LIEUT. X- RESCUES THE MEN FROM THE EMDEN

Evening Star, Issue 16987, 8 March 1919, Page 2

LIEUT. X- RESCUES THE MEN FROM THE EMDEN

The story told to Mr Freeman by Lieut. X ,of H.M.B. Sydney, and how he rescued some of the Germans who escaped from the Emden when our men ended the Emden off North Keeling Island, is published in the September ' CornMLL' Lieut. X Bet out in the galley to rescue these men, most of whom were wounded. They had no food and water, and their sufferings " during tha day and ) a-half before help reached them were unspeakable." "Just as I was about to go over the side," said Lieut. X ," a young Australian lad—soma kind of a boy rating—came and asked to be taken along. I refused him rather shortly, as I thought he J 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 show himself away before we pulled off from the Sydney. It was a lucky thing he came along, for, as it turned he was the only one of the lot of us who knew how to climb a cocoanut palm. "It was impossible to take a boat through the surf anywhere near the point whore 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 galley in without an upset, incidentally showing the way to the whaler, 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 favorable 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. It was getting late, and. I was anxious to lose no time in bringing them togetther and into the boats while there was still daylight tc see to running 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 just upset things completely. "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 sea birds, 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. My hair was rather long at the time, and hadn't been combed since morning. One of the birds put a foot through a tangle of it, and then nearly beat me into insensibility with its wings in trying to kick loose. They came batting against us_ in the darkness throughout the several minutes we were groping our way to the open of the beach. " It was well towards midnight when we got back to whore the boats were, and so quite out of the question trying to do anything further in the way of searching for the Hums till davlight. Several of the latter bad stagcrled in and 1 rfven 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 wo had expected to be putting back to the Sydney within an hour or two of the time we landed, we had little food and wat-er save that in the boat?, and this wouldn't have gone very far with lot of us if it had not been supplemented by the eocobnuts our yojnig 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 farinsr n, few miles farther down the bench. We started' oft nt the Rrs'o streak of dawn, and reached them by sun up. The most of them were in even, worse condition ihan I bad feared, for it seemed' inconceivable to mo that they should not have contrived .in -pome war or other *o get hold of some, cocoa nuts to cat 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 rase, perhaps, was that of the assistant surgeon, whom I told you of as having he-en wounded and blovn 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 shortlv afterwards as a result of drinking it. All the open wounds, sincs they had gone from 12 to 18 hours longer without attention, were in oven more terrible oonditon than those of the men we had found on the Emden the previous day. "Finally, we got all the helpless of the J wounded on to stretchers and started on their way to the boats. Sc-hn-ll was the [ greatest help throughout, but I can't say as much for many of the others of the un wounded, who were very grudging in the way"they lent a hand'. Schnll put up ; a ptiff protest against going off without ! burying the dead, declaring that be was not goinir to' lenvo tbern there for the crabs to eat tip. When I pointed out that we had no implements for digging, and that I needed his help in crettirag the living oft, ho saw the reason of it, and said ho would come along. We did the best we eould for the dead by .covering them with palm leaves and coral clinkers. " Wo reached the Sydney all right, and the whaler was just being hoisted in when I heard the captain's voice, from the bridge asking whore Lieutenant X——■ was. ~I looked iip just in time to catch him starling down at me with open-eyed amazement. ■" Oh, there he is!' he exclaimed, turnaway, with a grin on his face. That Jed iii", for the first time in 24 hours, to take a look at what, T could pee of myself without a glass. It was my turn to' grin—and to blush Absolutely the sum total of mv wardrobe 'was my shirt and a seaman's straw hat > Nothing dee. "To ease my feet from boots after standing on the scorching iron decks of the Emd.r-n. 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. They, and my sock's, must have been scoured oft' among the- coral dinkors, and my cap probably went when th© sea bird tangled ite feet in my hair. But where I los-trnv my trousers, and what sailor gave me his hat, I have never been able to make out."