Mücke of the Emden
I
THE films, as films, were most excellent, but their motive was so obvious that the rather representative and not especially ‘hyphenated’ New York audience, which had plainly come for entertainment, not propaganda, was becoming increasingly restive under the cumulative effect of the ‘kulturine’ capsules which were being slipped in with the pictures.
Beaming German soldiers helped tottering old Belgian refugees over débris and mud puddles, or swung obligingly out of line to round up a Polish peasant girl’s cows. In ‘a captured city in the West’ a helmeted Uhlan shared his loaf of black bread with a hollow-eyed street urchin, and the film snapped sharply off when a comrade in the background started to hustle some weary stragglers on their way. ‘ Russian Prisoners are Allowed to Rest on Their Way to the Concentration Camps,’ was the caption preceding the picture of a bayonet-ringed group of Cossacks sitting by the roadside; and ‘The Drawn Features of the Kaiser Show how Terribly He Feels the Suffering Imposed by the War,’ introduced another film, in which the War Lord, in the uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars, strode gloomily down the line of a drawn-up regiment.
‘Too much “Gott mit Uns” and “Deutschland über Alles” for mine,’ snorted a man in front of me, reaching down for his hat. ‘Why don’t they show us Liége and Louvain and round out the picture?’
Then, suddenly and with characteristic kinematic carelessness of sequence, the scene changed, and with it the atmosphere of the theatre. A quay by the waterside was being shown, with an eager, expectant crowd waiting for something that was about to happen. That sunlight, those fez-crowned heads, that stretch of dancing water with domes and minarets etched against the skyline above the opposite shore—I had missed the screenful of words that told what was coming, but I knew in an instant that I was standing on the water-front at Constantinople and looking across the Bosphorus to Scutari and Asia.
It was the breathless interest of the waiting crowd that surged out over the darkened footlights and pervaded the theatre. It was all so real, so unaffected, so ‘unkultured,’ that one knew instinctively that the thing, unlike so much that had gone before, was not being done for effect — to fan the flame of Teutonic pride or ‘educate’ the neutral. And so the spirit of the picture entered the audience, and we who, a moment before, half amazed, half disgusted, were shifting impatiently in our seats and glancing at our watches, now leaned forward in eager anticipation. We had become one with the expectant crowd by the quay-side.
Presently the object for which they — we were waiting, a gaunt destroyer, stripped for action, slipped into view, and, steering a wavering course across the swift current of the intercontinental strait, came nosing in beside the quay. Now, standing at attention amidships, at the head of the gangway, an erect white-clad figure was discernible; and even before the blurred features quivered to life in the sharpening focus, we were adding our cheers to those of the gesticulating Orientals on the quay.
The man in front of me — the one who had been on the point of stamping out a minute before — was applauding with hands and feet, and I, clapping vigorously myself but without knowing just why, was on the point of leaning forward to ask him what it was all about, when the stout German lady overflowing the chair on my right suddenly gave vent to an explosive ‘Ach, Mücke! Mücke!’ and, allowing her lorgnette to fall to the floor, began smiting her own plump palms together.
So it was Mücke we were welcoming? No wonder the theatre was in an uproar; no wonder it seemed quite the natural thing that my own brogans should be joining in the tumult of applause, and that those hearty ‘Bravas’ should be coming from the throats of the dark-faced chaps on my left who were so unmistakably Italian. ‘Surely Mücke is entitled to a hand from everybody.’ ‘Don’t let him go with that perfunctory sword salute!’ ‘Call him back!’ ‘We want Mücke!’ No one spoke these words, so far as I heard, but they express the spirit of the crowd exactly. It was no shadow swashbuckler we were applauding, but — so complete the illusion — a very real hero of flesh and blood; and for a moment one was just a little indignant that he would not stop and make a speech.
On flickered the film; on rolled the narrow black-and-white strip of Turkish panorama. Now young Ulysses marched off the quay at the head of his squad of bluejackets; now they tramped in a procession — with Turkish cavalry and Turkish boy scouts — down a flag-bedecked boulevard; now they approached a shamiana under which a group of officers was waiting; and now (one knew instinctively that this was the climax of more than the little march up from the quay) Mücke halted before a man in the uniform of an admiral of the German navy, clicked his heels together, touched the hilt of his sword to his forehead, and stood at attention.
