Transcriber's Note:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including inconsistent hyphenation. Some changes have been made. They are listed at the end of the text.

STORIES OF THE SHIPS

DEDICATED
TO
CAPT. ELLERTON

STORIES OF THE SHIPS

BY

LIEUT LEWIS R. FREEMAN, R.N.V.R.

OFFICIAL PRESS REPRESENTATIVE WITH THE GRAND FLEET

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1919

All rights reserved

[CONTENTS]

[I. STORIES OF THE SHIPS]

[THE STORY OF THE CORNWALL]

[I. Plymouth to the Falklands]

Of the countless stories of naval action which I have listened to in the course of the months I have spent with the Grand Fleet, I cannot recall a single one which was told as the consequence of being asked for with malice aforethought. I have never yet found a man of action who was enamoured of the sound of his own voice raised in the recital of his own exploits, and if there is one thing more than another calculated to throw an otherwise not untalkative British Naval Officer into a state of uncommunicativeness, in comparison with which the traditional silence of the sphinx or the proverbial close-mouthedness of the clam are alike sheer garrulity, it is to ask him, point blank, to tell you (for instance) how he took his submarine into the Baltic, or what his destroyer did at Jutland, or how he fought his cruiser at Dogger Bank, or something similar.

The quiet-voiced but always interesting and often dramatic recitals of such things as these which I have heard have invariably been led up to quite incidentally—at dinner, on the bridge or quarter-deck, around the wardroom fire, or through something else that has just been told. Several times I have found in officers' diaries—little records never meant for other eyes than those of the writers' own friends or families—which have been turned over to me to verify some point regarding which I had inquired, laconic references to incidents and events of great human and even historic interest, and one of the most amusing and dramatic yarns I have ever listened to was told me in a "kite" balloon—plunging in the forty-mile wind against which it was being towed like a hooked salmon—by a man who had assured me before we went up that nothing really exciting had ever fallen to his experience.

It was in this way—an anecdote now and then as this or that incident of the day recalled it to his mind—that Captain —— came to tell me the story of the Cornwall during those eventful early months of the war when he commanded that now famous cruiser. He mentioned her first, I believe, one night in his cabin when, referring to a stormy midwinter month, most of which had been spent by his Division of the Grand Fleet on some sort of work at sea, I spoke of the "rather strenuous interval" we had experienced.

"If you think life in a battleship of the Grand Fleet strenuous," laughed the Captain, extending himself comfortably in his armchair before the glowing grate, "I wonder what you would have thought of the life we led in the old Cornwall. Not very far from a hundred and twenty thousand miles of steaming was her record for the first two years of the war, and in that time she ploughed most of the Seven Seas and coasted in the waters of all but one of the Six Continents. Always on the lookout for something or other, coaling as we could, provisioning as we might—let me tell you that coming to the Grand Fleet after that (at least until a few months had elapsed and the contrast wore off) was like retiring on a pension in comparison."

He settled himself deeper into the soft upholstery, extended his feet nearer the fire, lighted a fresh cigar, and, in the hour which elapsed before the evening mail came aboard, told me of the work of the Cornwall in those first chaotic weeks of the war which preceded the battle of the Falklands.

"We were at Plymouth when the war began," said he, "and our first work was in connexion with protecting and 'shepherding' safely to port several British ships carrying bullion which were still on the high seas. It was a baffling sort of a job, especially as there were two or three German raiders loose in the North Atlantic, the favourite ruse of each of which was to represent itself as a British cruiser engaged in the same benevolent work the Cornwall was on. Warned of these 'wolves-in-shepherds'-clothing,' the merchantmen we sought to protect were afraid to reveal their whereabouts by wireless, the consequence being that our first forerunning efforts to safeguard the seas resolved themselves into a sort of marine combination of 'Blind-Man's Buff' and 'Hide-and-Seek,' played pretty well all over the Atlantic. All the ships with especially valuable cargoes got safely to port ultimately, though none of them, that I recall, directly under the wing of the Cornwall. It was our first taste of the 'So-near-and-yet-so-far' kind of life that is the inevitable lot of the cruiser which essays the dual rôle of 'Commerce Protector' and 'Raider Chaser.'

"After a few hours at 'Gib,' we were next sent across to Casa Blanca, where the appearance of the Cornwall was about the first tangible evidence that French Africa had of the fact that England was really coming into the war in earnest. There was a good deal of unrest in Morocco at the time, for the Germans were even then at work upon their insidious propaganda among the Moslems of all the colonies of the Allies. The 'buzz' in the bazaars that the appearance of a British warship started must have served a very useful purpose at this critical juncture in carrying to the Arabs of the interior word that France was not going to have to stand alone against Germany. Our reception by both the French and native population of Casa Blanca was most enthusiastic, and during all of our stay a cheering procession followed in the wake of every party of officers or men who went ashore.

"Leaving Casa Blanca, we were sent back to the Atlantic to search for commerce destroyers, ultimately working south by the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands to South American waters, where the Karlsruhe was then at the zenith of her activities. The chase of this enterprising and elusive raider, whose career was finally brought to an inglorious end by her going aground on a West Indian Island, kept the Cornwall—along with a number of other British cruisers—steadily on the move, until the ominous and painful news of the destruction of Craddock's fleet off Coronel suddenly brought us face to face with the fact that there was soon going to be bigger game than a lone pirate to be stalked.

"We never had the luck to sight even so much as the smoke of the Karlsruhe, although—as I only learned too late to take advantage of the information—the Cornwall was within an hour or two's steaming of her on one occasion. I did think we had her once, though—a jolly amusing incident it was, too. I was getting uncomfortably short of food at the time—a very common experience in the 'here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow' sort of life we were leading;—so that when the welcome news reached me by wireless one morning that a British ship—Buenos Aires to New York with frozen beef—was due to pass through the waters we were then patrolling, I lost no time in heading over to intercept her on the chance of doing a bit of marketing.

"We picked her up promptly as reckoned, but, while she was still hull down on the horizon, her skipper began to signal frantically, 'I am being chased by the "Karlsruhe"!' Here was luck indeed. I ordered 'Action Stations' to be sounded, and the course of the ship to be altered toward the point where I figured the smoke of the pursuing pirate would begin to smudge the sky-line as she came swooping down upon her prey. Sighting nothing after holding on this course for a while, I came to the conclusion that the raider must be hidden by the impenetrable smoke-pall with which the flying beef-ship had masked a wide arc of the western horizon, and headed up in that direction, begging the fugitive in the meantime to give me the bearing of her pursuer as accurately as possible.

"Her only reply to this, however, was to belch out 'smoke-screen' faster than ever and continue rending the empyrean ether with renewed 'I am being chased by the "Karlsruhe"!' In vain I assured her that we were the H.M.S. Cornwall, and would take the greatest delight in seeing that the chase was put an end to, if she would only tell us from which direction the Karlsruhe was coming, and cease to throw out a bituminous blanket for the enemy to hide behind. Blacker and blacker rolled the smoke, heavier and heavier piled the screen to leeward, and still more frantically shrilled the appeals for help. At the end of my patience at actions which it now began to dawn upon me looked more than a little suspicious, I headed the Cornwall straight after the runaway and soon reduced the interval separating us sufficiently to reach her with 'Visual.' She brought up sharp at my 'Stop instantly!' and a quarter of an hour later my boarding party was clambering over her side.

"'Where's the Karlsruhe?' I shouted impatiently to the Boarding Officer as his boat came back alongside again. I knew something of the accuracy of German long range naval gunnery, and was far from being easy in mind regarding the kind of surprise packet that might at any moment be wafted out of that slowly thinning smoke-blur to leeward.

"'There,' he replied with a comprehensive sweep of the arm in quite the opposite direction from the one I had been expecting the enemy. 'Right there, Sir.' That old lunatic of a skipper thought the Cornwall was the Karlsruhe!"

"Did you get your frozen beef?" I asked.

The Captain smiled the pleased smile of one who recalls something that has given him great satisfaction.

"I think that afternoon marked the beginning of the 'Food Economy' campaign in the Navy," he replied. "If the Admiralty had been able to continue buying frozen beef at the rate that crestfallen but highly relieved skipper—quite of his own free will—charged for the lot we loaded up after he had found it was not to be his fate to be sunk by the Karlsruhe,—well, the Government could have probably built a new battleship or two and never missed the money out of the saving."

The recollection of the treat that fresh meat was after a long period on "bully beef" ration turned the Captain's thoughts to another time of plenty he had experienced after the Cornwall had helped the wounded Carmania limp back to Base following her successful engagement with the Cap Trafalgar.

"In these times of food economy and restricted rations," he said, "it fairly makes my mouth water to think of the feasts Captain G—— spread for us during the days we were devising a way to get the battered Carmania back to England. You see, when the war started she was just about to sail on one of her transatlantic voyages with the usual midsummer cargo of American millionaires, and her cuisine was of a character calculated to satisfy their Epicurean tastes. When they converted her to an auxiliary cruiser, it was the usual sledge-hammer, crow-bar, and over-the-side procedure with the mirrors, the upholsteries, and the mahoganies, but they left the stores, God bless them, they left the stores. Can you fancy how things such as truffled quail, and asparagus tips with mayonnaise—iced—and café parfait, and Muscat dates, and California oranges—with the big gold labels on—tasted to men who had been for weeks pretty nearly down to the classic old wind-jammer ration of 'lobscouse' and 'dog's-body'? And those plump, black, five-inch-long Havanas in the silver foil (I can smell the soothing fumes of them yet), and that rarely blended Mocha, and those bottles of 1835 Cognac—the pungent bouquet of them scents the memories of the long evenings I sat with G—— in the wreck of his fire-swept cabin while he yarned to me of the ripping fight he had just come out of. And how we all envied G—— his luck—getting as sporting a show as a man could ask for in that half-converted liner while we cruisers were vainly chasing smoke and rumours over most of the South Atlantic. Nothing less than the banquets he gave us would have salved our heart-burnings."

And so it was that the Captain was led on to speak of what he had heard—from those who took part in it, and only a few hours from the time it happened—of the first great duel ever fought between modern armed merchantmen, a conflict, indeed, which is still practically unique in naval history.

"There was not much to choose between the ships," he said. "The Cap Trafalgar—one of the latest of the Hamburg Sud Amerika liners—had a good deal the best of it on the score of age, and the Carmania probably something on the score of size. The latter had been hastily converted at Liverpool immediately after the outbreak of the war, while the former turned herself from sheep into wolf about the same time by arming herself with the guns of a small German gun-boat. This craft, by the way, steamed to the nearest Brazilian port and, with true Hunnish logic, claimed the right to intern as a peaceful German Merchantman on the strength of the fact that it was no longer armed! The largest guns that either ship had were four-inch, the Carmania having slight advantage on the score of number. The Carmania would have been no match for the Karlsruhe, just as the Cap Trafalgar would have fallen easy prey to the Cornwall or another of the British cruisers in those waters. Under the circumstances, it was a happy fatality that let these two ex-floating palaces fight with each other and in their own class.

"The first word we had of the engagement was a wireless Captain G—— sent out saying, in effect, that he had sunk the Trafalgar, but, as his bridge was burned up, his steering gear shot away, and all his navigating instruments destroyed, that he would be glad to have some one come and tell him where he was and lead him to a place where he could, so to speak, lie down and lick his wounds for a while. It took a jolly good bit of searching to find a ship that couldn't tell any more about itself than that, but we finally sighted her ragged silhouette and gave her a lead to such a haven as the practically open seas of our rendezvous afforded.

"Poor G—— had lost a good deal more than his steering gear it soon transpired, for the fire which had consumed his bridge had also gutted his cabin, and reduced everything in it to cinders except an old Norfolk jacket. How that escaped we never could figure out, for of garments hanging on pegs to the left and right of it no trace was left. As G—— was of about three times the girth of any other British officer in those waters at the time, the wardrobe we tried to get together for him was a grotesque combination; indeed, so far as I recall now, the old Norfolk had to serve him as everything from pyjamas and bath-robe to dinner-jacket and great-coat during that trying period. It was a weird figure he cut presiding at those Gargantuan feasts he spread for us on the bruised and battered old Carmania, but there wasn't a one of us who wouldn't have changed places with him—Norfolk and all—for the assurance of half his luck. Such is the monotony of this patrol work in the outer seas, that, after your first enthusiasm wears off, you get into a state of mind in which you can never conceive that anything is ever going to happen. That we had the one most decisive naval battle of the war just ahead of us, no one dreamed at this time.

"The fight between the Carmania and Cap Trafalgar," he continued, "has well been called 'The Battle of the Haystacks,' for never before (or since, for that matter) have two ships with such towering upper works stood off and tried to batter each other to pieces with gunfire. Indeed, I well recall G——'s saying that, up to the very end, he could not conceive that either ship could sink the other, and of how—even after the Carmania had been struck three or four-score times and a raging fire forward had driven him from the bridge—he kept wondering in the back of his brain what sort of a fight the duel would resolve itself into when both had exhausted their shells. Luckily, he did not have to face that problem.

