_Buresk_, which had been captured by the _Emden_ some time before and
put in charge of a German prize crew. If her skipper had not felt sure
that the _Emden_ was going to do for us, he could have easily steamed
out of sight while the engagement was on. As it was, he lingered too
long, and we had little difficulty in pulling up to a range from which
we could put a warning shell across the runaway's bows. That brought her
up, but the Hun naval ensign was kept flying until a signal was made for
it to be struck. That brought the rag down on the run, but her skipper
prevented it falling into our hands by burning it.
"No sooner was our boarding officer over her side than a mob of Chinese
stokers crowded about him shouting in 'pidgin' English that 'puff-puff
boat gottee biggee holee. No more top-side can walkee.' Rushing below,
our men found the sea-cocks open, with their spindles bent in a way to
make closing impossible. As the ship was already getting a list on,
there was nothing to do but take the prisoners off and let her go down.
"To make sure that there was no trick about the game--that no concealed
crew had been left behind to stop the leaks by some prearranged
contrivances and steam away with her as soon as it was dark--the
_Sydney_ pumped four shells into her at short range, and she was burning
fiercely from fires started by these when the water closed over her.
Then, at a somewhat more leisurely gait, we steamed back to see how it
fared with the _Emden_.
"It was now about the middle of the afternoon, and the first thing we
noticed--standing out sharp in the rays of the slanting sun--was the
naval ensign flying at the still upright mainmast of the _Emden_.
"The instant he saw this, the Captain made the signal, by flag, 'Do you
surrender?' To this _Emden_ made back, by Morse flag, 'Have no signal
books,' which meant, of course (if it was true), that she couldn't read
our first signal. Then, using Morse flag, which they had already shown
they understood, we repeated the signal, 'Do you surrender?' There was
no answer to this, and again we repeated it. As there was still no
answer, and as there was no sign whatever of anything in the way of a
white flag being shown anywhere, the Captain had no alternative but to
continue the action. I have always been glad that I heard the Captain's
orders to the Gunnery Lieutenant at this time, for the point is one on
which the Hun survivors were even then ready to start lying.
"We were at fairly close range, and I heard Lieut. Rahilly ask the
Captain upon what part of the ship he should direct his fire. The
Captain studied the _Emden_ through his glass for a few moments and
then, remarking that most of the men appeared to be bunched at opposite
ends of the ship--on the fo'c'sle and quarterdeck--said he thought that
there would be less chance of killing any one if the fire was directed
somewhere between those two points. Then I heard him give the definite
order, 'Open fire, and aim for foot of mainmast,' and that was the word
that was passed on to the guns.
"The port guns fired (if I remember right) three quick salvoes, and we
were just turning to give the starboard ones a chance, when a man was
seen clambering up the solitary stick of the _Emden_, and the word was
passed, 'Don't fire without further orders.' At the same time a white
flag, which I later learned was a tablecloth, was displayed from the
quarterdeck. A moment later the naval ensign fluttered down, and shortly
I saw the smoke of new fire on the quarterdeck. I surmised rightly that
they were following the example of the _Buresk_ in burning their flag to
prevent its capture, but what else was going up in that fire I did not
learn until I swarmed up to that deck the next day.
"It was an unfortunate fact that our guns, which there had been no time
to overhaul, were suffering a good deal from the strain of their hard
firing during the battle. As a consequence their shooting was by no
means as accurate as at the beginning of the action, and several of the
shells went wide of the point at which it was endeavoured to direct
them.
"There is no doubt that they wrought sad havoc among the crowd on the
fo'c'sle, and I don't think our prisoners were exaggerating much when
they said that those three last salvoes killed sixty and wounded a good
many more, and also that a number of others were drowned by jumping
into the surf in the panic that followed. One could feel a lot worse
about it, though, if the whole thing hadn't been due to the sheer
pig-headedness of their skipper in trying to bluff us into letting him
keep his flag up. He has the blood of every man that was killed by those
last unnecessary shots on his hands, just as much as his brother Huns
have those of the women and children they have murdered in France and
Belgium.