Just so — a hundred times on this warship or that — had I seen a middy or an ensign report for duty to the officer of the day; and that, in fact, was just what Mücke was doing. That he happened to have zigzagged over eight or ten thousand miles of sea and land, braving storm and blockade, desert tribes and fever, did n’t make the least difference in the way the thing was done. The Emden was a shell-shattered hulk on the rocks of Cocos Island, and a few of her officers and men who had slipped through the meshes of the British net had hurried back to their nearest superior to report for duty. That was all.
Again the film changed, and in an instant the massive bulk of von Hindenburg appeared on the stone steps of a captured Polish palace. Bullnecked, square-headed, heavy-jowled, the incarnation of brutal, relentless force and efficiency, — of Prussianism, — he stood and glowered down upon us till one stirred restlessly in his seat and glanced uneasily at his neighbor. The applause — Mücke’s applause — died away, and only the click-clack of the picture-projector was audible where tumultuous acclaim had rung a few moments before. The stout German lady sighed heavily and sank back into her seat. ‘ If we only had more of the Mückes and not so many of the Hindenburgs,’ I heard her to say to a companion as I edged past them to the aisle, ‘perhaps this war would not have made so many people hate the Germans.’
The sentiments were not quite parallel, but the words recalled those of a young British subaltern whom, a fortnight previously, I had shouldered in the crowd around a shot-pierced searchlight and a rusty naval gun — relics saved from the Emden — on exhibition on London’s Horse Guards Parade.
‘Now those two were real gentlemen,’ he said, with enthusiasm, after we had conversed for a few minutes about the Emden. ‘If only the German army had the instincts of Müller and Mücke this bally war would be something like a fair sporting proposition instead of such a beastly bore.’
II
The official account of the stirring and picturesque adventures of the Emden is hardly likely to be given to the world until the gates of Captain Müller’s comfortable English prison swing open for him at the end of the war; but in the interviews, a lecture or two, and a booklet by Lieutenant Mücke all the salient features have been covered, and it is from translations of these that we will endeavor to follow the fortunes of the doughty young Teuton whose courage, resource, and devotion to duty have won scarcely less admiration in the countries of his enemies than in the Fatherland.
Within a day or two after the outbreak of the war the Emden, in pursuance of the commerce-destroying plan which the German Admiralty had worked out to its least details many years before, slipped away from Tsingtau and headed for the South Pacific to join the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Nüremberg. It was a later order which turned her off to the Indian Ocean to find both her glory and her grave.
‘ In Tsingtau,’ wrote Mücke, ' we had supplied ourselves with all the things we could think of. The first officer takes the place of the housewife in many ways, and has to look out for all details concerning equipment and provisions.’ But soap, it appears, had been overlooked, so that the men of the Emden were shortly in a position where they had to consider washing an occupation de luxe. However, the first ship sunk, on September 11, carried enough soap, ‘in the great impulse of cleanliness of the English,’ to last the Germans for a year. This was the Lovatt, a British transport, which had promptly hoisted the Union Jack under the impression that the Emden was an ‘English-boat.’ ‘The silly face of its captain, which he made after we had hoisted our flag and ordered him to stay with us, I would regret not to have seen,’ observes Mücke; and adds that ‘for the numerous stables for horses on this boat we had no appreciation, and a half hour later we had submitted the question to the sharks.’
Business was brisk for the Emden during the next few days, and there was one occasion on which she had five or six steamers (Mücke has forgotten the exact number) hove to and ready to sink at one place. ‘This happened so,’ writes Mücke: ‘a steamer came along and was stopped. Ten men and an officer went over to it. These got the ship ready to sink and saw that the passengers were all removed. While we were still occupied with this boat, appeared the top of another mast on the horizon. We did not need to hurry at all; the ships seemed to come by themselves to us. When one came near enough, the Emden made it a friendly signal, which tempted it on to join the other boats. And by the time this one was prepared for sinking, another mast-top would appear.’