"Both ships, according to G——'s account, began blazing at each other as soon as they came in range, and, as each was eager to fight it out to a finish, the distance separating them was, for a while, reduced as rapidly as possible. At something like three thousand yards, however, some sort of a rapid-fire gun burst into action on the Trafalgar. 'It didn't appear to be doing me much harm,' said G—— in telling of it, 'but the incessant "pom-pom" of the accursed thing got so much on my nerves that I drew off far enough to dull the edge of its infernal yapping.'

"A thing which came near to putting the Carmania out of the running before she had completed the polishing off of her opponent was the shell which I have spoken of as violating the sanctity of the Captain's cabin—the one that burned everything but the Norfolk jacket. This projectile—a four-inch—though (probably owing to the small resistance offered by the light upper works) it did not explode, generated enough heat in its passage to start a fire. Beginning on G——'s personal effects, this conflagration spread to the bridge, destroying the navigating instruments and ultimately making it impossible to remain there—the latter a serious blow in itself. What made this fire especially troublesome was the difficulty, because of the cutting of the main, of bringing water to bear upon it. As it was, it was necessary to head the Carmania 'down the wind' to reduce the draught fanning the flames. Nothing else would have saved her. Except for one thing, this expedient would have enabled the now thoroughly worsted (though G—— didn't know it) Trafalgar to withdraw from the action, and this was that the latter was herself on fire and had to take the same course willy-nilly. From that moment on the battle was as irretrievably joined as one of those old Spanish knife-duels in which the opponents were locked together in a room to fight to a finish. Often as not, so they say, the victor in one of these fights only survived the loser by minutes or hours, and so would it have been in this instance had they not finally been able to extinguish the fire on the Carmania.

"G——'s account of the way he had to carry on after being driven from the bridge—it was really a splendid bit of seamanship—was funny in the extreme, but the reality must have been funnier still, that is, if that term can be applied to anything happening while shells are bursting and blowing men to bits every few seconds. G—— is one of the biggest men in the Navy—around the waist, I mean—so it wasn't to be expected of him to be very shifty on his feet. And yet, by the irony of Fate, it was he of all men who was suddenly confronted with a task that required only less 'foot-work' than it did 'head-work.' With the battle going on all the time, they rigged up some sort of a 'jury' steering gear, or it may be that they steered her by her screws. At any rate, G—— had to con her from the most commanding position he could find on one of the after decks, or rather, as he had no longer voice-pipe communication with the engine-room, he had to keep dashing back and forth (it must have been for all the world like a batsman running in cricket) between two or three commanding positions. 'If I wanted to open the range a bit,' he said, 'I had to nip for'ard, wait till there was an interval in both gun-fire and shell-burst, and yell down a hatchway' (or was it a ventilator?) 'to the engine-room to "Slow port!" or if I suddenly found it imperative to open the distance, I had to make the same journey and pass the word down to "Stop starboard!" The very thought of that mad shuttling back and forth under the equatorial sun used to make poor G—— mop his forehead and pour himself a fresh drink every time he told the story.

"Battered and burning fiercely as both ships were, G—— confessed that even at this juncture he could not rid himself of the feeling that neither of them had enough shells to sink the other. 'I was racking my brain for some plan of action to follow when that moment arrived,' he said, 'when suddenly the Trafalgar began to heel sharply and started to sink. It was our second or third salvo, which had holed her badly at the water-line, that did the business. She had kept steaming and fighting for close to an hour and a quarter afterwards, though.'

"G—— told us one very good story about his Gunnery officer. 'It was just before the shell which started the fire struck us,' he said, 'that Y——'s sun helmet was knocked off—I don't remember whether it was by the wind or the concussion of the firing. Seeing it fall to the deck below, he ran to the rail of the bridge and began shouting for some one to bring it back to him. Before long, luckily, a seaman who had heard the shouting in a lull of the firing, poked his head out to see what it was about, and presently came puffing up the ladder with the fugitive head-piece. I say luckily, because the gun-control for the whole ship was suspended while Y—— waited for that infernal helmet. And the funniest thing about it all was that, when I ventured to suggest a few days later that it might be well if he made use of the chin-strap of his helmet the next time he was in action, he claimed to have no recollection whatever of the incident—thought he had been "sticking to his guns" all the time. Just shows how a man's brain works in air-tight compartments when he is really busy.'

"The Surgeon of the Carmania (continued the Captain)—a splendid chap who had given up a lucrative West-end practice and sworn he was under forty (although he was really fifty-two) in order to get a chance to do something for his country—told me many stories to prove the splendid spirit of the men that passed under his hands during and after the fight. Though most of the crew were only Royal Naval Reservists, with no experience of and but little training for fighting, it appears that they stood what is perhaps the hardest of all trials—that of seeing their mates wounded and killed beside them—like seasoned veterans.

"'There was one stout-hearted young Cockney,' said the Surgeon, 'whom, after I had finished removing a number of shell fragments from various parts of his anatomy, I asked what he thought of the fight. "Rippin', Sir," he replied, grinning ecstatically through the bandage that held up the flap of a torn cheek; "rippin', never been in one like it before." Then, as his eye caught the smile which I could not quite repress at the lifetime of naval battling suggested by that "nev'r afore," he concluded with "Not ev'n in Whitechapel."'

"The Surgeon came across one man who insisted that the blood flowing from a ragged tear in his arm was really spattered there when one of his mates—whose mangled body he bestrode—had been decapitated by a shell a few minutes before; and there was one lot of youngsters who went on cheerily 'Yo-heave-ho-ing' in hoisting some badly needed shells which were so slippery with blood that they had to be sanded before they could be handled. Grimly pathetic was the story he told me of a gunner whose torn hand he had just finished amputating and bandaging when some one shouted into the door of the dressing station that the Trafalgar was going down.

"'He crowded to a port I had had opened,' said the Surgeon, 'just in time to see one of the last salvoes from the Carmania go crashing into the side of the heeling enemy. "Huroor, boys," he shouted; "give 'em beans," and as he cheered he started (what had evidently been a favourite gesture of approval and excitement with him) to smite mightily with his right fist into the palm of his left hand. But the blow fell upon air; there was no answering thwack. The gnarled, weather-beaten fist shot past a bandaged stump. He drew back with surprise for a moment, and then, grinning a bit sheepishly, like a boy surprised in some foolish action, edged back beside me at the port. "Quite forgot there was su'thin' missin'," he said half apologetically, trying to wriggle the elbow of the maimed arm back into the sling from which it had slipped. "S'pose I'll be havin' to get used to it, won't I?" As the Trafalgar took a new list and began rapidly to settle he burst into renewed "Huroors." "By Gawd, Sir," he cried, when she had finally gone, "if I 'ad as many 'ands as an oktypuss, I'd 'a giv'n 'em all fer the joy o' puttin' that blinkin' pyrit down to Davy Jones."'"

The Captain gazed long at the coals of the grate, on his face the pleased smile of one who recalls treasured memories. "I can't tell you how sorry we were to see the Carmania go," he said finally. "My word, how we did enjoy those feasts good old G—— spread for us!" With a laugh he roused himself from the pleasant reverie and took up again the narrative of the Cornwall.

"The first intimation we had" (he resumed) "of the sinking of Admiral Craddock's fleet came in the form of a wireless from the Defence asking if I had heard of the disaster at Coronel. Details which came in the course of the next day or two brought home to us the astonishing change in the whole situation which the appearance of Von Spee in South American waters had wrought. The blow fell like a bolt from the blue.

"As rapidly as possible the various British warships in the South Atlantic rendezvoused off Montevideo to discuss a plan of action. What the next move of the victorious Von Spee would be we could only surmise. German prisoners picked up after the Falklands battle said his ultimate plan—after seizing Port Stanley for a base, and undergoing such a refit there as was practicable with the means at his disposal—was to scatter his ships as commerce raiders all over the Atlantic, cutting, if possible, the main sea arteries of England to North America. The Germans figured, according to these prisoners, that the suspension of the North Atlantic traffic for even a month (no impossible thing for five speedy cruisers in the light of the delays to sailings caused by the Emden and Karlsruhe working alone) would practically paralyse England's war efforts and reduce her military effort in France to almost negligible proportions. I am much more inclined to believe that this—rather than escorting a fleet of German merchantmen, bearing German reservists from Argentina, Uruguay, and Southern Brazil, to South-West Africa from Buenos Aires and Montevideo—was the real plan of Von Spee.

However, it was the immediate rather than the ultimate plans of the Germans that was our chief—in fact, our only—concern. Whether Von Spee intended heading for the North Atlantic later or South Africa, or up the Thames—the only way he could clear the road to any of these objectives was by first destroying such British warships as still remained in South American waters. It was these ships which had hurried to get together off Montevideo, in order to make the path of the enemy as thorny and full of pitfalls as possible.

"They had no illusions respecting what the immediate future held for them, that little group of cruiser captains that gathered in the Admiral's cabin of the Defence to formulate a plan of action. We knew nothing at that time of what had been decided upon at the Admiralty; indeed, we were quite in agreement that it would be deemed inexpedient to send any battle cruisers away from the North Sea, where they might be imperatively needed any day, on a voyage to the South Atlantic that might easily resolve itself into a months'-long wild-goose chase. Our plans, therefore, were laid entirely on the assumption that we should have to do the best we could with the ships already available.

"There was not a man of us who was not keen on the chance of a fight at even the prohibitive odds under which it appeared inevitable that the one ahead of us must be fought, but the prospects of success were anything but alluring. Every day that passed had brought reports revealing the completeness of the enemy's victory at Coronel, and all of these were more than confirmed when the Glasgow—whose captain had had the good sense to retire from a battle in which there was no longer a chance for him to be of any use—came in and joined us.

"It would be easy to suggest conditions under which one naval force, faced by another as much stronger than itself as the Germans were than the British at this time, would be justified in avoiding an action. The present was not such an occasion, however; in fact, I don't think it ever occurred to any of us to bring up a discussion of that phase of the question at all. This, briefly, was the way the matter presented itself to us: The measure of the power of the Germans to inflict harm to the Allies was their supply of shells. These gone—always provided no new supply reached them—the menace, even though the ships were yet unsunk, was practically at an end. We knew that they had already used up a considerable quantity of their munition in a foolish bombardment of the little tropical port of Papeete, in the French Societies, and we knew that a very large amount had been expended at Coronel. They still probably had enough, we figured, to see them through many months of commerce raiding if only they could avoid another general action against warships, and such an action, even if it was a losing one from our standpoint, it was our manifest rôle to provoke, and at the earliest possible moment.

"This point decided, about all that remained to be considered was how to make the most effective disposition of such ships as we had at our disposal when once the enemy was in sight. We knew just what ships we would have to meet. We also knew, practically to a gun, how they were armed. Moreover, with Coronel as an object lesson, we knew how well those ships were handled, and with what deadly effectiveness those guns were served. Now that it is all ancient history, I think there is no reason why I should not tell you how we arranged that our ships should 'take partners' for the little 'sea-dance' they were expecting to shake their heels at.

"The Defence—an armoured cruiser of the Minotaur type, subsequently sunk at Jutland—was to tackle the Scharnhorst, Von Spee's flagship. The former was the only ship we had that was anywhere nearly a match for either of the larger German cruisers. She exceeded them in displacement by several thousand tons, and her four nine-point-twos and ten seven-point-fives had a comfortable margin of metal over that fired from the Scharnhorst's eight eight-point-twos and six five-point-nines. In a fair duel with either of the larger Germans, I think there is little doubt she would have had the best of it. In the battle we expected to go into, however, there could be no certainty that she was going to be able to give her undivided attention to the vis-à-vis we had picked for her during a sufficient interval to finish up the job.

"The Carnarvon and the Cornwall were to be given the formidable task of keeping the Gneisenau so busy that she could not help her sister fight the Defence. Our combined displacement was about equal to that of our prospective opponent, but the four seven-point-fives and twenty six-inch (all we had between us) could hardly have prevented her pounding us to pieces with her eight-point-twos, in the event that she elected to use her speed to keep beyond the effective range of our lighter guns. By dashing into close range we might have had a chance with her, or, again there was the possibility we might lead her a dance that would take her out of the way long enough to give the Defence time to finish polishing off the Scharnhorst, in which event the former might have been able to intervene in our favour.

"Small as would have been our chance of carrying through our part of the programme successfully, the Gneisenau was the one opponent I desired above all the others, on account of the way I knew it would buck up the ship's company to feel that they were having a whack at the ship that sunk the Monmouth. There were a good many men in the Monmouth who had gone to her from the Cornwall, and our men never tired cursing the Hun for letting their mates drown at Coronel without making any effort to save them. They had something to say on that score when their turn came at the Falklands.