"Von Müller was brave all right. There's nothing against him on that
score. But it was nothing but his pride and a selfish desire to keep
his face with his superiors whenever he got back to Germany that led
him to force us to fire those entirely needless shots into his ship. He
thought that he would cut a better figure at his court-martial if his
colours were shot down rather than lowered in surrender. But if he was
so anxious to make a proper naval finish, why did he run his ship ashore
instead of fighting it out on the seas the Huns make such a shouting
about battling for the freedom of? If he had done that instead of trying
to bluff us like the bully the Hun always is, he'd have saved a good
many lives that he sacrificed in trying to save his own name. There
would have been a few wounded drowned in that case that were saved by
beaching the _Emden_, but these were more than offset by his forcing us
to fire those last shots that there was no need in the world for firing
if Von Müller hadn't tried to bluff about the flag.
"I've never had any patience, sir, with all that has been said and
written about Von Müller being a sportsman. That reputation was gained
wholly through the sportsmanship of the _Sydney's_ officers who, because
they'd given the _Emden_ a licking in a fair give-and-take fight, didn't
think it was quite the proper thing to speak ill of her captain, even if
it was the truth.
"And one other thing, sir, while I'm speaking of this incident. Every
time I hear any one talk about negotiating with the Huns I tell them,
that story of Von Müller's bluff about his flag. He pretended not
to understand our signals just because it served his purpose not to
understand them. But when our guns began to talk he had no difficulty in
translating _their_ language. Well, sir, the Huns are all alike. They
never will understand any language but that of guns until their bully
streak is knocked out of them with guns. It's a dirty job, sir, but
that's the only way to finish it."
The lad's fine blue eyes were flashing, and his face red with
excitement, and he took out a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration
from his brow before resuming his narrative.
"It was getting too late in the day to start rescue work on the
_Emden_," he went on more quietly, "and so we did the best we could for
her for the present by sending in a boat, manned by prisoners from the
_Buresk_, with food and water, and a message to the effect that we would
return early in the morning. Then we put out to sea, for we thought we
still had to reckon with the _Königsberg_ turning up at any moment, and
didn't want her to surprise us as we had surprised the _Emden_.
"Crossing the track of the battle, we sighted and picked up three Hun
seamen, who claimed to have been blown from the deck of the _Emden_ by
the explosion of one of our shells, none of them much the worse for
their experience. Indeed, the fact that they were not in worse shape
rather led us to suspect that they had jumped overboard to _avoid_
the explosion of our shell rather than as a direct consequence of an
explosion.
"I don't exactly remember whether it was one of these chaps, or one of
the English-speaking prisoners from the _Buresk_, who, by blurting out
something about how lucky were his mates who got ashore before the fight
started, gave us our first inkling that the _Emden_ had sent a landing
party to Direction Island to destroy the Wireless station. There were
three officers and forty men, he told us, and this we later learned to
be the truth.
"What he did not tell us--quite possibly because he did not know of
it--was the fact that, besides being armed with rifles, this party also
carried three machine guns. It was only by chance that our failure
to reckon with this latter fact did not get us into serious trouble.
Indeed, I think it is more than likely that I would not be here talking
to you now but for the happy fact that the little schooner _Ayesha_
lying in Direction Harbour offered a chance of escape too promising for
the officer in command of the party to resist.
"The rounding up of this lot, of course, had the call over everything
else, and at first the Captain appeared to be considering putting
back to Direction at once and landing in the night. Lucky, indeed,
it was for us that we didn't, for that--as we learned later from the
Wireless-station people--was just what the Germans had expected and
prepared for. Had we gone in in the night we would have found the only
landing-place covered by machine guns, and we would probably have
stepped off into an ambush that would have wiped the lot of us out in
a minute or two. Landing at dawn, however, we found our birds flown,
and I, for one, was jolly glad to hear it after they had told us what
a resolute fellow the German officer leading the party was, and how
determined he had been to make a resistance. This chap, by the way, was
Lieut. Mucke, who later found his way back to Germany by way of Turkey.