Mücke’s account of the manner of sinking a prize is exceedingly graphic, with all its Teutonic exactness. ‘It is a queer feeling for a seaman to see a ship sinking, and we who were used to helping each ship in need were always touched by it. The destroying was usually done in this way: We went down to the engine-room and removed the covers of pipes leading outside. In rushed the water in jets as high as a man. The watertight door of the boilerroom was then opened, to allow that compartment to be flooded. If there was cause for haste, other holes were opened by explosives. For a time the ship would rock back and forth as if it did not know exactly how to behave. Always deeper and deeper it sank, until the upper deck touched the water. Then it acted like a body taking its last breath. The bow went down first, the masts struck the water, and the screws were raised in the air. The funnels blew out the last smoke and coal-dust; for an instant the ship stood on end, and then shot down to the depths like a heavy stone. After half a minute greetings from the depths would begin to arrive. Long pieces of wood came up vertically, like an arrow, jumping several yards in the air. In the end the place where the ship sank was marked by a large oil-spot and a few smashed boats, beams, life-preservers, and the like. Then it was time for the Emden to make for the next mast-top.'
In the Berliner Tageblatt’s account of the adventures of the Emden Mücke’s strictures against some of the captains of the captured steamers are so strong, and of such a nature, as to incline a person acquainted with the bluff British merchant-marine skipper seriously to doubt their credibility; but there is a circumstantiality in the remarks attributed to the captain of the Kabinga which gives them all of the ear-marks of truth.
‘On the Kabinga,5 Miicke is quoted as saying, ‘the captain had his wife and youngster with him. He was inclined at first to be disagreeable, but afterwards he grew confidential, like all captains, called us “Old chap,” gave the lieutenant a nice new oilskin, and, as we finally let the Kabinga go, wrote us a letter of thanks. They all gave us three cheers as they steamed away. “ Come to Calcutta some time!” was the last thing the captain said, “and catch the pilots so that those [unprintable seaman’s epithet] fellows will feel something of the war too.”’
Any one who knows anything of the feeling cherished by the British India skipper for the lordly Hoogly River pilot — the most highly paid and the most autocratic of all the pilots of the seven seas — will also know that this is just the sort of thing one of the former would say on such an occasion.
At the end of ten days practically every steamer in the northern Indian Ocean was either at the bottom of the sea or held in port by its apprehensive owners, so, in lieu of other game, the audacious Emden took a tilt at the oil-tanks of Madras. Sure in his knowledge of the antique guns which defended the historic Indian port, Müller steamed in, with all lights out, to within 3000 metres of the shore. ‘The harbor light burned peacefully,’ writes Mücke, ‘and made navigation easy. Our targets, the red-and-white-striped oil-tanks, could be plainly discerned. A few shells, a quick flash of blue-yellow flame, and the tanks were vomiting red jets from the shot-holes. Then a great black cloud of smoke arose, and, according to the proverb, “Variety is the spice of life,” we had this time sent a few millions up into the air instead of down into the depths. From Madras a few shots were discharged at us, but without any aim, and the fire of the burning oil-tanks lighted us for ninety miles on our way.’
The Tyweric, sunk but two hours after it had left Colombo, gave the Emden late news of the world through the evening papers of the Cingalese capital. The German cruiser appeared to be the principal topic of local news, and her officers learned, among other things, that their ship had been sunk at two widely separated points, and was being hotly pursued at another. Mücke waxes both facetious and ironic in his account of the sinking of an English sugar steamer very close to the coast of Ceylon.
‘The captain, because of the fact that he was captured almost under a British searchlight, was in such bad humour that he resisted us. The sad result of his patriotism was that he was not even allowed to bring so much as an extra handkerchief away with him. Within five minutes his steamer was cleared and its crew aboard our Lümpensämmler. [The latter term, which may be roughly translated as “rag-collector” or “rascal-collector,” was the facetious name given by the Germans to one of the prizes which they always kept in attendance upon the Emden to carry the prisoners from sunk steamers.] The captain and the engineer had the honor of spending their voyage on the Emden in separate cells, and ten minutes later the sugar steamer sweetened the supper of the sharks. This captain, as we learned later from the papers, told some nice “ robber-stories ” about the Emden, and said she was a dirty, scratched, and damaged old boat. Had I only known that so high a visitor was to come to us, my pride as first officer would certainly have prompted me to have the deck scrubbed and painted. This noble soul also said that our crew looked starved and depressed; but surely this was not fair to the supply of English steamers we had enjoyed.’
