Stories of the Ships

vents, 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 rem

t 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 d

ction 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 t

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 la

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

he 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

ded 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

ts 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

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 o

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 as

s 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 giv

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 throug

ce of finding her in the Indian Ocean as you have of finding the finger-ring you lose in the coal bunkers. Certainly

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 entir

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 t

the Melbourne, who was the senior officer, did not feel that he had authority to leave the convoy that the Sydney had the call. W

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 incl

as nine-fifteen when the ragged fringe of the cocoa-nut palms of Direction Island-the main one of the Cocos-Keeling group-began to p

since, that trio of smoke-stacks marked her for a Hun, and probably the Emden or K?nigsberg. Just which it was we ne

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 C

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.

yards, for we had hardly expected him to open at over seven or eight thousand. Still more surprising was the acc

at 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 do

in 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 bee

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 e

ed the mangled fragments of his body together as best they could in one of those Neil Robertson folding stretchers, and I helped the party

hat appeared to be a very funny sight-one of the gun crew of 'S2,' which was not engaged at the ti

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 an

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 an

king 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

e Emden had the best of it. This was probably due mainly to her luck in putting

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 contr

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 var

ring 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

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 f

ch she had been rapidly nearing during the last hour. The Sydney fired her last salvo at 11.15, and then, t

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 th

f 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

nces 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 fi

we noticed-standing out sharp in the rays of the slanting sun-was

hich 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 sh

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

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 q

he strain of their hard firing during the battle. As a consequence their shooting was by no means as accurate as at th

t 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 i

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

ion was gained wholly through the sportsmanship of the Sydney's officers who, because they'd given the Emden a licking in a

tended 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

ith excitement, and he took out a handkerchief and wiped t

nding 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 o

he 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 rath

hing 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

y 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

ve 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

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

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 l

reward 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

b 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.

. 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 rema

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 t

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 tro

d 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 ov

ts 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

e 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

he Emden of the way of the Hun officers with their men, and t

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

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 a

re was any signalling to be done, and this gave me a good chance to get a line on a

ing 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 cra

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 unkn

ingered at the door long enough to say that he had fully made up his mind to go back to No

the holes and prevent them from being washed away. My only fear is that the coral may grow over a

al insect couldn't erect much more than a thirty-second of an inch of island a year, adding that I didn't

t won't have had time to grow even one inch before the war's over. T