When I read, three or four months later, of how well he had used those
same machine guns he had mounted to receive us against the Arabs in
fighting his way up the coast of the Red Sea, I realised the extent to
which we had been asking for trouble in landing armed only as we were.
Not expecting any resistance, we had no machine guns, and I think there
were several others who, like myself, had been given only revolvers.
Since the _Sydney's_ lucky star was in the ascendant for the whole show,
however, no harm came of it.
"You may be sure that the Wireless-station people were glad to see us,
for they had never been sure until they had seen the last of Mucke and
his men just how the Huns might use them in case the latter determined
to fight it out to the last ditch on Direction Island. One of them told
me that he had visions of being used as a human shield against the
_Sydney's_ shells, like the Huns used the women and children in Belgium.
They were a proper devil-may-care lot, those ones, and I can quite
believe the story that they asked the Huns to come and play tennis with
them when they got tired of watching the one-sided fight between the
_Sydney_ and _Emden_.
"As we were in a hurry to get back to the _Emden_, we did not remain
long ashore on Direction. Their doctor came off with us to help with the
wounded, and with him came two or three others of the Wireless people
to have a hurried 'look-see' at the _Sydney_. These latter intended to
return to shore at once in their own boat, but, by some mistake, the
whaler was cast off and the _Sydney_ got under weigh while the Inspector
was still in conversation with the Captain. They were about to ring
down to stop the engines, when the chap, with a good-bye wave of his
hand, ran to the port rail and disappeared in a header over the side.
A moment later he reappeared, settled his helmet back upon his head,
and struck out in a leisurely way for the boat which was pulling back
to meet him. It was quite the coolest thing of the kind I ever saw, but
I didn't appreciate it fully until an hour or so later when I saw the
black triangular fins of countless 'tiger' sharks converging from every
direction upon where the _Emden_ had been casting her dead into the surf
of North Keeling Island.
"Scarcely had we entered again the waters through which the battle had
been fought than we began to sight floating bodies. This was only to be
expected, of course, but what did surprise us was to come upon a wounded
man, in a lifebelt, being pushed slowly shoreward by an unwounded mate
who had nothing whatever to keep him up. Although they had been in the
water all of twenty-four hours, both were in fairly good shape when we
picked them up, and the unwounded chap was quite his own Hunnish self
again after he had had a night's sleep and a couple of square meals.
In fact, if I remember right, he was one of the worst of several of
the prisoners who seemed to think it was their privilege to keep the
stewards told off to look after them running day and night after 'bier.'
"As we neared the _Emden_ I saw that she was flying the International
signal for 'In want of immediate assistance.' We lowered two boats, and
in the one of these under Lieut. G---- I was sent along in case there
was any signalling to be done. It was a nasty job getting aboard her,
for she was lying partly inside the surf and the swells were running
high even under her stern. As she was at right angles to the seas, there
was no lee side to get under, and so we had to do the best we could
boarding her as she was. Lieut. G---- had a hard scramble for it, and
only the hands extended him by a couple of the German officers saved him
from a ducking. Watching our chances, the rest of us swarmed up between
swells, but it was touch-and-go all the time and took a long while.
"Frightful as the wreck of the _Emden_ looked from the sea, it was
nothing to the sheer horror of it as you saw it aboard her. The picture
of it is still as clear in my memory as if photographed there. I will
tell you first about the ship itself. The great and growing hole in her
bows, where she was pounding the reef, could be seen by leaning over
the side. Of the fore-bridge, only the deck remained. The chart-house
was gone completely. The foremast, though more or less intact to the
fore-top, had been shattered at the base by shells, and was lying over
the port side, shrouded with wreckage.
"The fore-control top I could not find at all, and the fore-topmast
had also disappeared completely. From the foremast to the main, which
was still standing, was one tangled mass of wreckage, and of this the
Wireless room, which looked like a curio shop struck by lightning,
was the worst mess. Two of the funnels were knocked flat over the
port battery, crushing several bodies under them, and a third--the
foremost one--was leaning against the wreck of the bridge. All about the
starboard battery the deck was torn with gaping holes, and through these
one could see that the whole inside of her was no more than a blown-out
and burnt-out shell. There was one place where it was a straight drop
from the quarterdeck to the inner skin of the bottom.