Ten or a dozen more steamers were sunk by the Emden during the next three weeks, and then she slipped away from the sea-lanes that she had terrorized, to rest and refit. This took her to Diego Garcia, an isolated rock in the South Ocean where two or three lonely Britons were holding an almost uncharted outpost of Empire by running a plantation. Here occurred a most delicious little episode. ‘As we dropped anchor,’ writes Mücke, ‘there came an Englishman, his arms loaded with presents for us, and his eyes wet with tears of welcome. He had not yet heard of the war, as the island received its mail only once every half year by schooner. He asked us to fix his motorboat, which was out of commission. This we did gladly. Then, without telling him anything of the terrible condition the world was in at present, we bade him good-bye and sailed away. His mail was due in fourteen days, and then, perhaps, he may have learned to whom he brought his presents.’
Shipping was spread thin along the trade routes when the Emden returned again to the attack, and two or three steamers sunk in the vicinity of Miniko were the sum of her bag for a week’s cruising. This monotonous life began to pall upon the men of the raider, and, as Mücke naïvely put it, they ‘felt the stirring of desire to make the acquaintance of real warships. We knew through the papers,’ he writes, ‘that sixteen English, French and Japanese men-of-war were using up their coal in a vain search for us, and, obligingly, we decided to visit them in their own harbor.’
The Penang raid was the crowning achievement of the Emden’s career, and, as it proved, the final one. It was a fitting ‘swan-song.’ Penang, a British Crown Colony, like Singapore, Hongkong, and one or two other ports of the Far East, is located on a small island, with its harbor formed by the narrow strait which separates the island from the mainland. For a mile or two this strait is no wider than the Hudson at Grant’s Tomb, and at its narrowest place, crowning a little point which reaches out toward the palmfringed foreshore of the Malay Peninsula, is a picturesque old stone fort which dates back to the days when the Portuguese held the Spice Islands and fought the British and the Dutch for the mastery of the Orient. Old bronze guns peeped from its crumbling ports, and did brave service as hobby-horses when the ayahs from the officers’ quarters brought out the babies for their afternoon promenade. If any modern guns had been mounted about the harbor, it may be taken for granted that the Emden was fully informed both as to their power and location.
The raider’s only chance of a successful raid upon a harbor in which it was more than likely to encounter superior force was to creep in unobserved, strike suddenly, and withdraw in the confusion of the surprise. By this time the profile of the Emden was up in the chartroom of every warship and merchantman plying the Eastern seas. The resourceful Teutons, knowing this, hit upon the expedient of altering that profile. A fourth smoke-stack of painted canvas had been ready for weeks against just such an emergency, and when set up in line with the three real ones made the raider appear, in anything but the broad light of day, an almost exact counterpart of a well-known type of British armored cruiser which was being extensively employed in the pursuit of the Emden.
With all lights out, the disguised German warship crept in toward the narrow strait which forms the harbor of Penang. The arrival was timed to the minute to meet the first forerunning streaks of dawn. Complete darkness would have made it impossible to navigate in the restricted seaway, while daylight would have meant discovery. The half-light of the breaking day suited the raider’s purpose to a nicety. At first only fisher-boats were seen; then a mass of merchant shipping unfolded, and, finally, looming darkly at only a couple of hundred metres distance, the silhouette of the Russian cruiser Schemtschuk took shape against the brightening east.
‘On board the Russian everybody was busy sleeping,’ observes Mücke. ‘We fired a torpedo at its stern. It was lifted by the detonation half a metre, and then began to sink slowly. Following the torpedo, we directed a hail of fire at the fore-deck, where the crew was sleeping. Soon this part of the ship looked like a sieve, and we could see through the holes the fires that were raging inside. Meanwhile, we sailed by the sinking ship and turned ready to run. Now we were being shot at from three sides — from the Schemtschuk and from two other directions which we could not exactly determine. We heard the whistling of the shells and saw the spots where they plunged into the water.’