"The Glasgow we were going to give a chance to wipe out her Coronel score by sending her in against the Nürnberg. With her superior speed, and her two six-inch and ten four-inch guns against the latter's ten four-point ones, she would probably have had the best of what could not but have been a very pretty fight if no one had interfered with it. Here again, unluckily, the chances were against a duel to the finish. Against the Dresden—a very worthy sister of the Emden—the very best we could muster was the armed merchantman, Orama. This (unless another armed merchantman—the Otranto, which had escaped with the Glasgow from Coronel—became available) left us nothing to oppose to the Leipzig, which, in that event, would have been a sort of a 'rover,' free to bestow her attention and shells wherever they appeared likely to do the most harm. And (from the way she was fought at the Falklands, where she was my 'opposite number') let me tell you that a jolly troublesome 'rover' she would have been.

"That, in a few words, was our little plan for making Von Spee use up the remainder of his ammunition. That was our principal object, and there can be no doubt that we would have come pretty near complete success in attaining it. For the rest, you can judge for yourself what our chances would have been. As the Fates would have it, however, that battle was never to be fought, save on paper in the Admiral's cabin of the old Defence. Before ever we had completed preparations for our 'magazine-emptying' sally against Von Spee, word was winged to us that the Admiralty had a plan of its own in process of incubation, and that we were to standby to co-operate.

"Sturdee and his battle cruisers were well on their way to the South Atlantic, however, before even an inkling of what was afoot was vouchsafed us, and even then my orders were simply to rendezvous with him at the 'Base' I have spoken of before—the one where we foregathered and feasted with the Carmania. I breathed no word of where and why we were going until the muddy waters of the Plate estuary were left behind and the last least possibility of a 'leak' to the shore was out of the question. Then I simply passed it on to the men by posting some word of it on the notice-board. There was no cheering, either then or even a few days later, when the Inflexible and the Invincible, the latter flying Admiral Sturdee's flag, came nosing in from the Atlantic and dropped anchor at the 'Base'; but the promise of action in the immediate future was like wine to the men. They were simply tumbling over themselves to carry out the most ordinary routine duties, and so it continued right up to the moment that Von Spee's foretops, gliding along above the low promontory of Port William, brought them to 'Action Stations' with real work to do at last.

"Sturdee had his plans all laid, and we repaired to the Invincible shortly after her arrival to familiarise ourselves with them. All in all, it wasn't so very different a gathering as that one which took place on the Defence, off Montevideo, to plan another battle—the one which was never to take place. I don't mind admitting though, that there was a bit more 'buoyancy' to the atmosphere of this second conference, the natural consequence of our 'improved prospects.' There is no use denying that it gives a man a more comfortable feeling to know that he is in a ship that has reasonable expectation of sending its 'opposite' to the bottom of the sea, than to be faced with the prospect of going out as a sort of animated lure to wheedle the enemy out of his shells.

"With the Invincible and Inflexible Sturdee had sufficient force to be able to dispense with the Defence, which was, I believe, sent to African water to join a force that was gathering there on the off-chance that the Germans slipped through the net that was being flung off South America. For scouting purposes, the Bristol and the Kent—both of which had foregathered with us at the 'Base'—were added to our 'punitive expedition,' which finally got under weigh for the Falklands on November 28. Steaming in a formation best calculated to sweep a wide range of seas, we held our southerly course for nine days, sighting, so far as I recall, no ship of any description except those of our own force. On the eighth day we weathered a heavy blizzard, but it was out of a clear dawn that the low, rounded hills of the Falklands—so suggestive in many respects of the Orkneys and the north of Scotland—took shape the following morning. We dropped anchor in the double harbour of Port William and Port Stanley at nine o'clock of the forenoon of December 7. Before another twenty-four hours had passed Von Spee—hurrying as though to a rendezvous—had made his appearance, and we were raising steam to go out and even up Craddock's account with him."

[II. The Battle of the Falklands]

The Captain had come for a breath of fresh air on the quarter-deck at the end of a grey winter's day, and it was the memories called up by the resemblance of the low, rounded, treeless hills which ringed the Northern Base to some other hills which he had good reason to carry a vivid mental picture of that set him talking of the Falklands.

"They're very much like these," he said, "those wind-swept hills around Port Stanley; indeed, I know of few other parts of the world so far apart geographically that have so much in common topographically and climatically. Their people, too, are a good deal like the northern Scots and Orcadians, with a dry sense of humour that usually manifests itself at your first meeting with them, when they tell you that the Falklands have two seasons, the cold and the snowy. The latter, they tell you,—because the snow stops up the chinks and keeps out the wind—is rather the warmer of the two. They are a sturdy, resolute lot, too, and we found that, quite expecting the coming of the German fleet and with no sure knowledge that British naval help would arrive in time, they had made all preparations to fight the enemy to the limit of their very primitive resources.

"And a jolly good fight they would have put up, too. The old Canopus (the battleship which did not come up in time to help Craddock at Coronel) had been grounded in the inner harbour and turned into a 'land fort.' Her heavy turret guns had been left aboard her, while those of her secondary batteries had been mounted at the most favourable positions on the hills. The 'standing army'—of something like thirty-five, I believe—had been recruited up to several times that figure, and all over the island firearms, ancient and modern, had been taken down and made ready for use. Von Spee's sailors and marines would have had many a ridge-to-ridge skirmish on their hands before they completed the conquest of the Falklands.

"The coming of Sturdee put an entirely different face on things," continued the Captain, smartly side-stepping the flying "grummet" which had been flicked across his path from out of a howling pack of flannelled "snotties" deep in the throes of hockey on the opposite side of the quarter-deck. "'When are the Huns coming?' was still the question on every tongue; but it was now put anticipatively rather than apprehensively. They had not long to wait.

"I shall never forget that morning they appeared. It was scarcely twenty hours from the time we had dropped anchor, and most of the ships of the squadron were rushing those odd and ends of cleaning up, overhauling, revictualling, and the like that always follow arrival in port. The Cornwall, with some repairs on one of her engines to be effected, was at six hours' notice, and the Bristol, for similar reasons, at somewhat longer. Only the Kent was ready to put to sea at once.

"I was in my bath when a signal reading 'Raise steam for full speed with all despatch' was handed me, and it did not need another signal, which arrived a few minutes later, to tell me that, by some amazing stroke of 'joss,' the enemy was near at hand. How near I did not dream until the guns of the old Canopus began to boom. Luckily, I was already shaved" (I liked that little touch), "but, even so, my finishing dressing and breakfasting within twelve minutes was a very creditable performance of its kind. I can't say much for the toilet I made, but the breakfast was a good hearty one, with porridge, eggs, and marmalade. With an action in the offing, and no knowing when you are going to have time to eat again, it is only common sense to fortify against an indefinite fast.

"By the time I reached the bridge the topmasts of an armoured and a light cruiser were visible, slipping along above the headland which cut off the harbour from the open sea. The events of the next few hours were to etch the profile of the latter ship indelibly upon my memory, for it was the Leipzig, coming up with the Gneisenau to destroy the Port Stanley Wireless Station. From the foretop of the Canopus they were able to see the Huns clearing for action; and the Glasgow and the Bristol, both of which were in the inner harbour, also had a clear view across the depressed neck of the peninsula. The other ships of the squadron saw no more than topmasts until they had raised steam and reached the open sea.

"Just how the Huns came to make the disconcerting discovery that there were modern battle cruisers concealed by the higher seaward end of the peninsula I learned from an officer who had been saved from the sinking Gneisenau, who told me the story in his guttural broken English. They had expected to find the Canopus at Port Stanley, he said, and perhaps the Cornwall and Carnarvon and other light cruisers; but anything of the class of the Invincible and Inflexible—'Mein Gott, Nein! Wen der Gunnery Ludenant sent word from der foredop down' (he sputtered) 'dot he zwei ships mit dreipodt madsts gesehen had, mein Kapdtin he say, "Nein, nein, es ist eempossibl. Ich will ein man mit der gut eyes up senden." Wen this man say, ya, he see zwei dreipodt madsts, mein Kapdtin, he say, "Der Teufel, now Ich must go quickt. Ein hour, zwei hour, we run, sehr schnell. Den komen aus der Inglish ships, und preddy soon Ich see dem komen mehr schell von uns." Den Ich say: "Mein Kapdtin, you must der mehr schnell gehen, or you must der fight machen." He say, "Ya, ya," und he mehr schnell try zu gehen. Nicht gut. No good. Den we up mit der Scharnhorst gekommen, und der Admiral, he say, "Nun will we der fight gemachen. Den we machen der fight. Nichts, no good. Kaput! Feenish!"'"

The Captain stopped at the windward end of the deck and let the breeze fan a brow that had grown red during his effort at literal rendition. A grin of pleased reminiscence sat on his face. "My word, but it must have given the Hun a jolly good jolt, that first sight of those 'dreipodt madsts!'" he explained finally, as he put on his cap and fell into step beside me again.

"If Von Spee ever had any time for arrière pensée before the sea closed over him," he resumed, "he must have reproached himself bitterly for not pushing on in force and attacking us in the harbour before we had steam up. If his whole squadron had come up as the Gneisenau and Leipzig did, they could undoubtedly have given us a very unpleasant hour or two while we were raising steam. We would have polished them off in the end, of course, but they would have done us a deal more harm than by the tactics they did follow. Again, there is a chance that, if the two armoured cruisers had pressed the attack alone—as they eventually were forced to do—they might have inflicted enough damage to our light cruisers to have made the escape of all three (instead of only one) of theirs a possibility. However, Von Spee's star of good fortune, which had been at its zenith at Coronel, was now sinking to near the horizon, and it was ordained that at the Falklands he should meet an enemy who was both faster and heavier armed than he, under conditions of sea and light which favoured him no whit.

"The battle of the Falklands was really won in the harbour of Port Stanley. It was all a question of how soon we could get out. If we could reach the enemy in anything like full force there was little doubt of the result. A delay of an hour or two, however, might have easily resulted in their scattering so effectually that the running down of the last of them would have been a matter of months, and months, too, marked with great losses of, and greater delays to, the merchant shipping of two hemispheres. Nothing short of the truly splendid efforts of the engine-room and stokehold personnel of Sturdee's ships would have given their gunners their chance to win the battle of the Falklands.

"Of the Cornwall's achievement in this respect I am especially proud. With one of the engines partially dismantled, we would have been doing all that was expected of us if we had been under full steam in six hours. Indeed, that was the very notice we had gone under, in order to do the overhauling desired. And now let me tell you what happened. It was ten minutes after eight when the signal to raise steam for full speed was received, and before half-past ten she was steaming out of the harbour. We could have got under weigh some minutes earlier than we did but for having to let the Invincible and the Inflexible, which had been lying inshore of us, pass out ahead. And before the day was over the old Cornwall, with the heartiest lot of lads that ever swung a scoop throwing coal under her boilers, covered a wide stretch of the South Atlantic at a speed a good knot or two better than she had averaged on her trial trip, or at any other time since then.

"There was one trivial but amusing little incident in connexion with the departure of the battle cruisers which stands out particularly clearly among my otherwise rather jumbled memories of those two hours of rush and hurry. We had been leading our usual hand-to-mouth existence in the matter of food for some weeks previous to this, and one of the things we had most looked forward to our call at Port Stanley for was revictualling. We were losing no time in getting provisions aboard, and at the moment the signal to raise steam was received a lighter containing, among other things, a large cask of beer and a lot of salt pork had just moored alongside. We were really in great need of the salt pork, and—well, there seemed to be a considerable desire for the beer also. However, when the Devil drives, or a reckoning is to be settled with the Hun, one can't wait for such incidentals as food and drink. Knowing that we had enough aboard to keep going on until the game was played out, I ordered the lighter to cast off and turned my attention to more pertinent matters. I recalled later that I heard the winch grinding once or twice after I gave the order, but, seeing the lighter floating away with the tide presently, thought no more about it for the moment.

"Carried hither and thither by the conflicting harbour currents, the lighter was half a cable's length or so off our port bow when the battle cruisers, spouting smoke like young volcanoes, came charging out to take up the chase of the Hun, and, by a strange chance, it was lounging indolently square athwart the course of the Flagship. The sharp bows of the Invincible shore it through like a knife, and her propellers, with those of the Inflexible, quickly reduced boat and cargo to bobbing bits dancing in their bubbling wake.[A]

"It really hurt me to see that good food and drink snatched almost out of our mouths, as it were, but I tried to put on a brave front and turn the matter off as a joke. 'Beer and pork sausage,' I remarked to one of my officers who had just come up to the bridge to report; 'the battle cruisers seem to have a good appetite for Hun diet this morning. I only hope they'll have as good luck gulping down the Huns themselves.'

"'It's only "sausage" they put their teeth in, I'm glad to say, sir,' he replied with a grin. 'The men managed to hoist the beer aboard somehow before casting off the lighter, and as I came along just now I heard some one ordering that the cask be put down in a "syfe plyce wher' it won't be 'oled if th' 'Un 'its us."'

"'My word!' said the Captain, with the same look on his face that it had worn on another occasion when he had told me of the 'banquets' that had been served on the Carmania when the Cornwall had foregathered with her at a certain mid-Atlantic rendezvous after the former had sunk the Cap Trafalgar. 'My word! but we did enjoy that beer when the time came to drink it. Yes, they shared and shared alike with the officers. Good old pirate law as to loot and salvage, you know.'