"But it was the men--the dead and wounded--that provided the real
horror. In the first place, there had been something over 350 officers
and men in the _Emden_. When we boarded her, 185 of these were alive,
but something like half of them were wounded, most of them very
badly. This number included a score or so who had jumped or been
blown overboard, and had swum, waded, or been washed by the surf on
to the beach of the island. Even the unwounded were very cowed and
apathetic, the only exceptions I remember being the Captain and one or
two other officers. By no means all of the dead had been thrown over
in the twenty-four hours that had now passed since the battle, and
not nearly as much had been done for the wounded as might have been
done, even considering the difficulties. Some of the wounded had not
even been dragged out of the sun, and it was the wounds of these (as
I learned later from one of our sick bay stewards) that were much the
worst infested with the maggots, which the tropical heat had started
breeding almost immediately because no antiseptics had been applied.
A considerable quantity of medical stores had been uninjured by the
fighting, I was told, and the proper use of these would have made the
greatest difference in saving lives and preventing a lot of suffering.
I could tell you just what swine it was that was responsible for this,
but I'd rather you got the facts from one of the officers. I think our
Surgeon could tell you something of the way things were.
"Horrible as were some of the mutilations from shell fragments, by
far the most shocking injuries seemed to have been inflicted by our
lyddite. The hair and clothes were entirely burnt from some of the
bodies, and the sides of these which had been exposed to the blast of
the flame-spurts were cooked to the colour of cold mutton. Most of the
bodies that had been thrown or blown overboard were being washed in to
the beach by the surf, and there was a fringe of them lying in rumpled
heaps above high-water mark. This was only about a hundred yards from
the bow of the _Emden_, and some of our men said that they saw the big
land-crabs crawling and fighting over them, and also worrying some of
the wounded who had crawled a little further inshore under the coco
palms. These men ashore had most of them jumped overboard when those
three last salvoes were pumped into her, and as it was not possible for
us to reach and bring them off till the following day, their sufferings
from thirst and from the attacks of the crabs must have been very
terrible indeed. All of this would, of course, have been avoided but for
Von Müller's trying to bluff us into leaving his flag flying after his
ship was beached and out of action.
"Most of the unwounded men who jumped overboard were probably washed
ashore before the sharks had a chance to get to them, but the more
helpless of the wounded who went over outside of where the surf was
breaking must have been attacked almost at once. The sea tigers were
still fighting over some of the fragments even after rescue work had
commenced, and I still shudder when I think of the shock it gave me
the first time I saw a floating body start to wriggle as a shark nosed
into it from beneath. It was a seaman in a white suit and sun-helmet,
floating face down, and as the monster seized it, the jerks made it give
two or three quick overhead flops of the arms, for all the world like
a man striking out to swim the 'Australian Crawl.' There were sharks
following along astern of every boat-load of wounded we pulled back to
the _Sydney_, just as if they thought we were robbing them of something
that belonged to them by rights.
"But perhaps the thing that shocked me most of all, terrible as were the
sights on every hand, was something one of the surviving officers (I
think he was of 'Warrant' rank) said to me shortly after I came over the
side. Although he was quite unwounded, he was lolling in the shade of a
blanket thrown over some wreckage, and making no effort to help in the
thousand and one things that might have been done to ease the sufferings
of his mates. He spoke fairly good English, and I learned afterwards he
had been a steward on a 'Nordeutscher Lloyd' liner on the Australian
run. Raising himself on his elbow, but not leaving his comfortable
retreat, he called out to me, 'I say, my poy, vy vos it der _Zydny_
ev'ry time turn to us stern on 'stead of bows on?' There was the Hun for
you. That little point about the way the _Sydney_ happened to turn once
or twice had evidently puzzled him, and the question had been occupying
his Hunnish mind at a moment when any other kind of a human being but a
German would have been working his head off to make life a little less
of a hell for the men who had fought beside him and under him. Sickened
by the shambles all round, and half-choked as I was by the horrible reek
from the bodies of the dead and wounded, it took all the control I had
to keep from putting my foot in the ruffian's bloated face.