A second torpedo finished the Russian cruiser, and the Emden turned to meet its new foes. Now the French destroyer, D’Iberville, was descried; now a cruiser was reported coming in, and now a torpedo boat. The supposed cruiser turned out to be a merchantman, but the torpedo boat, the French Mousquet, was a real menace in the narrow channel. Disdaining the obsolete D’Iberville, the Emden steamed to meet the oncoming Mousquet, which was disposed of in three broadsides. Picking up thirty-three survivors from the water, the unscathed raider slipped out of the harbor and made for the open sea from which it had come but a short half hour before. The night mists were lifting now, but there was left afloat in Penang no ship swift enough to pursue the audacious marauder.
III
Twelve days later, on the ninth of November, the Emden landed a force under Lieutenant Mücke to destroy the wireless station at Keeling — sometimes called Cocos — Island. The little British colony received the heavily armed enemy philosophically, and just before Mücke began putting the radio apparatus out of commission the operator congratulated him upon having been awarded the Iron Cross. ‘How do you know I have the Iron Cross?’ asked the surprised German. ‘I have just caught the message,’ was the answer. It was the last one received at Keeling for some time.
Scarcely was the work of destroying the station completed, when Mücke heard the Emden’s siren signaling him to return at once. Rushing his men into the launch, he started for his ship, only to see the Emden’s anchor wound frantically in and the cruiser steam away at top speed. At first he thought that it was going to meet a collier, but just before the cruiser disappeared its Gefechtsflagge — the battle-pennant — was broken out, and columns of water flung high in the air told that guns of equal or greater power than the Emden’s own were feeling for their range. The raider was nearing the end of its far-trailed tether.
Crushing down his chagrin at being thus helplessly marooned while his ship and captain were fighting for their lives, Mücke returned to the shore, hoisted the German flag, mounted his four machine-guns and declared the island under martial law. Not until a trench had been dug and preparations made to resist a landing from the enemy warship, did he find time to climb to a house-top and endeavor to follow the distant sea-duel.
His account of the fight between the Emden and Sydney is incomplete, disjointed, inaccurate, and not especially fair, and I am not setting it down here. The raider put up a game fight against a swifter and more heavily armed adversary. It was foredoomed from the moment the speedy Australian cruiser picked up its smoke-trail, and its finish was not the least glorious moment of an unparalleled career.
Lieutenant Mücke was destined to receive two shocks on this eventful ninth of November, both from the English. The first was the sinking of the Emden, which, though staggering, was quite comprehensible. The second shock — but let Mücke tell the story himself. ‘The battle over, I went back to the people on the island. Their behavior was characteristic. While we had all kinds of things to do to put the strand in a proper state of defense, and the battle was but a few minutes over, one of them came to me and exclaimed, “Do you play tennis? We always play about this time of day.” Then one of them told me that they were really very glad that their cables to Australia were out of commission, as it would save them many hours of extra work every day.’ Mücke’s contempt struggles with his surprise, but the incident leaves one fairly safe in assuming of the English and German minds, that, as Kipling says of East and West, ‘never the twain shall meet.’
When Mücke and his party landed at Keeling they passed a small schooner anchored in the bay, which he marked for sinking when time permitted on the ground that she was ‘enemy shipping.’ Luckily for him that opportunity did not offer, for if the Ayesha had been sent to the bottom, it is certain that the Germans would never have left the island alive except as British prisoners. Fearing the return of the Sydney, Mücke made up his mind to take his little band and run for one of the Dutch islands of Malaysia. The English outdid themselves in speeding their guests on the way; Mr. Ross, the genial owner of the ship and the island, bade them good-bye with the comforting words, ‘The bottom of the little schooner is rotten, but I wish you a pleasant voyage.’