"The Kent, which was at five minutes' notice, was the first ship to get under weigh, probably with orders to keep the enemy in sight but not, of course, to try to engage them. The Glasgow was the next out, and then the Carnarvon. The Cornwall was ready to follow close on the heels of the latter, but, as I have told you, had to wait for the battle cruisers, which were now under weigh. We went out not far astern of the Inflexible, and the Bristol, which had been on long notice in the inner harbour, was last, at a considerable interval.

"The battle cruisers, with their turbines, worked up to full speed a great deal more rapidly than the ships with reciprocating engines, and, heading straight down the wake of the retreating Germans—now showing their fore-shortened silhouettes in 'Line Ahead' on the south-western horizon—they quickly drew away from all but the Glasgow. The latter, not long out of the dry dock and swiftest of the lot in any event, had passed the Kent and was holding a southerly course, evidently with the intention of keeping the Hun light cruisers in sight and reporting their movements.

"It took something like two hours after the British ships were out to convince Von Spee that all his efforts to go 'mehr schnell' were going to be of no avail. There was nothing left for him to do but to 'der fight gemachen.' In this he had two alternatives—to fight with all of his ships, or to fight a delaying action with a part of them and give the others a chance to escape. His choice was the one that any other sailor as gallant and able as Von Spee had proved himself to be would inevitably have taken. He plumped to fight with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and let the Nürnberg, Leipzig, and Dresden make the most of their chances of scattering to safety. His signal, as we learned it later from prisoners, was substantially this: 'Light cruisers will make every endeavour to escape to South American ports. Armoured cruisers will engage enemy, and endeavour to delay.'

"It was just about noon that I saw the tower-like, smoke-crowned silhouettes of the German ships gradually begin to lengthen, and when they held steady more or less beam-on I knew that the turn of eight points meant that Von Spee had made his decision. As the dark profiles began to draw apart—the two longest heading to port and the three shortest to starboard—I realised at once what that decision was. The armoured cruisers were going to try to draw the pursuit to the south, while the light cruisers sought safety by 'starring' on divergent courses to the south and south-west.

"I think there will be no harm in my telling you that in all the possible contingencies we had discussed under which we might meet the enemy, there was none which roughly approximated to the conditions imposed upon us by the fact that he had unexpectedly come upon us in harbour—surprising us no less than himself—and forcing us to tumble out in pursuit of him in much the same order as a farmer and his family sallying forth following an alarm in their hen roost. What we had generally agreed would happen was that we—ourselves spread over a wide expanse of sea in 'Line Abreast'—would sight the enemy steaming in similar formation, and in that event it was understood that our battle cruisers should attend to the two German armoured cruisers, while the rest of us took on such of his light cruisers as we could most readily bring to action. Though already scattered over many miles of sea, our problem was really only that of conforming this 'elastic' general plan to present conditions.

"The battle cruisers altered course instantly to continue the chase of the enemy armoured cruisers, but the Admiral, doubtless realising that, scattered as we were, each of the rest of us (already conversant with his general instructions) would be his own best judge as to where he could be most useful, left us to pick our own quarries. I made up my mind at once to go after the light cruisers, and, signalling 'Come on, Kent' (the Captain of the Kent was my junior, and therefore subject to my orders in a case of this kind), headed off in the direction of what were still little more than three dark blurs on the south-westerly horizon. The Glasgow, which was a long way ahead to port, also decided (in view of instructions) in favour of going after the light cruisers, and, altering course sharply, passed astern of the battle cruisers and converged with the Kent and Cornwall in the chase. The Carnarvon, which for some reason was not steaming her best, and had been left a good distance astern, held on after the battle cruisers. The Bristol, which had been delayed in getting out of harbour, had been ordered to look after some steamers which had been following Von Spee, and which we believed to carry coal and provisions. We afterwards learned that one of them had a cargo of potatoes, and as potatoes chanced to be another of the many things which the Cornwall was short of at this time, I have always harboured the same kind of grudge against the Bristol for sinking these as I have against the Invincible for putting down my salt pork.

"As soon as it became evident what courses the Hun ships were steering, I signalled to the Kent to go after the port ship, which turned out to be the Nürnberg, while I gave my attention to the middle one of the three, the Leipzig. This would have left the Glasgow free to pursue and engage the third ship, the Dresden, which her twenty-six knots of speed should have enabled her to do handily. This plan, if it could have been carried out, would have made a clean sweep of Von Spee's squadron then and there, instead of giving the Dresden a new lease on life, and some weeks more of uncertainty for merchant vessels of both the South Atlantic and Pacific. Where it slipped up was through the fact that the Glasgow could not avoid engaging the Leipzig en passant while endeavouring to get within range of the Dresden, and, once having taken on the latter, she was, bulldog-like, reluctant to draw off until her opponent was finished. As there was no other ship fast enough to catch up the Dresden, her escape was inevitable.

"It was a little after four in the afternoon—almost to a minute the time I had reckoned it would be—that the fine burst of speed the Cornwall had been putting on brought the Leipzig well within range, and I gave the order to open fire. Previous to this the latter had been engaging in a very lively little running fight with the Glasgow, neither appearing to be inflicting serious damage to the other. The Hun's four-point-ones were about balanced by the Glasgow's equal number of four-inch, but the latter's two six-inch gave her a comfortable margin that would have decided the issue in her favour in the end. The German gunners, always at their best at the beginning of an action, were making good practice, however, and the Glasgow would have known she had had a fight on her hands before it was over.

"At the intervention of the Cornwall, with her fourteen six-inch guns, the Leipzig—very pluckily and properly—turned her attention to the heavier armed, and therefore the more dangerous, of her two adversaries. We began hitting her at our third salvo, and it must have been about the same time that a shell from one of her well-served four-point-ones came crashing into the Cornwall. I must say it was jolly good work for such comparatively small guns. The extremely high angle they had to be fired at, though, reduced their chances of hitting, and I recall especially one beautifully bunched salvo which struck the water so close to the far side of the ship that it might almost have been dropped from an air-ship.

"One of the gunners told me an amusing incident in connexion with that first hit. A boy, engaged in passing six-inch shells, was inclined to be rather nervous at the outset, and was coming in for a good deal of chaffing from his more callous mates. When the bang and jar of that first explosion ran through the ship, a shell had just been handed him to shove along, but, quivering all over, he stood rooted in his tracks and demanded to know what the noise was. A guffaw of laughter ran round, at the end of which an old gunner replied, 'That, me son, is our fust vaxinashun mark.' Gradually a grin of comprehension and reassurance replaced the look of terror on the lad's face as he realised that it isn't necessarily so serious a thing after all to have a shell burst above your head. 'Right-o!' he cried, passing the shell smartly on; ''and this proj. on to the 'Un an' prevent a small-pox epidemic breakin' out 'board 'is ship.' The joke had passed all the way round the ship before the fight was over, and there was red-hot rivalry to the end to keep the Hun's small-pox rate down by 'vaxinashun.' When you think of it, there's nothing funny about the joke at all; but there's nothing equal to the roughest of chaff to keep men's spirits up and their nerves steady in a fight, and it's because these lads of ours take fighting in the same happy-go-lucky spirit that they take their sport that they're such incomparable stayers—that they're always going stronger at the finish than when they started, no matter what the course.

"I remember another amusing little incident which occurred at about this stage of the game. Owing to the fact that there was no voice-pipe connexion from the bridge to the foretop and other 'nerve-centres,' it was imperative that I should fight the ship from the conning tower—an irksome necessity on account of the circumscribed vision. I found myself making occasional rounds of 'afternoon calls' to the various places with which I wanted to keep in closer touch, or from where I had a better chance to see how things were progressing than from the box of the conning tower, and one of these took me to the bridge, whose sole occupant was the signalman at the range-finder. Silhouetted black against the sky and with not enough cover to protect him from a pea-shooter, he was still going quietly about his work and apparently having the time of his young life.

"The Liepzig's gunnery had not begun to go to pieces at this juncture, and every little while one of those beautifully bunched little salvoes of four-point-ones would throw up its pretty nest of foam jets in the near-by water. A shell from one of these struck somewhere amidships as I came out upon the bridge, and I found the man at the range-finder just throwing an appraising glance over his shoulder to where the fragments of a whaler were mounting skyward in a cloud of smoke. 'My word, sir,' he greeted me with, 'but it's jolly glad I am I ain't back ther' w'ere the projers catch you 'tween decks. Now, up 'ere it's diff'rent—they just passes straight on into the water.'

"'They pass straight through!' I repeated. 'What do you mean by that?' 'Jest wot I sez, sir,' he replied. 'Look w'ere you're standin', sir! The canvas ain't 'arf stiff enuf to stop 'em.'

"I looked. On my left the canvas wind-shield was punctured with a smooth round hole at about the level of my waist, while on my right a similar strip had been pinked about even with the calf of my leg. From the upper hole the ragged ends of the painted canvas were bent inwards: from the lower hole, outwards.

"''Twas from the 'Uns' last salvo but one, sir,' said the signalman, grinning down at me over the range-finder. ''Twould 'a' jest about plugged you in the knees. You was jest too late in comin' up, sir.'

"I believe I told him," said the Captain with a laugh, "that, while I should hate to be setting an example for unpunctuality on my own ship, I sincerely hoped and trusted that I should continue being equally late for 'appointments' of that kind. He was a brave chap, that one, and I'm glad to say my recommendation brought him a D.C.M. for the way he carried on that afternoon.

"It's very funny the things one 'imagines' in the course of an action, one in which you are being hit, I mean. There isn't a lot of your ship that you can see from a conning-tower, and so when anything happens—like the explosion of a shell, for instance—you (generally more or less sub-consciously, for your whole active mind is engrossed with fighting the ship) have to speculate on where it struck and what damage it did. Here is an example of one of my efforts in this line that afternoon. A terrific smashing-banging followed the explosion of a shell somewhere amidships, and from the nature of the racket I instantly jumped to the conclusion that it could be only one thing. 'After funnel carried away,' I announced to my Staff Paymaster, whom I had kept standing by to take notes and the time of any incidents I thought worth recording, though just why I concluded it was the after one I don't remember. 'After funnel carried away,' he repeated, and jotted down the entry against the time the disaster had occurred.

"Well, I carried on for the next hour or two with the distinct idea in my mind that one of the funnels was gone, and I even recall wondering several times in the course of the next hour or two whether any damage had been caused in the engine-room, or whether the wreckage was likely to get afire, or whether the smoke would be getting in the way of the guns. Indeed, it is quite possible I tried to get some assurance on these points by voice-pipe. I don't remember precisely. At any rate, it was quite definitely fixed in my mind that that funnel was gone, so that when the next time I poked out to have a look round, I found that it was not even dented, I could hardly believe my eyes. I really am not quite sure to this day what it was that made the infernal banging which I took to be that funnel going over the side.

"Everything considered, the Leipzig made as gallant a fight as it is possible to conceive. Under the fire of two ships, either of which was faster and more heavily gunned than herself, knowing all the time that her sister ships—almost as completely outclassed as herself—could never be counted upon to come to her aid, and, finally, desperately short of ammunition, the way in which she carried on to the end was worthy of the traditions of any navy. Indeed, it has often occurred to me that Von Spee and his officers—from their long service on the China station—had kept themselves entirely free of the contaminating influences of Potsdam which have made the names of the High Sea and the U-boat fleet words anathema. British Naval Officers who had met those of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in the Orient still speak of them with kindness, and even occasionally with affection, and certainly no one could have faced defeat and death with a finer or more resolute spirit than they did at the Falklands. Perhaps, for the sake of their souls, it was fortunate that they never got nearer home than the South Atlantic.

"As I have told you, it was about our third salvo which made our first hit upon the Leipzig, a shell of this carrying away her topmast. The latter, in falling, appears to have killed the Gunnery Lieutenant, which must inevitably have made it at least a temporary interference with the control. The Torpedo Lieutenant, whom we picked up among the survivors, took over the direction of the firing from the foretop from that time on.

"There was no appreciable falling off in the Leipzig's firing until the fight had been in progress about two hours. Then the hammering from our shells began to tell rapidly, and at about six-thirty, when I noted that both her mainmast and after funnel had been carried away, and that she was blazing with heavy fires in several places—the firing became spasmodic, and finally, with the exception of a single gun, ceased altogether. At this juncture, as I learned subsequently, there were but eighteen unwounded men left in the ship, and it was a 'scratch' crew of these who, bringing up odd shells from wherever they could find them, continued the fight as long as they had anything to fire. Then they lit their pipes, sat down on the deck and waited for the end.