"I learned a good many things in those few hours I spent in the
_Emden_ of the way of the Hun officers with their men, and the
'cat-o'-nine-tails' I have told you of were not the worst.
"A rather decent sort of chap, who said that he had learned his English
working on a Scotchman's farm in Argentina, took me to a doorway leading
to a flat from which a ladder had descended to the engine-room and
stokeholds. Across that doorway was lying the body of an officer, which
nobody seemed to have taken the trouble to move. He was the Gunnery
Lieutenant, the chap said, and had been driving up stokers at the point
of his revolver to serve a gun whose crew had been knocked out when he
was killed. The officer's body was somewhat scorched by lyddite, but
from the line of the burns it looked as if they were made after he fell.
"What looked to me very much like a bullet wound in the side of the head
struck me at once as the likely cause of his death. 'Did one of his own
men shoot him?' I asked; but the chap--seeing a young officer who, I
later learned, was Prince Franz Joseph Hohenzollern, a relative of the
Kaiser, approaching--only shrugged his shoulder and raised his eyebrows
and walked away. I didn't like to ask about the incident after the men
were prisoners on the _Sydney_, but just the same there has never been
any doubt in my mind as to what occurred.
"Most of my time on the _Emden_ was put in standing by on the
quarterdeck in case there was any signalling to be done, and this gave
me a good chance to get a line on a little ceremony which had been
carried out there just after she sent her flag down.
"We had seen them burn that flag, but just what other things went into
that fire we never knew exactly. The nature of some of them, however, I
began to surmise when I came upon charred fragments of Bank of England
notes lying about among the wreckage and sticking in the cracks of the
warped deck. Several coins which I picked up turned out to be English
shillings and German marks. I noticed that some of our lads were pushing
the search with much energy whenever they had a chance, paying especial
attention to the cracks between the charred planking and the deck. When
fire-blackened gold sovereigns began to make their appearance in the
_Sydney_, and kept appearing even after we had been for months in the
West Indies and South Atlantic, I understood the reason for their
energy.
"When the prisoners were searched on board the _Sydney_ several of them
were found to be in possession of English sovereigns (one of them gave
the Paymaster a bag containing over a hundred for safe keeping), which
they claimed to be their own. It was not until they had been disembarked
at Colombo that it turned out that one of them had confessed that among
other things thrown into that fire on the quarterdeck of the _Emden_ was
all the treasure she had seized from the British merchant ships she had
sunk during her career as a raider. This included sixty thousand pounds
in gold sovereigns and an unknown amount in bank notes. The latter were
consumed, and the gold, after the bags had been burned away from it, was
swept into the sea. It was in this way that the few stray coins picked
up lingered behind in the gaping cracks opened up by shells bursting in
the enclosed spaces under the quarterdeck."
At this juncture a messenger came to summon my young friend to the
signal bridge, but he lingered at the door long enough to say that he
had fully made up his mind to go back to North Keeling Island after the
war and have a try at raking up some of that scuttled treasure.
"There's no sand where she was lying, sir; only hard coral reef that
ought to catch the coins in the holes and prevent them from being
washed away. My only fear is that the coral may grow over and cover
it up before I am free to get out there. Do you know how fast a coral
island grows, sir?"
I replied that I was not sure about it, but that I seemed to have some
kind of an impression that the coral insect couldn't erect much more
than a thirty-second of an inch of island a year, adding that I didn't
think that a few inches of coral could make much difference with a big
heap of gold like that in any case.
"Perhaps not, sir," he assented; "but all the same I'm hoping that it
won't have had time to grow even _one_ inch before the war's over. The
stuff's no use to a chap unless he can have it while he's young."
II. NAVAL HUNNISM
SOME INSIDE HISTORY FROM THE FALKLAND AND COCOS ISLAND BATTLES