To deceive the English, Mücke steered westerly, as though heading for East Africa, until out of sight of Keeling, and then put about and slanted up for Padang, a Dutch settlement in Sumatra. The Ayesha, which was of about a hundred tons and had formerly carried copra from Keeling to Batavia, proved a first-class sea-going boat. Her gear was in atrocious shape, howover, and it was ‘ touch-and-go ’ all the way to the Dutch Indies. The water in three of her four tanks turned out to be ‘rotten’ and quite unfit to drink, and only a timely tropical shower saved the party from severe suffering from thirst. Storms alternated with calms during the latter portion of the voyage, and on a number of occasions the men were out in boats trying to tow the schooner a few miles nearer its goal.
Sighting Sumatra on the 27th of November, Mücke sailed the Ayesha into the three-mile zone, hoisted the German war-flag, and demanded of the captain of a Dutch destroyer which had been following him that he be allowed a warship’s rights of twenty-four hours in Padang to provision and refit. After much parleying, the Dutch finally allowed the Ayesha to drop anchor in Padang, but that was about the extent of their concessions. ‘The principal person in Padang,’ observes Mücke, ‘was the harbor master, a Belgian born, and naturally we could not expect from him any great amiability. The Ayesha did not seem good enough for him, and he acted as if he was in a coal-cellar until I gave him to understand that he was on a warship of His Majesty, the Kaiser.’
As Mücke’s men had landed at Keeling in their oldest uniforms, they were in rags by this time, and their leader confesses to an ‘insane desire to make again the acquaintance of the toothbrush and soap.’ But the Dutch allowed them only water, provisions, and some tackle and sails, and the Ayesha was headed back to the open sea in not much better plight than when she arrived. ‘My men were literally in their “paradise suits,”’ says Mücke,
‘ and I had only one sock, a pair of shoes, and the remains of a shirt.’ The crews of the several German ships interned in the harbor sped the Ayesha with cheers and ‘Die Wacht am Rhein,’ and two German reservists followed in a rowboat and boarded her beyond the three-mile limit.
The Ayesha had missed a Japanese warship by only a few hours on the day of her arrival at Padang, and her luck still held good after her departure. For the next three weeks she made herself as inconspicuous as possible, meanwhile making such headway as the fluky weather permitted toward one of those long-predetermined ‘ sea trystingplaces,’ remote from the regular trade lanes, where the German commerce destroyers were expected to repair for coal and refitting. Finally, on December 14, the Choising, a 1700-ton China coaster belonging to the North German Lloyd, hove in sight. ‘Great was our joy now,’ wrote Mücke. ‘I had all my men come on deck and line up for review. The fellows had n’t a rag on. Thus, in Nature’s garb, we gave three rousing cheers for the German flag on the Choising. The men on the Choising told us afterwards, “We could n’t make out what that meant, those starknaked fellows all cheering!” ’
After two days’ delay on account of a storm, the men of the Emden were transferred to the Choising, and the brave little Ayesha, whose log showed 1,709 miles of sailing since she had left Keeling, was sent to the bottom.
‘She was n’t at all rotten and unseaworthy, as they had told me,’ wrote Mücke, ‘ but nice and white and dry inside. I had grown fond of the ship, on which I could practice my old sailing manœuvres. . . . That was the saddest day of the month. We gave her three cheers, and my next yacht at Kiel will be named the Ayesha.’
IV
On the Choising Mücke came upon the story of a journey round the world by a man called Meyer, in which the statement was made that the Hedjaz or Pilgrim’s Railway (which really runs from Damascus only to Medina), was completed to Hodeidah, on the Red Sea. As this appeared to offer the only possible chance of ultimately reaching Germany again, the young officer, who had temporarily assumed command of the Choising, resolved to run for the Arabian coast. The narrow Strait of Perim, ‘swarming full of Englishmen,’ was passed on the night of January 7. The next night, nosing in toward a string of lights which, it was thought, might mark the pier of Hodeidah, the Choising almost rammed a French armored cruiser lying at anchor, but managed to back away without awakening suspicion. The next night Mücke and his men, in four boats, effected a safe landing, and, after the usual parleys with a suspicious gathering of Arabs, made their way safely along to the sun-scorched streets of old Hodeidah. Here the Turkish soldiers saluted them as allies and friends, and assured them that, though the railway was still hundreds of miles to the north, it should not be difficult for them to make their way to it by caravan. Hearing this, Mücke, as soon as it was dark, sent up a red star rocket, the signal agreed upon to let the captain of the Choising know that he was safely started on his way home and that the way was clear ahead. As a matter of fact, his troubles were just beginning.
