John Jennings
THE RAIDER
Producer's Note
Jennings, John, 1906-1973
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Contents
Preface 5
I. Knights of the Swan 9
II. The Little Cloud 57
III. Shadow on the Wind 109
IV. Monsoon Seas 153
V. Gott mit Uns 199
THE RAIDER
The chronicle of a gallant ship
A novel of World War I
Preface
I have labeled the tale that follows "A Novel." And so it is. Yet paradoxically enough it is by no means all fiction. Many a younger man than I will recall that there was such a ship as the Emden, a German light cruiser, which operated in the far reaches of the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean during World War I, whose daring exploits made her name a byword throughout the world. There were such men as Kapitan Karl von Mueller and Helmuth von Muecke, von Guerard and Gyssling, von Hohenzollern, Schall, and Lauterbach, to name but a few. Oberhoboistenmaat Wecke conducted the ship's band at Tsingtao. The officers' cook was a civilian— though whether his name was Herman, as I have dubbed him, the record does not say. Furthermore, he did have a cat which gave birth to kittens in Leutnant Schall's lap, to the great glee of all his shipmates, as I have described, and his fate was as it has been told here. Oberleutnant Lauterbach was a reservist. He did command the Hamburg-Amerika liner Staats-sekretar Kratke, and was in port at Tsingtao at the outbreak of the war. Later, when the Emden captured a British vessel in the Indian Ocean, he did, once more, encounter an Englishwoman who had sailed with him as a passenger not long before. It has seemed to me significant that there were no recriminations.
But it would be impossible for me to cite all such actual occurrences in the space of a brief preface. I have named only a few of them here to show that wherever it has been possible I have gone to the record for my material.
In the interest of accuracy this has been most important. What has seemed to me much more significant, however, has been the overshadowing fact of the event itself: the very brief career of the Emden, and those few months in the lives of the men who sailed her.
The Emden was on the other side during that conflict of 1914-1918. She was Russia's enemy at the beginning; then France's, then England's, and finally Japan's before her career was cut short by an Australian cruiser. She would have been our enemy, too, had she survived that long. And yet not even from her bitterest foes has there ever come any criticism or disparagement of her conduct. She fought her war in the only way she could; in the way that was expected of her— alone and with honor, boldly, audaciously, unflinching, and above all, with a touch of gallantry and chivalry; qualities that no longer seem to exist in war.
If we cannot admire the forces for which her crew fought, we must allow them the courage of their convictions. Everything they had been taught from childhood to honor and respect and revere was on the board; and from the moment they turned away from the fleet, outside Pagan, and bore southward on their lonely mission into the Indian Ocean, there could not have been a moment's doubt in the mind of any man on board as to their ultimate fate. They knew that by that act they became a ship without a port, men without homes. There were few harbors in the world that stood ready to receive them—and those few lay far away, halfway around the world, and blocked against them. Only so long as their food and fuel remained could they keep the sea freely. After that the end was obvious: soon or late the jaws of the trap must snap, and they would be caught. For some—how many of them, who could tell?—it could mean only death. For others there would be life without living—blinded, maimed, crippled. For the rest, save for a very few who might by some freak manage to escape, there would be life as a prisoner of war for an indefinite length of time and under unknown conditions.
And still, even knowing this, not for a single instant did any one of them hesitate. To a man they remained steadfast and loyal to the ideals and concepts they believed in, to the obligations they had sworn to defend. Whether those concepts and obligations were right or wrong is not for us to consider here. Our honor is to the men who had-die integrity to face Destiny without flinching in support of their beliefs, and to the ship they sailed. I think their story is worthy of retelling.
John Jennings,
Carmel, New York
1962
I
KNIGHTS OF THE SWAN
Frederick II, Elector of Brandenburg, founded the Order of the Swan in 1443. It was restored by Frederick William IV of Prussia in 1843. The cruiser Emden was known as the "Swan of the East."
The sun was setting behind the ragged rim of the Shantung Hills as they prepared to go on shore. Its last golden rays sent soft purple shadows lengthening over the bare brown slopes and into the folded hollows, and then ran out along the crescent curve of the beach toward the city' and sparkled on the quiet waters of Kiaochow Bay. Northward the Lao-shan Mountains, their crags and creases normally hazy through the summer's day, stood out sharp and clear, looming large in the evening air. Eastward the Rusham Hills, separating the bay and the city from the pounding of the Yellow Sea, glowed pink and gold in the late night. Over by die commercial docks the black hull and yellow masts and funnels of the big Hamburg-Amerika liner Staatssekretar Kratke stood out sharply amid the mass of smaller shipping —the freighters and colliers and junks and sampans moored or massed in the harbor, lying along the great mole, or clustered thickly in the shelter of the cove in a sort of floating squalor, typical of the China coast.
Along the waterfront boulevard the gaslights came on, one by one—a modem German innovation that seemed somehow slightly incongruous in spite of the bustle and Teutonic efficiency of the little city. In the center of the Kronprinzessensplatz, the tiny, meticulously laid out, and carefully manicured park that fronted on the water just diagonally across the boulevard from the Imperial dockyard, the Emden's band, under the direction of Uberhoboistenmaat Wecke, was opening the evening concert with a stirring rendition of "Die Wacht am Rhein," as tradition prescribed. Across the way, beyond the park, bxit still facing the reach of the bay, rimmed in lights through the trees and the fragrant gathering dusk, loomed die imposing bulk of Government House. Beyond it, also fronting on the tree-lined Prinz Heinrich Strasse, on the comer of the Friedrichstrasse, the tall, thin twin spires of the Lutheran church towered against the still faintly glowing sky like the spikes of a pair of guardsmen's helmets.