, and before going below for my cup of ship's cocoa as
a preliminary to turning in I had arranged for a yarn in the first Dog
Watch that evening. It was indeed good luck to hear the account of
the historic action from one who, besides having had such exceptional
opportunities for seeing the various phases of it, also appeared to be
well educated and a trained observer.
* * * * *
"I'm sorry I couldn't find one of the _Emden's_ cat-o'-nine-tails," were
my visitor's first words when he appeared at the door of the Captain's
sea-cabin where I awaited him after tea; "but the fact is that the most
of us have taken the best of our little remembrances of that show ashore
for safe-keeping, and those 'dusters' were the things we prized more
than anything else as showing the Hun up for the bully he really is.
"What did they use them for? Well, if you'd believe their story, it was
to dust their togs after coaling ship. We brought back about twenty of
them, with the rest of the salvage, and at first we were rather inclined
to take it for straight when they said they used them for dusters.
Then one of our prisoners got hold of more than his share of our beer
one night, and became drunk and truthful at the same time. He confessed
that they had been used on the men time and time again, just in ordinary
routine, to keep them up to the mark on discipline. He also said that
they had been used freely during the fight with the _Sydney_, and that
when the lashes failed to give sufficient 'encouragement,' something
more drastic was used. But I'll tell you about that in its place. But
you see what real prizes those 'cats' were, sir, in the way of holding
the Hun up to the light so you could see through him, so to speak. _My_
'cat' was a brand new one, but the most of the lot were black and stiff
with blood.
"We'd been rather playing at war up to the time we fought the _Emden_,"
he went on, "having spent most of the opening months purifying the
Marshalls, Carolines, New Britain, and New Guinea by cleaning the Huns
out of them. There had been a few skirmishes ashore, but nothing at all
at sea, nor did the prospects of anything of the kind seem any better
in early November than they had been right along up to then. We missed
our big fight when, with the _Australia_, _Melbourne_, and the French
cruiser, _Montcalm_, we came within twenty-four hours of connecting with
Von Spee's squadron when they swept through the South Pacific on their
way to South American waters. With that gone, there didn't seem much to
look forward to until we were sent to the North Sea, and we were rather
hoping, when we set out from Australia with a convoy in the first week
of November, that we might keep going right on to Europe.
"We knew, of course, that the _Emden_ was still in business, but we
also knew that any one ship had about as much chance of finding her in
the Indian Ocean as you have of finding the finger-ring you lose in the
coal bunkers. Certainly we didn't expect that going out in force with a
convoy would be the means of bringing her to the end of her tether.
"The first and only word we had that a raider was in our vicinity was
in the form of a broken message from the Cocos station, which never got
further than 'Strange cruiser is at entrance of harbour----.' At that
point the 'strange cruiser' managed to work an effective 'jam,' and it
was not long before the Cocos call ceased entirely. Although we did not
learn it till a couple of days later, this was caused by the destruction
of the station by a landing party from the _Emden_ under Lieut. Mucke.
"The escorting warships were the _Sydney_, her sister, the _Melbourne_,
and a Japanese cruiser, larger and with bigger guns, but slower than we.
The Jap, without waiting for orders from the Captain of the _Melbourne_,
who was the senior officer of the convoy, dashed off at once, and was
only recalled with difficulty. A message which the Japanese captain sent
to account for his break was most amusing, 'We do not trust the skipper
ship _Emden_,' it read, 'he is one tricky fellow, and must be watched.'
"As the job was one for a fast light cruiser, the choice was between
the _Sydney_ and _Melbourne_, and it was because the skipper of the
_Melbourne_, who was the senior officer, did not feel that he had
authority to leave the convoy that the _Sydney_ had the call. We worked
up to top speed quickly, and were soon tearing through the water headed
for Cocos Island at over twenty-six knots an hour.
"I don't remember that there was any especial excitement in the _Sydney_
that morning. We had dashed off on too many wild-goose chases already to
feel that there was very much of a chance of finding our bird this time.
In fact, I don't remember being as nervous at any stage of this _Emden_
show as in a night attack we made upon Rabaul, in New Britain, where
never a shot was fired. There had been some 'Telefunken' messages in
the air during the night (undecipherable, of course), but that was only
to be expected. Every one seemed even more inclined to crack jokes than
usual, and that is saying a good deal. I remember especially that some
of the officers were making very merry over the fact that Lieut. G----
prepared for action by going to the barber and having his hair cut,
something that he didn't do very often.
