| Captain’s own story of Emden fight—“Thank God, we didn’t start the war”—A sailor talks to the point—English and Australians work together—Discipline in the Silent Service—A little affair in Mexico. |
Fortunately, this expedition was halted in Egypt for training, so they had to stick to the show whether they liked it or not. When we talk about the glories of Gallipoli we should give credit to the fifty per cent or so of Yorkshiremen, Cousin Jacks, Cockneys, etc, who did their share in it.
At sea—Leaving Australia. Among the officers there are many be-medalled men. When any debatable question comes up, they pout their chests at MacLaurin and say they never did it that way in their old regiments. For instance, one hero named Lieutenant Magee was ranching in Mexico, when Pancho Villa came along and commandeered all his men and horses. Being left on his beam-ends, so to speak, Magee was wondering what he would do next, when Villa said: “Why not come along with us? Do you know anything about fighting?” It so happened that Magee had done some volunteer artillery work, and Villa said: “You are the very man I want. I have just captured two guns and I have nobody that can work them.”
Magee had a great time working those two guns, shooting at all and sundry, until one day he went down to headquarters and found nobody there but the General and his staff. All the troops had cleared out and joined some other general. Knowing that all captured officers were invariably shot, Magee hopped on to a horse and never stopped going till he reached the coast.
“What did you do with the guns, Magee?” I asked.
“I left them in the middle of the road. I expect they are there yet.”
Another officer, a Major MacNaughton, had served in a crack Highland regiment, and had led the troops up the heights of Dargai or some other inaccessible and dangerous place. He persisted in wearing a Highland bonnet in defiance of an order that no equipment was to be worn other than that laid down by the Australian regulations. MacLaurin, however, was by way of being a bit of a Highlander himself, and a born, natural soldier. For instance, he took hold of that rough outfit and made the troops stand to attention when another transport was going past.
A New Zealand transport came close alongside, with the men cheering, beating tin pans, and yelling out, “Hello, Digger.”
Not a word out of our lot, not a move of a muscle: and the New Zealanders went off saying: “You b——! You’re too flash to speak to us, are you?” By and by, it seeped into the intelligence of the officers commanding the various transports that this was the correct thing to do; and before we got to Egypt they were all doing it. MacLaurin put Magee under arrest for being late on parade; and, having occasion to send for MacNaughton, he said:
“How dare you appear before me improperly dressed? Go and put your cap on, and don’t let me see you wearing that thing again.”
This, from a man who had never seen any service, to the hero of a hundred fights! MacLaurin straightened everything up, and these two officers became his admirers. Magee said: “When I first joined this outfit I thought that this Brigadier was just about able to take a salute. Now I prophesy that he will command a division before the war is over.”
Unfortunately, MacLaurin and his brigade major were both killed by a shell almost as soon as they landed on Gallipoli.
Among our personnel was a gigantic lieutenant named Massie, an international cricketer, strong and rugged as an iron-bark tree. By some freak of fortune he had been made adjutant of his battalion though he knew no more about military routine than he knew about flying. His first question was:
“How am I to mount guard, when we haven’t got any horses?” But by sheer personality and common sense, he managed to make a success of his job. He had a string of officers after him all day long, with troubles and questions.
“They’ve taken the table out of our orderly room, Jack.”
“I caught a fellow cutting some rope out of the rigging to dry his washing on, Jack.”
“A chap’s hat blew overboard, Jack. How do I get him another?”
Luckily the brigade adjutant was a regular, Lieutenant King, of the King’s Liverpool regiment, and by doing the three men’s work this King managed to keep the show going; aided largely by the English ex-service men, who love a regular officer but felt it below their dignity to be bossed by volunteers.
It was through friendship with Massie that I got in touch with a celebrity—the man who commanded an Australian warship in the first fight fought under the Australian flag. It is not often that we get from the silent navy an account of a fight from the lips of the man who fought it.
November 15th—Colombo. Arrived in Colombo to find everybody in a wild state of excitement over the sinking of the Emden by the Sydney. We can hardly believe that Australia’s first naval engagement could have been such a sensational win, for our people are not sea-going people and our navy—which some of us used to call a pannikin navy—was never taken very seriously. And now we have actually sunk a German ship!
Colombo harbour is a wonderful sight with warships, transports, merchantmen, Japanese, Russians, English and Australian ships. There is the Russian man-of-war, Askold, reported sunk in the Russo-Japanese War, also reported sunk by the Emden, and that she sank the Emden in this war; Abouki (Japanese), Hampshire (English), and, best of all, alongside the long breakwater the four funnels—the two centre funnels with white streaks round them—of the Sydney. It sort of wakes us up to the idea that we have a country.
Our troops are not allowed ashore lest in their exhilaration they should take Colombo to pieces. The Colombo streets are full of New Zealand Tommies and officers, hundreds of them. They are a fine lot of men, well turned out, and with black boots like the English ammunition boot. They are not enjoying the war, for their General is even a worse “nark” than ours. They are not allowed beer or cigarettes on board their transports. Fancy going to war without beer or cigarettes! Their General is named Godley, but they call him un-godly. Their ranks, like ours, contain a large proportion of men who are not New Zealanders at all, but are soldiers of fortune who have joined up in search of adventure. One of these men says that Godley was not to blame for the beer and cigarette order; that it was done by the New Zealand public, whom he describes as a lot of “narrow-minded, persecuting, canting, Scotch hypocrites.” This comes of cutting off a man’s tobacco.
General Godley, by the way, afterwards proved himself a very fine soldier, and made a great name for the New Zealanders at Gallipoli. All over the world it is the same—the rougher the general, the better the troops.