It was Mücke’s original plan to make his way northward by the interior route, not only because it was more salubrious than that along the coast, but because it took him beyond the reach of interference by the British blockaders. His party, however, appears never to have penetrated far beyond Sana, in the highlands of Yemen. He is quite silent in all his published interviews and lectures regarding what occurred during the two months following his departure from Hodeidah, the only explanation advanced being that ‘the time spent in the highlands of Sana passed in lengthy inquiries and discussions that finally resulted in our foregoing the journey by land through Arabia for religious reasons.’ Doubtless, this is as much as he would be permitted to reveal of the condition prevailing in a region which always has been, and probably still is, in revolt against the Turks. All the party, many of whom were suffering from fever, benefited greatly by the sojourn in the high, dry valley in the Yemen Mountains.
Returning to Hodeidah early in March, no alternative was left for Mücke but to work his way up the coast in boats to the better controlled region in the vicinity of Jeddah and Mecca, an undertaking which, what with the hostile Arabs ashore and the British patrol off-coast, placed him almost literally between ‘the devil and the deep sea.’ The party divided and set sail in two tsambuks, native craft of about fifty feet length and twelve feet beam. Mücke purposely set a Saturday evening for running through the British blockade line because, he writes, ‘I knew the English liked their weekend rest so well.’ Whether or not the blockade was suspended at this time he does not state, but, at any rate, both tsambuks slipped safely through. After that, by keeping in the shallow coastal waters, the danger from warships was minimized, but the immunity was dearly bought. By keeping an incessant watch for three days, the boats managed to avoid the reefs among which they navigated. Then the larger craft, in endeavoring to thread a passage already safely negotiated by its lighter mate, struck a sharp rock, filled and sank. Twenty-eight men, among whom were four typhoid convalescents and Mücke himself, were thrown into the shark-infested water. An Arab fishingboat stood by, but, observing the sun helmet of one of the Germans, its crew became suspicious and refused to take any chances in saving the Giaours. At last the other tsambuk hove in sight, and ultimately managed to pick up the men in the water by using its tender, a sort of dinghy in which only two could be taken at a time. The rescue work was not completed until far into the night, and one of the typhoid patients suffered so severely from the shock and his long immersion that he died a few days later. The next day two machineguns and most of the rifles were brought up by Arab divers, but none of the recovered weapons proved entirely dependable afterwards. The worst loss, however, was the medicine, especially the quinine, for the want of which there was much suffering later.
The remaining tsambuk somehow managed to flounder on to Konfida, where another boat was secured to take the place of the one that had foundered. Four more days of creeping up the coast took the party to Lith, where definite word that three English ships were blockading Jeddah forced the amphibious men of the Emden back upon land again. The region of hostile Arabs was not yet passed, but Mücke did not hesitate between the near certainty of an English prison and the risk of a fight with Bedouins. Hastily gathering a caravan of a hundred camels, the Germans set out overland for Jeddah, the nearest point where Turkish authority was fully established.
At first the Arabs contented themselves with circling in the distance out of rifle range; then, their audacity increasing with their numbers, they made an attack on the night of April first. Firing began from all sides in the darkness, but the Germans, hastily improvising rough defenses from their camels and baggage, held their ground till daylight, then rushed out and routed the enemy with bayonet charges.
‘They fled, but returned again,’ writes Mücke, ‘ this time from all sides. Several of the gendarmes who had been given us as escorts were wounded; the machine-gun operator, Rademacher, fell, killed by a shot through his heart; another was wounded; Lieutenant Schmidt, in the rear guard, was mortally hurt. He had received a bullet in his chest and abdomen.’
