Every afternoon the ship's band gave us quite a long concert. At such
times the men all sat cozily about on the forecastle, listening to
the music, some joining in with their voices, while others smoked or
danced. In the evening, after darkness had set in, the singers aboard
usually got together, and then every possible and impossible song was
sung by a chorus that was excellent both in volume and quality. The
"possible" songs were, to a great extent, our beautiful German national
melodies, and these were always well rendered. The "impossible" ones
were frequently improvised for the occasion. In these, clearness of
enunciation was always a greater feature than either rhyme or rhythm.
The singing invariably closed with the "Watch on the Rhine," in which
all hands on deck joined.
Distributing the booty we had taken from a captured ship was always an
occasion about which centered a great deal of interest. Anything of
a useful nature, especially everything in the line of food, was, as
a matter of course, taken aboard the _Emden_. As a result, veritable
mountains of canned goods were stored away in a place set apart for
them on the forward deck. Casks full of delectable things were there.
Hams and sausages dangled down from the engine skylight. There were
stacks of chocolate and confectionery, and bottles labelled "Claret"
and "Cognac," with three stars....
So as to be able to do justice to all that fortune bestowed upon us, an
extra meal or two had to be tucked in between the usual ones. So, with
our afternoon coffee we now had chocolate or bonbons. For the smokers
there were more than 250,000 cigarettes stored away, and when, in the
evening, they had been passed around, the deck looked as though several
hundred fireflies were flitting about it.
* * * * *
So we spent the passing days, while certain death lurked round about
us. In sixteen ships our enemies were burning their coal, and racking
their brains in vain attempt to catch us.
(Here the Lieutenant-Captain of _The Flying Dutchman_ narrates the
adventures of those wonderful days; how they kept the enemy seas
fraught with danger; how they were hunted through the oceans; how
they lived their gay life of "gentlemen buccaneers," knowing that
each day brought them nearer to death and the bottom of the seas. He
describes vividly "Our Baptism by Fire;" he tells how they torpedoed
the Russian destroyer _Schemtschuk_; how they fought the French gunboat
_D'Iberville_; how they sunk the French destroyer _Mousquet_; how
they wrapped the French dead in the French flag and buried them with
naval honors in the sea; until the last fight of the _Emden_ when she
met her champion, the Anglo-Australian cruiser _Sydney_ and went down
gloriously in the Indian Ocean. The Lieutenant-Captain's description of
this last fight is one of the classics of the Great War.)