"At seven-fifteen, seeing her engines had failed her and that she was lying an apparently helpless hulk in the trough of the now rising sea, I gave the order to cease firing. Scarcely had I done so, however, when there came another flash from that one unsilenced gun, and its well-placed shell pierced the paint-room in the Cornwall's forepeak. The ensuing clouds of smoke were so dense that I gave orders for the fire to be extinguished with all despatch. Luckily, the fumes proved to have come almost entirely from the shell itself. It was only afterwards, of course, that I learned in what desperate straits the Leipzig was at this moment. At the time, as she still appeared desirous of carrying on the fight, I had no choice but to commence firing again. This last salvo or two was quite thrown away, however, that is, so far as settling the fate of the enemy was concerned. Indeed, the injury done to her in the first two hours of the fighting would ultimately have sent her to the bottom, while the fact that her shells—except for the odd ones chivvied together for the one gun—must have been at an end about the same time would have left her quite incapable of doing us much harm save with a torpedo. As I have said, however, I did not know these things then, and so could only continue trying to inflict the heaviest damage possible as long as she kept firing.

"That shot through my paint-lockers was the last fired by the Leipzig, and I have good reason to believe that the shell was literally the last four-point-one left on the ship. Two or three of Von Spee's ships had wasted a good bit of their quite irreplaceable munitions in what must have been an almost useless bombardment of Papeete, in the French Societies, while on their way across the Pacific, and Coronel made still further inroads into the magazines. I do not know whether any other ship, like the Leipzig, exhausted all its heavy shells before being sunk, but all of them must have been very low in any case. This fact fully vindicates the decision (which I told you of some time ago) resolved upon by those responsible for the disposition of the greatly inferior force of British ships in South American waters before the intention of sending out the battle cruisers was known, to seek out and fight Von Spee, regardless of the odds, in the hope of clipping his claws for the future by compelling him to fire away as many as possible of his remaining shells.

"As soon as it became evident that the Leipzig was incapable of further resistance, the Glasgow (as the senior ship) signalled 'Do you surrender?' but to this there was no reply. Whether this failure to respond was fortuitous or deliberately intentional I was never able to learn definitely, but, from the fact that her flag was kept flying to the last, I am inclined to the belief that it was the latter. It is still possible, however, that she had no halyards, flags, lights, or anything else to signal with, even had she so desired. She did send up a Verey light at this juncture, but whether that was intended to convey some message to us, in lieu of any other means of doing so, or whether it was a sort of gesture of farewell to any of her sisters that might still be afloat, we never knew. If the latter, it failed of its purpose, for the Dresden, the only one of Von Spee's ships still above water, had melted into the mists of the horizon hours before.

"On the chance that the rocket was meant as a distress signal, we steamed in as close as seemed wise, considering the fact that even a sinking ship may launch a torpedo most effectively, and lowered away our boats with all despatch. The fact that, with a seven per cent. list to port due to being holed twice below the water-line on that side, it was difficult to lower the boats to starboard, as well as the fact that several of our port boats had been smashed by shellfire, hampered the work of relief, and the Leipzig had gone down, while the nearest whaler was still some distance away. Any of the wounded that may have got clear of the sinking ship succumbed quickly to the icy coldness of the water, but of the eighteen unwounded men remaining after the action closed, sixteen were picked up—eleven by the boats of the Glasgow, and five by those of the Cornwall.

"One burly Hun, picked up by my coxswain whom I had sent in charge of my galley, gave the lad the surprise of his life, when he exclaimed (in impeccable Cockney English), the instant he was safe aboard: 'G'blyme, myte, but ein't it bally cold?' I found out later that he had been for a number of years an interpreter in the Law Courts of Sydney, Australia. An extremely significant admission that he made me in the burst of confidence induced by thankfulness at finding himself safe and sound after the hell he had been through, was to the effect that he had received notice of mobilisation toward the end of June. One could not ask for better evidence than that of the deliberation with which Germany prepared for the war which she has made such frantic efforts to delude the world into thinking was 'forced' upon her by the Allies—in August!

"My greatest surprise of the day, and certainly the most welcome, came when I asked for a report on our casualties. There were none, or rather only one—the ship's canary, killed in its cage when a shell exploded in the wardroom pantry. This, considering the fact that the Cornwall had been hit eighteen times by four-point-one shell, was indeed good luck, and fully vindicated the plan I had followed of fighting the earlier stages of the battle at a range which, while short enough to allow my heavier guns to do deadly execution, was still somewhat extreme for the lighter ones of the enemy. The latter, it is true, were sighted up to a very considerable range, but both their accuracy and effectiveness fell off greatly as the angle at which they had to be elevated to carry these long distances was increased.

"The battle cruisers had opened fire on the enemy armoured cruisers 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.

"This collier, as we learned presently, was a former British ship, the 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

Perhaps there is nothing about which the German has been more contemptuous of the Briton than in the matter of the way the latter has of treating war as he does his sport, of fighting his battles in the same spirit with which he plays his games. Yet it has been this very desire of the latter to play the game at all stages that is responsible for the fact that the German, for a time at least, was given credit in the popular mind of even the neutral and Allied countries for a great deal that never should have been credited to him. This is especially true of two or three of the earlier naval actions of the war. The fact that a German captain fought his ship gallantly seemed to his British opponent of that period sufficient reason for forgetting, or at least forgiving, him for not fighting fairly, and so it was that the bravery of Von Spee at the Falkland, and the skill and pluck of Von Müller in the Emden at Cocos Island, had the effect of mitigating in the minds of the officers of the British ships, which emerged as victors from those battles, the impression of a number of things, ranging all the way from "not playing the game" to downright treachery. And so it chances that in the eyes of even the civilised world the Germans have been given a clean sheet for these earlier encounters, and one hears them spoken of to-day in London as though they stood apart in this respect from every battle the German has fought on sea—or on land for that matter—since then. It is regrettable to record that this popular belief has no more to base itself on than the sportsmanlike reticence of the British officer in refusing to broadcast the real facts. One had a sort of pleasure, as the record of the Hun grew blacker and blacker the more chance he had to give expression to his real self, in hugging that delusion that the sailors of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and Emden were at worst only a dull grey in comparison with their infamous mates of the High Sea Fleet who were drawn upon to man the U-boats. But that they were all of a kind one has only to talk with any of the British officers and men who came in contact with them in and after battle to learn beyond dispute. I will cite a single instance from the Falklands before going on to the Emden, on which latter even more false sentiment has been wasted on the score of the supposed "sporting" behaviour of her officers than on any other of the German ships which were in the limelight of publicity during the opening months of the war.

After the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had been sunk off the Falklands by the Invincible and Inflexible, the latter ships made every possible effort to pick up all the Germans who had survived the fighting and were floating in the water. A considerable number of these were brought aboard Admiral Sturdee's Flagship, the Invincible. Among the few German shells which had struck the latter battle cruiser was an "eight-point-one" which had failed to explode. Knowing that Von Spee had been near the end of his munition, but wishing to gain indisputable evidence on that point by establishing beyond a doubt whether the shell in question contained an explosive charge or was only a practice projectile fired for want of anything better, Admiral Sturdee decided to have it taken to pieces. Thinking it might be useful to get the testimony of the prisoners on the matter first, the Admiral, after having the shell in question brought to his cabin, ordered that the captured Germans be sent in for interrogation. Without exception they all declared that the projectile before them was made only for practice, and that, as it carried no explosive charge, there would be no risks whatever in knocking it apart to prove that fact. Questioned specifically as to whether any special precautions need be taken in handling it, they replied with equal unanimity in the negative.

As the prisoners began to file out, however, one of them caught the Admiral's eye and shook his head slightly, as though to convey—without his mates observing it—a warning that the shell was dangerous. On calling this man back, the Admiral was informed that the projectile really contained a full charge of high explosive, and that tinkering with it before certain precautions were observed would inevitably result in detonating it. A keen student of human nature, Admiral Sturdee recognised at once the unparalleled opportunity to test German honour and study a phase of the then imperfectly understood German psychology. The prisoners were ordered to be brought in separately, and in such a manner that those who passed out after interrogation should have no chance to communicate with their mates who were waiting their turn. To each man as he appeared it was pointed out that he owed his life to the fact that the British had not followed (as they well might have) the precedent set by the Germans at Coronel of making no effort to pick up the survivors from the ships they had sunk. It was also pointed out to him that his failure to tell the truth would probably be attended with serious loss of life among those to whom he owed his own. Then the question respecting the nature of the shell was again put. Without a single exception (the man who had confessed was not, of course, examined again) they reiterated most emphatically their former statements that the shell contained no explosive and might therefore be disassembled with impunity.

After providing adequate safeguards, the shell was taken to pieces, and at once proved to be everything that all but one of the several score of rescued Huns had declared it was not, which meant, of course, that if it had been handled in the way these had insisted would be perfectly safe, all near it would have been killed. Since there is no punishment provided for this brand of treachery, no action was taken against the prisoners, and the incident was remembered principally for the illuminative sidelight it threw on the unexpected moral obliquity of the German sailor. It was something quite new in the annals of civilised naval warfare, and Sturdee's officers were scarcely less grieved than shocked that men who had fought so bravely could behave so despicably. Yet that (to the Germans) incomprehensible sporting code of the British, by which it reckoned as not "playing the game" to speak ill of a brave foe after he is beaten, has prevented the story from finding its way to the public, and it is only now, when four years more of war have established the fact that the action of the Huns on this occasion was characteristic rather than (as so many of Sturdee's officers tried so hard to persuade themselves at the time) exceptional, that I am given permission (by one who observed at first hand all that took place) to publish it.

Perhaps (doubtless on account of the greater spectacularity of the lone-hand game she played) the Emden and her able and resourceful Captain came in for more of this misplaced credit than any other of the German cruisers of similar career. In one instance this even went so far as to prompt the people of the sporting Australian city from which the ship which brought the Emden's career to a finish took her name to request that the doughty Von Müller and his surviving officers should be sent to Sydney that they might be tendered a public reception. This kindly but misdirected instance of sportsmanship on the part of a people who—at this stage of the war at least—saw nothing incongruous in treating an enemy who had put up a good fight in precisely similar a way to which they had been accustomed to treat a visiting cricket eleven, was occasioned largely by the fact that the officers of the Sydney, in their eagerness to do full justice to a beaten foe, laid stress in their accounts of the fight on his bravery and said little or nothing of anything else. Yet, when one comes to learn the real facts of this historic battle (as I have done recently, by talking at length with a number of the British officers and men who took part in it), he finds evidences of "Hunnisms" splashing with muddy spots a record which might have been golden bright on the score of physical courage and devotion to duty.

It is no pleasure to write what I have to set down here, for I am quite frank to confess that the story of the Emden, according to the first accounts that were published of it, in connexion with the classic exploit of Lieutenant Mucke in escaping from Cocos Island in a small sloop and ultimately reaching Constantinople by way of Arabia, stirred my imagination as few episodes of the war have done. The time is long past, however, when the German has a right to expect anything further in the way of chivalrous reticence in the recording of his deeds and misdeeds. What I am setting down here was told me by an officer of the Sydney who boarded the beached Emden, and was also entrusted with the task of rounding up and bringing off the men from the latter that had jumped overboard and made their way to the beach of North Keeling Island.

As regards the battle itself, no one in the Sydney has anything but admiration for the pluck and skill with which the Emden fought a losing battle against a faster and more heavily gunned ship. But perhaps the one thing which they do hold most heavily against Von Müller personally is for the characteristically Prussian way he tried to bluff them, after he had run his ship aground, into allowing him to leave his flag flying when the Emden had been put completely out of action and was out of the running for good and all. I have already written of this historic incident in considerable detail as it appeared to a signalman of the Sydney who had unusually favourable opportunity for observing just what transpired, so that it will suffice here merely to summarise it and record that this man's version is fully borne out by what was subsequently told me by officers.

When the Sydney returned to the grounded Emden after pursuing and sinking the latter's collier, it was seen that the German Naval ensign was still flying at her maintopmast. Nothing in the nature of a white flag was displayed anywhere upon her. After making three times the signal, "Do you surrender?" and each time receiving only an evasive reply, or none at all, the Captain of the Sydney had reluctantly to give the order to reopen fire. The three broadsides which were required to convince Von Müller that his bluff would not go down are estimated to have killed sixty men in the Emden and to have caused a number of others to jump over into the surf. These lives were nothing more or less than a sacrifice on the altar of Von Müller's Prussian pride, and under the circumstances he was just as blood-guilty for causing them to be snuffed out in a typically Hunnish attempt to "put one over" on the ship that had beaten him and make the report of his defeat read better in Potsdam as if he had ordered them to be mown down by the guns of the Emden.

Lieutenant X——'s account of the work he had charge of in the Emden shows Von Müller in a better light, but reveal a terrible callousness and negligence on the part of his medical officers. As he must always be the most weighty witness as to how things were on the stricken ship at this juncture, I shall set down his account of what he saw and did in some detail.