"It was about seven in the morning when the broken message was picked
up, and at eight I was sent aloft to relieve the lookout. It was
nine-fifteen when the ragged fringe of the cocoa-nut palms of Direction
Island--the main one of the Cocos-Keeling group--began to poke up over
the horizon, and perhaps ten minutes later that my glasses made out the
dim but unmistakable outline of three funnel tops.
"Although we hadn't studied silhouettes at that stage of the game
to anything like as much as we've had a chance to since, that trio
of smoke-stacks marked her for a Hun, and probably the _Emden_ or
_Königsberg_. Just which it was we never knew for certain till after
we'd put her out of action and picked up the crew of the collier that
accompanied her.
"Just before I went aloft I heard one of the officers make an offer of
a pound to the Boy that was first to sight the enemy. I didn't come
under that rating myself, but it occurred to me instantly that it would
never do to let all that money go unearned. So I leaned over, broke the
news to a pukka Boy who was aloft with me, and told him to sing it out.
He got the quid all right, and, for a long time at least, he got all
credit and kudos of actually being the first to sight the _Emden_. When
I finally told the Captain about the way it really happened, he laughed
and said it served me right for trying to dabble in 'high finance.' I
never understood quite what he meant, but always fancied 'high' had some
reference to me being aloft, and 'finance' referred to the quid.
"The first sign of life I saw on the _Emden_ was when she started
blowing her syren. This, although we did not know it at the time, was
an attempt to call back the party she had sent ashore to destroy the
wireless station. Luckily for that lot there was no time for them to
come off. The _Emden_ did not, as I have read in several accounts of
the action, attempt to close immediately, but rather headed off in what
appeared to be an endeavour to clear the land and make a run of it to
the south'ard. It was only when her skipper saw that the converging
course we were steering was going to cut him off in that direction that
he took the bull by the horns and tried to shorten the range to one at
which his four-point-ones would have the most effect.
"There is no use denying that we were taken very much by surprise when
the enemy fired his ranging shot at 10,500 yards, for we had hardly
expected him to open at over seven or eight thousand. Still more
surprising was the accuracy of that shot, for it fell short only by
about a hundred yards, and went wobbling overhead in a wild ricochet.
"His next was a broadside salvo which straddled us, and his third--about
ten minutes after his 'opener'--was a hit. And a right smart hit it was,
too, though its results were by no means so bad as they might have been.
I had the finest kind of a chance to see everything that that first
shell did to us. It began by cutting off a pair of signal halyards on
the engaged side, then tore a leg off the range-taker, then sheared off
the stand supporting the range-finder itself, went through the hammocks
lining the inside of the upper bridge, and finally down through the
canvas screen of the signal bridge (behind where you were standing last
night) and on into the sea. If it had exploded it could hardly have
failed to kill the Captain, Navigator, and Gunnery Lieutenant, and
probably pretty well all the rest of us on both bridges.
"You may well believe, sir, that we were rather in a mess for some
minutes following that smash, but I remember that the officers--and
especially the Captain and Navigator--were as cool as ice through it
all. The Captain went right on walking round the compass, taking his
sights and giving his orders, while the 'Pilot' was squatting on top of
the conning tower and following the _Emden_ through his glasses, just
as though she had been a horse-race. I even remember him finding time
to laugh at me when I ducked as one or two of the first shells screamed
over. 'No use trying to get under the screen, Seabrooke,' he said; 'that
canvas won't stop 'em.'
"It was almost immediately after this that the after-control--located
about amidships--met with even a worse disaster through being hit
squarely with two or three shells from a closely bunched salvo. I had
a clear view in that direction from where I stood, and chanced to be
looking that way when the crash came. I saw a lot of arms and legs mixed
up in the flying wreckage, but the sight I shall never forget was a
whole body turning slowly in the air, like a dummy in a kinema picture
of an explosion. As the profile of the face showed sharp against the sky
for an instant, I recognised it as that of a chap who had been rather a
pal of mine, and so knew that poor old M---- had 'got his' a couple of
hours before I heard it from the Surgeon.
"It was some minutes before there was any chance to look after the
range-taker whose leg had been taken off by that first shell. They
bundled the mangled fragments of his body together as best they could in
one of those Neil Robertson folding stretchers, and I helped the party
get it down the ladders. As the leg was cut off close up to the body the
poor chap had bled terribly, and there was no chance of saving him.