The gigantic Massie offers to take me off to interview Glossop, the hero of the Sydney-Emden fight. Massie’s people are of considerable importance in Sydney and he has entertained Glossop at his house; so, he says that if I go with him and listen to what Glossop says I may get some stuff that the other correspondents wouldn’t get. This Massie is about six feet two in height, broad in proportion, and he must be all brains. Any man that can make a success as adjutant of a raw battalion, without any previous experience whatever, can do anything.
We find Glossop in mufti, having a drink by himself, a typical English sailor-man, not a bit excited by the fact that he has “woke up to find himself famous:” to him the whole affair is a matter of range of guns, weight of metal, speed of ship, and of course a good deal of luck.
“Well, Massie, I had a lot of luck, didn’t I?” he says. “Fancy her coming to Cocos just when we were right on the spot, and fancy just having the luck to be on that side of the convoy. If I’d been on the other side, then I wouldn’t have got the job. Of course I had the speed of her and the guns of her, but if our people hadn’t served the guns properly or if she’d dropped a shell into our engine-room, we might have been sent to the bottom instead of her. You can work out a fight on paper, and one shell will upset the whole calculation.”
“She had no idea that there was any vessel of her own power in that part of the Pacific, and she came out looking for a fight—and she got it. She must have got a surprise when she found she had to fight the Sydney; and I got a surprise, too, I can tell you. When we were about ten thousand five hundred yards apart I turned nearly due north so as to run parallel with her, and I said to the gunnery lieutenant that we had better get a thousand yards closer before we fired. I knew the Emden’s four-point-one guns would be at their extreme limit at ten thousand yards, and I got a shock when she fired a salvo at ten thousand five hundred and two of the shells came aboard us. That’s modern gunnery for you. Fancy one ship, rolling about in the sea, hitting another ship—also rolling about in the sea—six miles away! She must have elevated her guns and fired in the air, for we were technically out of range; but it was great gunnery.”
“Her first salvo was five guns, of which two shells came aboard us. One shell burst and carried away the after-control, wounding all the men, including Lieutenant Hampden, but no one was killed. The other shell passed within six inches of the gunnery lieutenant and killed a man working a range-finder, but it never burst. There was luck again for me—I was in that control and if the shell had burst I suppose I would have been a goner.”
“There was a boy of about sixteen in the control working a telescope. When the shell landed he was stunned by the concussion and was lying under the body of the man that was killed. As soon as he came to himself he threw the man’s body off him and started looking for his telescope. ‘Where’s my bloody telescope?’ was all he said. That’s the Australian Navy for you.”
“The whole thing didn’t last forty minutes, but it was a busy forty minutes. She tried to get near enough to torpedo us, but she could only do seventeen knots and we could do twenty-seven, so we scuttled out of range. The Emden had a captured collier called the Buresk hanging about, trying to get near enough to ram us, and I had to keep a couple of guns trained on this collier all the time. We hit the Emden about a hundred times in forty minutes, and fourteen of her shells struck us but most of them were fired beyond her range and the shells hit the side and dropped into the water without exploding.”
“When the Emden made for the beach we went after the collier, but we found the Germans had taken the sea-cocks out of her so we had to let her sink. They were game men, I’ll say that for them.”
“Then we went back to the Emden lying in the shallow water and signalled her ‘do you surrender.’ She answered by flag-wagging in Morse ‘we have no signal book and do not understand your signal.’ I asked several times but could get no answer and her flag was still flying, so I fired two salvos into her and then they hauled their flag down. I was sorry afterwards that I gave her those two salvos, but what was I to do? If they were able to flag-wag in Morse, they were surely able to haul a flag down. We understood there was another German warship about and I couldn’t have the Emden firing at me from the beach while I was fighting her mate.”
“We waited off all night with lights out for this other vessel, but she never showed up, and then we sent boats ashore to the Emden. My God, what a sight! Her captain had been out of action ten minutes after the fight started from lyddite fumes, and everybody on board was demented—that’s all you could call it, just fairly demented—by shock, and fumes, and the roar of shells bursting among them. She was a shambles. Blood, guts, flesh, and uniforms were all scattered about. One of our shells had landed behind a gun shield, and had blown the whole gun-crew into one pulp. You couldn’t even tell how many men there had been. They must have had forty minutes of hell on that ship, for out of four hundred men a hundred and forty were killed and eighty wounded and the survivors were practically madmen. They crawled up to the beach and they had one doctor fit for action; but he had nothing to treat them with—they hadn’t even got any water. A lot of them drank salt water and killed themselves. They were not ashore twenty-four hours, but their wounds were flyblown and the stench was awful—it’s hanging about the Sydney yet. I took them on board and got four doctors to work on them and brought them up here.”
“I’ve seen my first naval engagement, Massie; and all I can say is, thank God we didn’t start the war.”
We left Captain Glossop to handle his very turbulent lot of prisoners and went back to our ships. The next night a message came that the Sydney, with the German prisoners on board, would pass us at sea about two o’clock in the morning. The Brigadier ordered that all ranks should parade and stand at attention as she went past: an order that started a lot of grumbling among the recruits until a Yorkshire ex-sergeant-major said:
“Tha’ll be proud, laad, some day to say that tha’ did it. Yesterday ye were nowt but a handful o’ blacks; but the world’s talkin’ about ye to-day.”
Under the tropic night the ghost of a warship glided by and all ranks on our transport fell in and stood at attention until she had passed out of sight. A formality, perhaps; but it might have satisfied even Mr Kipling that we were growing up.