"It was the morning after the fight before we had cleaned up all the other incidental business and were free to give our attention to looking after what was left of, or rather who was left in, the Emden. Fortunately, her stern was lying out beyond where the surf broke, so that, with a line they threw us from the deck, it was possible to ride under one quarter, with the boat's bow to seaward. I had rather a hard time getting aboard, once nearly falling into the water through getting a hawser between my legs, but I finally managed it through a hand which one of the German officers standing aft reached down to me. I told Von Müller that the Captain of the Sydney was prepared to take the surviving officers and men to Colombo provided they would give their parole. At first he rather stuck over the word, as though he would like to make out that he did not understand it, a perfectly absurd bluff in the light of the fact that he was fluent in both English and French, and that the term is in common use by the Germans themselves. He quickly came round, however, when I hastened to explain exactly what the Captain would require of him. Ultimately he signed a paper agreeing that for such time as all officers and men of the Emden remained in the Sydney they would cause no interference with ship or fittings, and would be amenable to the ship's discipline. This parole was substantially observed.

"The surgeon of the Emden, though unwounded, was doing nothing at the time of our arrival, and, from the appearance of the wounded, it was evident that he had done very little during the twenty-four hours which had elapsed since the action. By way of excuse, he claimed that his staff were all killed and his dressings and instruments destroyed. Accepting this as the literal truth, we made a signal for more medical supplies to supplement those already brought, and Dr. Ollerhead, the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company's surgeon, who had come with us from Cocos Island, set to work to get the wounded ready to be transferred. Neither at that time, nor during the three days in which the surgeon of the Sydney worked without rest to save as many as possible of the Emden's eighty wounded, did the German surgeon render anything like the assistance that might have been expected from him under the circumstances.

"What disgusted us most, however, was to find before we left the Emden that there had been ample supplies of uninjured dressings all the time. The action station of Dr. L——, the surgeon in question, had been in the stokehold, which was quite undamaged. A bent and twisted ladder or two formed the only obstacles to reaching and utilising the considerable stores of dressings, lotions, etc., which were still available there. Although it was true that the assistant surgeon was missing (he had come on deck after his station in the tiller flat aft had been struck, and was blown overboard by an exploding shell), it was not true by a long way that there was not ample help, skilled and unskilled, available for at least first-aid dressing all around, and on this they had hardly made a beginning."

A brief quotation or two from the report of the surgeon of the Sydney may be interesting while on the question of the neglect of the Emden's wounded by their own surgeon. Referring to the wounded which had just been brought aboard, he says:

"In cases where large vessels of the leg or arm had been opened, we found torniquets of pieces of spun yarn, or a handkerchief, or piece of cloth bound around the limb above the injury. In some cases, I believe the majority, they had been put on by the patients themselves. One man told me he had put one on his arm himself. They were all in severe pain from the constriction, and in all cases where amputation was required, the presence of these torniquets made it necessary to amputate much higher than one would otherwise have done. There was little evidence of any skilled treatment before they arrived aboard."

Again he writes:

"Some of the men who were brought off to the Sydney presented horrible sights, and by this time the wounds were practically all foul and stinking, and maggots 1/4 inch long were crawling over them, only 24 to 30 hours after injury. Practically nothing had been done to the wounded sailors, and they were roughly attended to by our party and despatched to us as quickly as possible."

Professional etiquette evidently operated to restrain the surgeon of the Sydney from stating in his report what he thought of these very palpable evidences of neglect on the part of his "opposite number" in the Emden. When I met him in the Sydney last winter I heard him express himself in no uncertain language on the subject, but I do not feel at liberty to quote him without his permission, and he has recently returned to Australia. I take it that he reckoned that to his medical brethren, to whom his report was especially addressed, the plain statements of the facts were sufficient to speak for themselves.

Lieutenant X—— credits the German officers with doing the best they could in helping him transfer the wounded. "Shortly after I came over the side," he said, "I took the opportunity to tell Von Müller that we reckoned he had fought very well. To this he merely answered with a rather surly 'No,' and turned away as though to hide his chagrin. Presently, however, he came up to where I was standing, and, speaking in a rather apologetic tone, said: 'Thank you very much for saying that, but I was not satisfied. We should have done better. You were very lucky in shooting away all my voice-pipes at the beginning.' I do not remember whether or not I told him that this was hardly enough to balance his own luck in getting both our range-finders in the first five minutes.

"The best of the whole lot of officers, however—indeed, the only one who showed anything like the spirit one would expect a British officer to display under similar circumstances—was Lieutenant ——, whom I encountered in connexion with my 'sweep' of North Keeling Island after the lot of Huns who landed there through the surf. I was a good deal puzzled to account for the sporting spirit of —— on this occasion—until he chanced to tell me that his mother was English! I had this little Keeling Island roundup all to myself, and, grim as some features of it were, it had also its amusing side, and you may be interested in hearing something of it.

"When we fired those last three broadsides into the Emden a good many men either jumped or were blown into the water, and of these a score or more were carried to the beach by the surf. Most of these, as I found later, were wounded in one way or another, and having no food or water, their sufferings during the day and a half before help reached them were unspeakable.

"From the Emden the bodies of men—some of which appeared to have life in them—were visible on the beach above high-water mark, and just before we left the wreck for good I noticed a party setting off along the shore to the right. If I had only failed to notice this move, my rescue party would have reached the poor wretches eight or ten hours earlier than it did, and probably have saved several more lives than we saved. The unfortunate delay was also largely due to my ignorance of the fact that North Keeling Island was a coral atoll.

"When we got back to the Sydney with the last of the wounded from the Emden I learned that our galley had already been sent away to take food and water to the men on the beach, but that, for some reason, it had gone in no further than the line of the outer reef where the surf began to break. I volunteered to go in the whaler to find what the trouble was, and if possible, make a landing with both boats. Just as I was about to go over the side, a young Australian lad—some kind of a Boy rating—came and asked to be taken along. I refused him rather shortly, as I thought it would be of more hindrance than help in the kind of job we had on hand. He disappeared quickly, and I did not see him again until we had taken the galley in through the surf and were pulling it up on the beach. Then he was discovered, curled up under the thwarts, where he had managed to stow himself away before we pulled off from the Sydney. It was a lucky thing he came along, for, as it turned out, he was the only one of the lot of us who knew how to climb a coconut palm in true native fashion.

"It was impossible to take a boat through the surf anywhere near the point where the Emden had grounded, but some miles up the beach there appeared to be an opening in the reef through which a landing might be made. Watching our chances, we managed to shoot the whaler in without an upset, incidentally showing the way to the galley, which had been on the point of giving up the job after staving a hole in its bottom in attempting a passage at a less favourable point. Mustering my men, I set out to find the Huns. It was here that I went wrong.

"Knowing that the island was but a small one, and having seen a number of the Emden's men making off to the right from the point where she was grounded, I figured that I would be likely to intercept them more quickly if I circled round to the left and met them face to face than by trying to overtake them. As it was late, I was anxious to lose no time in getting them together and into the boats while there was still daylight to see to getting the latter through the surf. If the island had been anything but a coral atoll my reckoning would have worked out all right; as it was it upset things completely.

"The island was covered with coco palms, under which there was a thick growth of pandanus and some sort of salt grass, the latter forming a tangle which made walking extremely difficult, and ultimately forced me to take to the beach to get opener going. Even here progress was slow on account of the sand and coral clinkers, and it was already getting dark when we suddenly found our way barred by a swift-flowing tidal passage connecting the open sea and what I now saw for the first time—the lagoon in the heart of the coral atoll. The island, like all others of its kind, was in the shape of a rough letter 'C,' with water between the two tips, and therefore quite impossible to walk around.

"As it was out of the question trying to swim what was probably a shark-infested passage in the dark, especially as there was no certainty of finding our men on the other side, there was nothing to do but turn back. Here again I made the mistake of trying to take a short cut by striking straight across the island instead of sticking to the beach. I never saw the place in daylight which we stumbled into, and so can't say just what it was; it seemed, however, to be a sort of wilderness of reeds peopled with a million seabirds, many of them nesting. The roar of our guns in the battle was as nothing to the bedlam of screams which arose when I went slithering through a lot of eggs and flopped full length into a rising mass of beating wings. They came batting against us in the darkness throughout the several minutes we were groping our way back to the open of the beach.

"It was well after midnight when we got back to where the boats were, and so quite out of the question trying to do anything further in the way of searching for the Huns till daylight. Several of the latter had struggled in and given themselves up, and they told us that the rest were all at the point where they had first come ashore from the Emden, and suffering greatly from hunger and thirst. As we had expected to be putting back to the Sydney within an hour or two of the time we landed, we had little food and water save that in the boats, and this wouldn't have gone very far with the lot of us if it had not been supplemented by the coconuts our young stowaway brought down for us.

"There was not much chance to rest that night on account of the small land-crabs which kept crawling over you the moment you dropped off to sleep, and it was not pleasant to think of how those more or less helpless Huns were faring a few miles farther down the beach. We started off at the first streak of dawn, and reached them by sun-up. The most of them were in even worse condition than I had feared, for it seemed inconceivable to me that they should not have contrived in some way or other to get hold of some coconuts to eat and drink. It turned out that they had not done so, however, and that, as a consequence, a number of them had died of thirst. The worst case, perhaps, was that of the assistant surgeon, whom I told you of as having been wounded and blown overboard by a shell. Delirious from thirst, he had managed to induce a sailor to fetch him a drink of salt water, and had died shortly afterwards as a result of drinking it. All the open wounds, since they had gone from twelve to eighteen hours longer without attention, were in even more terrible condition than those of the men we had found on the Emden the previous day.

"The only one of the lot who seemed to have any hold on himself was the Lieutenant —— I have mentioned. Luckily, he was not injured, and he appeared to have been doing everything he could to help those that were. It must have kept the plucky chap's hands full, for several of them were crazy, and a number of the wounded were too helpless to keep the crabs away. He and one or two of the least knocked out of the seamen had managed to keep these vermin pretty well away from the bodies of the living, but with the dead down along the water's edge they were already having their way.

"Finally, we got all the helpless of the wounded on to stretchers and started on their way to the boats. —— was the greatest help throughout, but I can't say as much for many of the others of the unwounded, who were very grudging in the way they lent a hand. —— put up a stiff protest against going off without burying the dead, declaring that he was not going to leave them there for the crabs to eat up. When I pointed out that we had no implements for digging, and that I needed his help in getting the living off, he saw the reason of it and said he would come along. We did the best we could for the dead by covering them with palm leaves and coral clinkers.

"I made a wide circle around before we left, trying to be sure that none of the living was left behind. The Huns were not quite sure of their numbers, so there was no checking up the thing that way. I am quite positive that no living man was left in that immediate vicinity, and ---- felt equally certain that none had strayed away. This must have been just what did happen, however, for, many weeks later, we had word from the Telegraph people to the effect that, when they landed on North Keeling Island to bury the dead, one of the crab-picked skeletons they found was in a sitting position against the bole of a palm tree. I've never tried to reconstruct the story of what happened, but it must have been rather awful at the best.

"It was rather a problem, calculating how to get every one off in two small boats, one of which had a hole in the bottom. The whaler would still float right side up, however, and we finally managed it by putting the badly wounded, with a pulling crew, in the Sydney's cutter, which was sent to aid us in the morning, and the rest piling into the whaler and sitting in the water. Then a long tow-line was passed to the cutter (long enough to let her get out beyond the breakers before a strain came on it) and she pulled away with the whole procession. ——, in spite of all I could do to induce him to get into the whaler, insisted on swimming out through the breakers and boarding her outside. If he hadn't been starving and thirsting for forty-eight hours I would have put it down as pure swank; as it was, however, I can't believe he was actuated by anything else than a wish to ease off the load on the damaged boat while it was going through the breakers. He was a thoroughly good sport, that ——, and, as I told you, I was a good deal puzzled to account for it until I learned about his being half English.

"We reached the Sydney all right, and the whaler was just being hoisted in when I heard the Captain's voice from the bridge asking where Lieutenant X—— was. I looked up just in time to catch him staring down at me with open-eyed amazement. 'Oh, there he is!' he exclaimed, turning away with a grin on his face. That led me, for the first time in twenty-four hours, to take a look at what I could see of myself without a glass. It was my turn to grin—and to blush. Absolutely the sum total of my wardrobe was my shirt and a seaman's straw hat! Nothing else. To ease my feet from boots after standing on the scorching iron decks of the Emden, I had shifted to an old pair of dancing pumps when I returned to the Sydney and these, in the rush of departure, I had worn ashore. These, and my socks, must have been scoured off among the coral clinkers, and my cap probably went when we stumbled into the sea-birds' roost in the darkness. But where I lost my trousers, and what sailor gave me his hat, I have never been able to make out."

I asked Lieutenant X—— if it was true, as I had heard, that the officers of the victor and vanquished took advantage of the several days they spent together in the Sydney before the Germans were disembarked at Colombo to foregather and talk the battle over.

"Except for the two Captains, who were necessarily thrown together a good deal and who drew a chart of the battle between them, emphatically no," he replied. "The wardroom officers held practically no conversation at all with those from the Emden. On their part there was shown no inclination to talk, and on our part that fact alone would have been enough to prevent any interchanges of a personal nature. It would have seemed rather like 'rubbing it in' if we had tried to draw them out on a subject that couldn't but be a painful one to them. Some of the men yarned together a bit, I believe, but you may be quite assured that (save for the exception I have mentioned) there was nothing of the kind between the officers. There wasn't a lot in common between us at the best."