"While I was edging along the deck with the stretcher-party, I saw, out
of the corner of my eye, what appeared to be a very funny sight--one of
the gun crew of 'S2,' which was not engaged at the time, dabbling his
foot in a bucket of water. When I came back I saw that it was anything
but funny.
"Two of the crews of starboard guns had been badly knocked about by
the explosion of shells striking the deck at the end of their long
high-angle flight. Among these was the chap I had seen apparently
cooling his feet in a water-bucket. As a matter of fact, it was no
foot at all he was dabbling, but only a maimed stump. The foot had
been carried away by a shell fragment, and the brave chap, not wanting
to be put on the shelf by going down to the Surgeon, had--all on his
own--scooped up a canvas bucket full of salt water and was soaking his
stump in it in an endeavour to stop the flow of blood. He was biting
through his lip with the smart of the brine on the raw flesh as I came
up, but as I turned and looked back from the ladder leading up to the
bridge I saw him hobble painfully across the deck and climb back into
his sight-setter's seat behind his gun. I have forgotten now whether it
was another wound, or further loss of blood from this one, which finally
bowled him over and put him out of the fight he wanted so much to see
through to a finish.
"These I have mentioned were the several shots from the _Emden_ which
were responsible for our total casualties of four killed and eleven
wounded. Of other hits, one took a big bite out of the mainmast, but
not quite enough to bring it down. Another scooped a neat hollow out of
the shield of the foremost starboard gun and bounced off into the sea,
leaving two or three of the crew who had been in close contact with the
shield half paralysed for a few moments from the sharp shock.
"Still another ploughed through a grating, two bulkheads and the
Commander's cabin, and finally nipped into the sea, all without
exploding. Next to the knocking out of the range-finders, perhaps our
most troublesome injury was from a shell-hole in the fo'c'sle deck,
through which the water from the big bow wave the _Sydney_ was throwing
up entered and flooded the Boys' Mess deck. By means of the water-tight
doors we managed to confine the flooding to that flat only.
"There is no doubt that for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the
fight the _Emden_ had the best of it. This was probably due mainly to
her luck in putting both our range-finders out of action in what were
practically her opening shots.
"It took her three ranging shots to find us, though, and, once we
started, we did the same with her. Our first salvo fell beyond her, the
next both short and wide, but two or three shells from the third found
their mark. And we were no less lucky than the _Emden_ with our first
hits, for where she knocked out our gunnery control by disabling our
range-finders, we did the same to her by shooting away the voice-pipes
of her conning tower, from which Captain Von Müller directed the action.
"Just as soon as we started hitting the _Emden_ she stopped hitting
us. In fact, I don't think from then on to the end she dropped another
shell aboard us. Going aft to see if a small cordite fire had been put
out, I noticed the crew of one of the port guns--'p. 3,' I think it was,
which was not in a position to train at that moment--amusing themselves
by chalking messages on their shells. I don't remember all of them, as
there was a good deal of a variety. One shell had 'Emden' on it, to
make sure it would go to the right 'address,' I suppose. Another had
'Cheerio' and 'Good Luck' on it, and another simply 'Kaiser.' They were
a proper lot of 'don't-give-a-hangs,' that crew.
"With the _Emden's_ shell no longer bursting about our ears, I had a
better chance to watch the effect of our fire upon her. I still have the
page of memorandum on which I noted the time that a few things happened
during the next hour. I will run through it so you can see just the way
the show went. At ten o'clock the range was about 8000 yards, a distance
which the Captain evidently reckoned our guns would do the most harm to
the _Emden_, and hers the least to us. She was trying to close this for
some time, but the _Sydney_ was using her superior speed to keep her
right there, so that, in a way, she was chasing us at this stage of the
game.
"The effect of our fire upon the _Emden_ first began to show just after
ten, and at 10.4 I made a note that her fore funnel had disappeared. At
10.30 our lyddite caused a big explosion at the foot of her mainmast,
making a fire which never was entirely got under control. At 10.34 her
foremast, and with it the fore-control, collapsed under a hard hit
and disappeared over the far side. At 10.41 a heavy salvo struck her
amidships, sending the second funnel after the first, and starting a
fierce fire in the engine-room. At 11.8 the third funnel went the way of
the other two, and when I looked up from writing that down I saw that
the fore-bridge had done the disappearing act.
"Almost immediately the _Emden_ altered course and headed straight for
the beach of North Keeling Island, which she had been rapidly nearing
during the last hour. The _Sydney_ fired her last salvo at 11.15, and
then, the Captain seeing that the enemy was securely aground, turned
away and started in hot pursuit of the collier.