All day there was intermittent sniping, and in the intervals of firing the Germans worked hard on their fortifications — a circular barricade, fifty yards in diameter, of live camels, saddles, and riceand coffee-sacks filled with sand. Using hands, bayonets, and tin plates, they scooped out a trench inside of this, and back of it built a shelter for the sick and wounded. In this strange fortress the precious water-supply— two jars and ten kerosenecans — was buried in the sand.
The following morning, under a flag of truce, the Arabs made an offer to allow the Germans to go free on the delivery of all their arms, water, provisions, and twenty-two thousand Turkish pounds. Mücke responded that the money question did not interest him in the least, as he had not a single piastre; and as for arms, it was not the custom for Germans to give them up as long as there was any one to fight with them. Then the shooting began anew, and continued throughout the day. During the night Lieutenant Schmidt died from his wound, and his grave was carefully smoothed over to obliterate it and thus protect his body from defilement by the Mohammedans should the camp have to be abandoned.
By the third day both munitions and water began to run short. The Arab zaptiehs, or gendarmes, with the party relieved the water situation somewhat by cutting the throats of the wounded camels and drinking the noisome yellow liquid from their ‘reserve’ stomachs. The Germans, unable to swallow this nauseous substitute, kept up as best they could on the three small cups of water a day that was served to them. The fact that they dared not wear their sun helmets for fear of offering better marks for the Bedouins made the suffering from heat intense, and sunstroke prostration was added to the other troubles. The guns became so hot that the barrels seared the flesh of the hands that touched them, while the air grew black with a plague of flies drawn by the decomposing bodies of the camels.
When night fell, the Germans dragged the carcasses of the animals which had been killed during the day as far as possible from the fortifications, but even then the odor was unbearable. It was good hunting for the hyenas. They came in droves with the darkness, their horrible laughter resounding through the desert silence. One could see them creeping like black shadows round the dead camels and hear them snarling. One of them, coming too near the redoubt, was shot by Mücke himself, who thought one of the Arabs was trying to creep up on them.
When another emissary from the attacking band approached again to discuss terms of surrender, the situation appeared so desperate that Mücke asked for a parley with the Sheikh himself, intending to finish that worthy with his revolver, and then lead his men out to die fighting. The Arab leader, scenting trouble, declined to show himself; but the Germans, not to be balked, commenced preparations for a sally which, if successful, was to be extended to an attempt to cut through to Jeddah. Before the first of them had climbed the parapet, however, a commotion in the enemy’s ranks was noticed, and presently the Arabs began to disperse in all directions. The cause of this became evident a few minutes later, when two camel-riders, waving white banners, topped a sand-dune to the north, and the Germans soon learned that a relief force dispatched by the Emir of Mecca was drawing near.
Under this strong escort the men of the Emden reached Jeddah the following day, only to learn that the Turks were powerless to protect the caravan route to the terminus of the Hedjaz Railway at Medina, and that they must either remain where they were indefinitely, or else take to the sea and brave the British blockade again. As usual, Mücke decided in favor of the alternative that promised to carry him most quickly homeward, irrespective of risk; and after a day or two of rest in the historic old ports he put his men on a couple of tsambuks and commenced another game of hide-and-seek with the British patrol. Gunboats of the enemy were sighted every day, but by keeping the Europeans out of sight the tsambuks were given so much the appearance of harmless Arab fisher-craft that they were not molested.
Not until nineteen days had passed, during which they skirted several hundred miles of reef-armored coast-line, did they reach a region where Turkish authority was sufficiently established to allow the overland journey to the Hedjaz Railway to be attempted. The tsambuks were abandoned at El Wesh, where Suleiman Pasha provided a strong escort for the five-day caravan journey to El Ula, where a special train from Damascus awaited the longexpected men of the Emden.
The arrival at El Ula marks the end of the epic adventures of the little band of adventurers; the rest of their journey was a triumphal progress through Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, culminating in the magnificent moment which stirred us to acclamations even on the ‘movie’ screen. Then we saw only the bowed head, the lowered sword-point, the moving of the lips of the young ‘ triumphator.’ This is what he said: —
‘ Beg to report most obediently, Herr Admiral, landing corps of the Emden, forty-four men, four officers, one surgeon.’