[II. LIFE IN THE FLEET]

[A BATTLESHIP AT SEA]

The collier had come alongside a little after seven—two hours before daybreak at that time of year—and I awoke in my cabin on the boat deck just abaft the forward turret to the grind of the winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below.

On my way aft to the wardroom for breakfast, I stopped for a moment by a midships hatch, where the commander, grimed to the eyes, stamped his sea-boots and threshed his arms as a substitute for the warming exercise the men were getting behind the shovels and the barrows. He it was who was responsible—partly through systematisation, partly through infusing his own energetic spirit into the men themselves—for the fact that the Zeus held the Blue Ribbon, or the Black Ribbon, or whatever one would call the premier honours of the Grand Fleet for speedy coaling. Not unnaturally, therefore, he was a critical man when it came to passing judgment on the shifting of "Number 1 Welsh Steam" from hold to bunkers, and it was not necessarily to be expected that he would echo my enthusiasm when I told him that this was quite the smartest bit of coaling I had ever seen west of Nagasaki, something quite worth standing, shivering tooth to tooth, with a raw north wind, to be a witness of.

"It's fair," he admitted grudgingly, "only fair. A shade over 300 tons an hour, perhaps. 'Twould have seemed good enough before we put up the Grand Fleet record of 408. Trouble is, they haven't anything to put 'em on their mettle this morning. Now, if some other ship had come within fifty or sixty tons of their record this last week, or if we'd had a rush order to get ready to go to sea—then you might have hoped to see coaling that was coaling."

All through my porridge and eggs and bacon the steady tramp of the barrow-men on the forecastle-deck throbbed along the steel plates of the wardroom ceiling, and it must have been about the time I was spreading my marmalade (real marmalade, not the synthetic substitute one comes face to face with ashore these days) that I seemed to sense a quickening of the movement, not through any rush-bang acceleration, but rather through gradually becoming aware of increased force in action, as when the engines of a steamer speed up from "half" to "full." In a few moments an overalled figure, with a face coal-dusted till it looked like the face of the end-man in a minstrel show, lounged in to remark casually behind the day before yesterday morning's paper that we had just gone on "two hours' notice." A half-hour later, as the gouged-out collier edged jerkily away under the impulse of her half-submerged screw, the commander, a gleam of quiet satisfaction in his steady eyes, remarked that "it wasn't such a bad finish, after all," adding that "the men seemed keen to get her out to sea and let the wind blow through her."

The ship's post-coaling clean up—usually as elaborate an affair as a Turkish bath, with rub down and massage—was no more than a douche with "a lick and a promise." Anything more for a warship putting off into the North Sea in midwinter would be about as superfluous as for a man to wash his face and comb his hair before taking a plunge in the surf.

Once that perfunctory wash-down was over, all traces of rush disappeared. What little remained to be done after that—even including getting ready for action—was so ordered and endlessly rehearsed that nothing short of an enemy salvo or a sea heavy enough to carry away something of importance need be productive of a really hurried movement. Just a shade more smoke from the funnels to indicate the firing of furnaces which had been lying cold, and the taking down or in of a few little harbour "comforts" like stove-pipes and gangways, forecasted imminent departure.

The expression regarding the fleet, squadron, or even the single ship ready to sail at a moment's notice is as much of a figure of speech as is the similar one about the army which is going to fight to the last man. A good many moments must inevitably elapse between the time definite orders come to sail and the actual getting under weigh. But the final preparations can be reduced to such a routine that the ship receiving them can be got ready to sail with hardly more than a ripple of unusual activity appearing in the ebb and flow of the life of those who man her. No river ferry-boat ever cast off her moorings and paddled out on one of her endlessly repeated shuttlings with less apparent effort than the Zeus, when, after gulping some scores of fathoms of Gargantuan anchor chain into her capacious maw, she pivoted easily around in the churning boil of reversed screws, took her place in line, and followed in the wake of the flagship toward the point where a notch in the bare rounded periphery of encircling hills marked the way to the open sea.

Nowhere else in the temperate latitudes is there so strange a meeting and mingling place of airs and waters as at the "Northern Base." The butterfly chases of sunshine and showers even in December and January are suggestive of nothing so much as what a South Pacific Archipelago would be but with fifty or sixty degrees colder temperature. Dancing golden sunmotes were playing spirited cross-tag with slatily sombre cloud-shadows as we nosed out through the mazes of the booms, but with the first stinging slaps of the vicious cross-swells of a turbulent sea, a swirling bank of fog came waltzing over the aimlessly chopping waters, and reared a vaporous wall across our path.

The flagship melted into the milling mists, and dimmed down to an amorphous blur with just enough outline to enable us a sight to correct our position in line. In turn, the towered and pinnacled head-on silhouette of our next astern ship grew soft and shadowy, and where proper perspective would have placed the fourth was a swaying wisp of indeterminate image which might just as well have been an imminently wheeling seagull as a distantly reeling super-dreadnought. The comparison is by no means so ridiculous as it sounds, for only the day before a naval flying-man had told me how he once started to bring his seaplane down on sighting a duck (which was really some hundreds of feet in the air) because he took it for a destroyer, and how, later, he had failed to "straighten out" quickly enough because he thought a trawler was a duck in flight.

The lean grey shadows which slipped ghostily into step with us in the fog-hastened twilight of three o'clock might just as well (had we not known of the rendezvous) have been lurking wolves as protecting sheep-dogs.

"Now that we've picked up our destroyers," said the officer who paced the quarter-deck with me, "we'll be getting on our way. Let's go down to tea."

Smoke, masts, funnels, and wave-washed hulls, the Whistleresque outlines of our swift guardians had blurred to blankness as I looked back from the companion-way, and only a misty golden halo, flashing out and dying down on our port bow, told where the flotilla leader was talking to the flagship.

Tea is no less important a function on a British warship than it is ashore, and nothing short of an action is allowed to interfere with it. Indeed, how the cheerful clink of the teacup was heard in the prelude to the diapason of the guns was revealed to me a few days ago, when the Commander allowed me to read a few personal notes he had written while the light cruiser he was in at the time was returning to port after the Battle of Jutland. "The enemy being in sight," it read, "we prepared for 'Action Stations' and went to tea." A few minutes later, fingers which had crooked on the handles of the teacups were adjusting the nice instruments of precision that laid the guns for what was destined to prove the greatest naval battle in history.

Tea was about as usual with us that day, save that the officers who came in at the change of watch were dressed for business—those from the bridge and conning-tower in oilskins or "lammy" coats and sea-boots, and the engineers in greasy overalls. A few words of "shop"—steam pressure, revolutions, speed, force and direction of the wind, and the like—passed in an undertone between men sitting next each other, but never became general. The sponginess of the new "potato" bread and the excellence of the margarine came in for comment, and some one spoke of having rushed off a letter just before sailing, ordering a recently advertised "self hair-cutter." A discussion as to just how this remarkable contrivance worked followed, the consensus of opinion being that it must be on the safety-razor principle, but that it couldn't possibly be worth the guinea charged. All that I recall having been said of what might be taking us to sea was when an officer likely to know volunteered that we would possibly be in sight of land in the morning, and some speculation arose as to whether it would be Norway or Jutland. A recently joined R.N.V.R. provoked smiles when he suggested Heligoland.

The cabin which I had been occupying in harbour was one located immediately under the conning-tower, and used by the navigating officer when the ship was at sea, the arrangement being that I was to go aft and live in his regular cabin while we were outside. Going forward, after tea, I threw together a few things for my servant to carry back to my temporary quarters. Groping aft in Stygian blackness along the windward side of the ship, I encountered spray in clouds driving across even the lofty fo'c'sle deck. The wind appeared to have shaken off its flukiness as we cleared the headlands, and, blowing with a swinging kick behind it, was rolling up a sea to match. I did not need to be told by the sea-booted sailor whom I bumped on a ladder that it wasn't "goin' t' be no nite fer lam's," to know that there was something lively in the weather line in pickle, probably to be uncorked before morning.

The grate, robbed of its chimney, was cold and empty when I went in for seven o'clock dinner—half an hour earlier than in harbour—and there was just the suggestion of chill in the close air of the wardroom. An engineer-lieutenant who started to reminisce about a winter cruise he had once made in the Arctic was peremptorily hushed up with a request to "talk about something warmer." A yarn about chasing the Königsberg in the lagoons of East Africa was more kindly received, and an R.N.R.'s account of how his ship carried Moslem pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah on their way to Mecca brought a genial glow of warmth with it. There was something strangely cheering in his story of how, when there was a following simoon blowing across the brassy surface of the Red Sea, the Lascar stokers used to go mad with the heat and jump overboard in their delirium. The air seemed less dank and chill after that recital. I ventured a "sudorific" contribution by telling of the way they made "desert storms" in the California movies with the aid of buckets of sand and a "wind machine." The whole table showed interest in this—probably because it was so far removed from "shop"—and sat long over port and coffee planning a "blower" that would discharge both wind and sand—in sufficient quantities to give the "desert storm" illusion over the restricted angle of the movie lens—at the turning of a single crank. One does not need to be long upon a British battleship to find out that the inventive genius of the Anglo-Saxon race is not all confined to the American branch.

Between officers on watch and those resting to relieve, the after-dinner gathering around what had once been a fire was a small and rapidly dwindling one. As I got up to go to my cabin, the captain of marines quieted the pet cockatoo on his shoulder long enough to say, as we would probably be at "Action Stations" early in the morning, I might find it of interest to come up to his turret, where he had a "jolly smart crew." "We usually do 'B.J.1' at daybreak when we're out," he said, "just on the chance that we may flush some sort of a Hun in the early light. Quite like snipe-shooting, you know."

A "snotty" whom I met outside said something about the way the barometer had been chasing its tail on the drop ever since we got under weigh, and when I turned on the light in my cabin I noticed that the arrows on the navigating officer's instrument indicated a fall of thirty points since noon. The keen whistling of the rising wind shrilled with steady insistence, and the wide swinging swells from the open sea were lock-stepping along with a tread that was just beginning to lift the great warship in a swaggering Jack Tar roll.

On the floor of the cabin was a flannel bulldog with "manipulable" legs and a changeable expression. Its name was "Grip" (so "the pilot" had told me), and it had been his constant companion ever since it was presented to him on the eve of his first sailing as a midshipman. The only time they had ever been separated was on the occasion a colleague, who had borrowed it as a mascot in a game of poker, threw it overboard in chagrin when the attempt to woo fickle fortune proved a failure. Luckily, the ship was lying in a river, and the dog floated back on the next tide, and was fished out with no damage to anything but the compression bladder which worked its bark. The Navigating Officer left the companionable little beast in his cabin, so he explained, to give it the proper home touch for my first night at sea with the British Navy. Cocking "Grip" up in the genial glow of the electric grate in an attitude of "watchful waiting," I crawled into my bunk, pulled up the adjustable side-rail, and was rocked to sleep to the even throb of the turbines and the splish-splash of the spray against the screwed-down scuttle.

"We aren't having 'B.J.1' this morning," some one explained facetiously when I reported for "duty" at seven o'clock, "because we already have 'B.B.8.'" This last meant "Boreas Blowing Eight," he said, and I was just "nautical" enough to know that a wind of "8" in the Beaufort scale indicated something like fifty or sixty miles an hour.

"No U-boat will want to be getting within 'periscopic' distance of the surface of the sea that's running this morning," said a young engineer-lieutenant who had been in the submarine service, "and even if one was able to get a sight, its torpedo would have to have some kind of a 'kangaroo' attachment to jump the humps and hollows with. Fact is, it's rather more than our destroyers are entirely happy with, and we've just slowed down by several knots to keep 'em from dipping up the brine with their funnels. Hope nothing turns up that they have to get a jump on for. A destroyer's all right on the surface, but no good as a submarine; yet an under-sea diver is just what she is if you drive her more'n twelve into a sea like the one that's kicking up now. Barometer's down sixty points since last night, and still going."

Breakfast that morning had little in common with the similar festal occasion at Base where, fresh bathed and shaven, each immaculate member of the mess comes down and sits over his coffee and paper much (save for the fact that the journal is two days old) as at home. Several places besides those of the officers actually on watch were empty, and by no means a few of those who did appear had that introspective look which is so unmistakable a sign of all not being well within the citadel. Even the Poldhu—the daily wireless bulletin of the Navy—had a "shot-to-pieces" look where "static" or some other esoteric difficulty was responsible for gaps in several items of the laconic summary. The last word in super-dreadnoughts does not have table-racks and screwed-down chairs. She isn't supposed to lose her dignity to the extent of needing anything in the way of such vulgar makeshifts. The fact remains that if the mighty Zeus had chanced to have these things, she would have saved herself some china and several officers from "nine-pinning" down one side of a table and piling up in a heap at the end.

With the staid wardroom doing things like this, it was only to be expected that the mess decks would be displaying a certain amount of shiftiness. I was, however, hardly prepared for the gay seascape which unrolled before me when I had worried my way through the intricate barricade of a watertight bulkhead door in trying to skirmish forward to the ladders leading to the upper decks. For several reasons—ventilation and guns have something to do with it—it is not practicable to close up certain parts of a battleship against heavy seas to anything like the same extent as with the passenger quarters in a modern liner. It is only in very rough weather that this may give rise to much trouble, but—well, we were having rough weather that morning, and that little bit of the Roaring Forties I had stumbled into was a consequence of it.

Oilskinned, "sou'westered," sea-booted men, sitting and lying on benches and tables, was the first strange thing that came to my attention; and then, with a swish and a gurgle, the foot-deep wave of dirty water which had driven them there caught me about the knees, and sat me down upon a pile of hammocks, or, rather, across the inert bodies of two men (boys I found them to be presently) who had been cast away there in advance of me. Clambering over their unprotesting anatomies, I gained dry land at a higher level, and at a tactically defensible point, where a half-Nelson round a stanchion steadfastly refused to give way under the double back-action shuffle with which the next roll tried to break it. With two good toe-holds making me safe from practically anything but a roll to her beams' ends, I was free to survey the shambles at my leisure. Then I saw how the havoc was being wrought.

With a shuddering crash, the thousand-ton bludgeon of a wave struck along the port side, immediately followed by the muffled but unmistakable sound of water rushing in upon the deck above. To the accompaniment of a wild slap-banging, this sound came nearer, and then, as she heeled far to starboard under the impulse of the blow that had been dealt her, a solid spout of green water came tumbling down a hatchway—the fount from which the mobile tidal wave swaggering about the deck took replenishment. Two men, worrying a side of frozen Argentine bullock along to the galley from the cold-storage hold, timing (or, rather, mis-timing) their descent to coincide with that of the young Niagara, reached the mess-deck in the form of a beef sandwich. Depositing that delectable morsel in an inert mass at the foot of the ladder, the briny cascade, with a joyous whoof, rushed down to reinforce the tidal wave and do the rounds of the mess.

I was now able to observe that the sailors, marooned on the benches, tables, and other islands of refuge, were roughly dividable into three classes—the prostrate ones, who heaved drunkenly to the roll and took no notice of the primal chaos about them; the semi-prostrate ones, who were still able to exhibit mild resentment when the tidal wave engulfed or threatened to engulf them; and the others—some lounging easily, but the most perched or roosted on some dry but precarious pinnacle—who quaffed great mugs of hot tea and bit hungrily into hunks of bread and smoked fish. These latter—hard-bit tars they were, with faces pickled ruddy by the blown brine of many windy watches—took great joy of the plight of their mates, guffawing mightily at the dumb misery in the hollow eyes of the "semi-prostrates" and the dead-to-the-world roll of "prostrates" with the reelings of the ship.

If there is one thing in the world that delights the secret heart of the average landsman more than the sad spectacle of a parson in the divorce court, it is the sight of a sea-sick sailor. Since, however, the average landsman reads his paper far oftener than he sails the stormy seas, the former delectation is probably granted him rather more frequently than the latter. At any rate, the one landsman in No. X Mess of H.M.S. Zeus that morning saw enough sea-sick sailors to keep the balance on the parsons' side for the duration of the war, and perhaps even longer.

I made the acquaintance of one of the "prostrates" marooned on the beach of my hammock island through rescuing him from the assaults of a tidal-wave-driven rum tub. He was nursing a crushed package of gumdrop-like lozenges, one of which he offered me, murmuring faintly that they had been sent him by his sister, who had found them useful while boating at Clacton-on-Sea last summer. Endeavouring to start a conversation, I asked him—knowing the Zeus had been present at that mighty struggle—if they had had weather like this at the Battle of Jutland. A sad twinkle flickered for a moment in the corner of the eye he rolled up to me, and, with a queer pucker of the mouth which indicated that he must have had a sense of humour in happier times, he replied that he had only joined the ship the week before: "'Tis my first time at sea, sir, and I've come out to—to—this."

I gave him the best advice I could by telling him to pull himself together and get out on deck to the fresh air; but neither spirit nor flesh was equal to the initiatory effort. Looking back while I waited near the foot of a ladder for a Niagara to exhaust itself, the last I saw of him he was pushing mechanically aside with an unresentful gesture a lump of salt pork which one of the table-roosting sailors dangled before his nose on a piece of string.

Three flights up I clambered my erratic way before, on the boat deck in the lee of a launch, I found a vantage sufficiently high and sheltered to stand in comfort. The sight was rich reward for the effort. Save for an ominous bank of nimbus to westward, the wind had swept the coldly blue vault of the heavens clear of cloud, and the low-hanging winter sun to south'ard was shooting slanting rays of crystalline brightness across a sea that was one wild welter of cotton wool. I have seen—especially in the open spaces of the mid-Pacific, where the waves have half a world's width to get going in—heavier seas and higher seas than were running that morning, but rarely—not even in a West Indian hurricane—more vicious ones—seas more palpably bent on going over, or through a ship that got in their way, rather than under, as proper waves should do. And in this obliquity they were a good deal more than passively abetted by a no less viciously inclined wind, which I saw repeatedly lift off the top of what it appeared to think was a lagging wave, and drive it on ahead to lace the heaving water with a film of foam or dust the deck of a battleship with snowy brine.

But it was the ships themselves that furnished the real show. Of all craft that ply the wet seaways, the battleship is the least buoyant, the most "unliftable," the most set on bashing its arrogant way through a wave rather than riding over it, and—with the increasing armour and armaments, and the crowding aboard of various weighty contrivances hitherto unthought of—this characteristic wilfulness has tended to increase rather than decrease since the war. As a consequence, a modern battleship bucking its way into a fully developed mid-winter gale is one of the nearest approaches to the meeting of two irresistible bodies ever to be seen.

The conditions for the contest were ideal that morning. Never were seas more determined to ride over battleships, never were battleships more determined to drive straight through seas. Both of them had something of their way in the end, and neither entirely balked the other; but, drawn as it was, that battle royal of Titans was a sight for the gods.

The battleships were in line abreast as I came up on deck, and holding a course which brought the wind and seas abeam. We were all rolling heavily, but with the rolls not sufficiently "synchronised" with the waves—which were charging down without much order or rhythm—to keep from dipping them up by the ton. If the port rail was low—as happened when the ship was sliding down off the back of the last wave—the next wave rolled in-board, and (save where the mast, funnels, and higher works amidships blocked the way) drove right on across and off the other side. If the port side had rolled high as an impetuous sea struck, the latter expended its full force against the ship, communicating a jar from foretop to stokeholds as shivering as the shock of a collision with another vessel.

Our own quarter-deck was constantly swept with solid green water, and even the higher fo'c'sle deck caught enough of the splash-up to make traversing it a precarious operation. But it was only by watching one of the other ships that it was possible to see how the thing really happened. If it was the wallowing monster abeam to port, the striking of a sea was signalised by sudden spurts of spray shooting into the air all the way along her windward side, the clouds of flying water often going over the funnels and bridge, and not far short of the foretop. She would give a sort of shuddering stumble as the weight of the impact made itself felt, and then—running from bow to stern and broken only by the upper works, and occasionally, but not always, by the turrets—a ragged line of foam appeared, quickly resolving itself into three or four hundred feet of streaking cascades which came pouring down over the starboard side into the sea. Watching the vessel abeam to starboard, the phenomenon was repeated in reverse order. Save for the swaying foretop against the sky, either ship at the moment of being swept by a wave was suggestive of nothing so much as a great isolated black rock on a storm-bound coast.

But the most remarkable thing about it all was the astonishingly small effect this really heavy weather had upon the handling of the ships. Evidently they had been built to withstand weather as well as to fight, for they manœuvred and changed formation with almost the same meticulous exactitude as in protected waters. A gunnery officer assured me that—except for momentary interference in training some of the lighter guns—the fighting efficiency of the ship would hardly be effected by all their plungings and the clouds of flying spray. Their speed was, naturally, somewhat diminished in bucking into a head sea, yet no lack of seaworthiness would prevent (should the need arise) their being driven into that same head sea at the full power of their mighty engines. The reason we were proceeding at somewhat reduced speed was to ease things off a bit for the destroyers.

Ah! And what of the destroyers? There they all were, the faithful sheep-dogs, when I came up, and at first blush I got the impression that they were making rather better weather of it than the battleships. That this was only an optical illusion (caused by the fact that they were farther away and more or less obscured by the waves) I discovered as soon as I climbed to the vantage of the after super-structure, and put my glass upon the nearest of the bobbing silhouettes of mast and funnel. Then I saw at once, though not, indeed, any such spray clouds or cascades of solid water as marked the course of the battleships, that she was plainly a labouring ship. A destroyer is not made to pulverise a wave in the bull-at-a-gate fashion of a battleship, and any exigency that compels her to adopt that method of progression is likely to be attended by serious consequences. If one of the modern type she will ride out almost any storm that blows if left to her own devices; but force her into it at anything above half-speed, and it is asking for trouble. Even before the destroyer I was watching began disappearing—hull, funnels, and all but the mastheads—between crest and crest of the onrushing waves, it was plain that both she and her sisters were having all they wanted; and I was not surprised when word was flashed to us that one of our brave little watch-dogs was suffering from a wave-smashed steering geer, and had asked permission to make for port if necessary. The permission was, I believe, granted, but—carrying on with some sort of a makeshift or other—her plucky skipper managed to stick it out and see the game through to the end.

There were a number of other ships in difficulties in that neck of the North Sea at this moment, and every now and then—by the wireless—word would come to us from one of them. Mostly they were beyond the horizon, but two were in sight. One (two smoke-blackened "jiggers" and a bobbing funnel-top beneath a bituminous blur to the east) was apparently a thousand-ton freighter. An officer told me that she had been signalling persistently since daybreak for assistance; but when I asked him if we were not going to help her, he greeted the question with an indulgent smile.

"Assistance will go to her in due course," he said, "but it will not be from us. That kind of a thing might have been done in the first month or two of the war, but the Huns soon made it impossible. Now, any battleship that would detach a destroyer at the call of any ship of doubtful identity would be considered as deliberately asking for what she might jolly well get—a torpedo."

Another ship which was plainly having a bad time was some kind of a cruiser whose long row of funnels was punching holes in a segment of skyline. There was a suggestion of messiness forward, but nothing we attached any importance to until word was wirelessed that she had just had her bridge carried away by a heavy sea, and that the navigating officer had been severely injured. The latter was known personally to several of the wardroom officers, and at lunch speculation as to what hurt he might have received led to an extremely interesting discussion of the "ways of a wave with a man"; also of the comparative seaworthiness of light cruisers and destroyers. The things that waves have done to all three of them since the war began (to say nothing of the things all three have done in spite of waves) is a story of its own.

The barometer continued to fall all day, with the wind rising a mile of velocity for every point of drop. The seas, though higher and heavier, were also more regular and less inclined to catch the ship with her weather-rail down. The low cloud-bank of mid-forenoon had by early dusk grown to a heavens-obscuring mask of ominous import, and, by dark, snow was beginning to fall. The ship was reeling through the blackness of the pit when I clambered to the deck after dinner, so that the driving spray and ice-needles struck the face before one saw them by even the thousandth of a second. The darkness was such as one almost never encounters ashore, and it was some time before I accustomed myself to close my eyes against the unseen missiles (when turning to windward) without deliberately telling myself to do so in advance.

Into the Stygian pall the vivid golden triangles from the signal searchlights on the bridge flashed like the stab of a flaming sword. One instant the darkness was almost palpable enough to lean against; the next, the silhouette of funnels and foretop pricked into life, but only to be quenched again before the eye had time to fix a single detail. So brief was any one flash that the action in each transient vision was suspended as in an instantaneous photograph, yet the effect of the quick succession of flashes was of continuous motion, like the kinema. From where I stood, the heart of the fluttering golden halos, where a destroyer winked back its answer, were repeatedly obliterated by the inky loom of a wave, but the reflection was always thrown high enough into the mist to carry the message.

Returning to the wardroom by the way of the mess-decks, I saw the youth who had offered me the anti-seasick lozenges in the morning. Now quite recovered, he was himself playing the pork-on-a-string game with one of the only two "prostrates" still in sight. The following morning—though the weather, if anything, was worse than ever—all evidences of "indisposition" had disappeared.

For some days more we prowled the wet seaways, and then, well along into a night that was foggier, colder, and windier than the one into which we had steamed out, we crept along a heightening headland, nosed in the wake of the flagship through a line of booms, and opened a bay that was dappled with the lights of many ships. A few minutes later, and the raucous grind of a chain running out through a hawse-pipe signalled that we were back at the old stand.

And since, like all the rest of our sisters of the Grand Fleet, we were expected to be ready to put to sea on x hours' notice, there was nothing for it but that the several hundred tons of coal which the mighty Zeus had been snorting out in the form of smoke to contaminate the ozone of a very sizeable area of the North Sea should be replenished without delay. A collier edged gingerly out of a whirling snow-squall and moored fast alongside as I groped forward to retake possession of my cabin under the bridge, and I went to sleep that night to the grind of the winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below.