Gallipoli (15 page)

‘As it was now impossible for me to damage my opponent in any way further,' von Müller would write in his report to the German Admiralty, ‘I decided to put my ship, which was badly damaged by gun-fire and burning in many places, on the reef in the surf on the weather-side of North Keeling Island and to wreck it thoroughly, in order not to sacrifice needlessly the lives of the survivors.'
³⁵

And yet, despite it all, their spirit remains, with one German sailor heard to lead his compatriots in ‘
Ein Hoch auf das Vaterland!
– Three cheers for the Fatherland!'
³⁶
an instant before a shell lands to blow them all apart.

The air is thick with the choking and burning Lyddite fumes from the exploded Australian shells,
³⁷
and the whole ship would be out of control if not under the hand of a master mariner such as Kapitän von Müller, backed by a courageous and expert crew. At a rate of ten knots, at 11.20 am, the German cruiser hits the reef and comes to a dead stop, of course throwing officers, sailors, wounded men and many, many dead men forward, together with everything else on the ship that is not bolted down. For a split second, there is nothing to be heard but the crashing of the waves against the ship's suddenly exposed hull and the roaring of the engine. Then come the screams, the agonised groans, the cursing and shouting of the surviving crew …

Aboard
Sydney
, the dramatic end of
Emden
is met with a great deal of satisfaction: ‘She came looking for a fight, and she got it,' Captain Glossop would later tell Banjo Paterson.
³⁸
The skipper now dictates the message that will, on the instant, be sent to the rest of the convoy, and soon all the way back to Australia, where the news creates a sensation:

For the men on the convoy of ships, who had seen the
Ibuki
and
Sydney
steam off, ‘The news went round like wildfire and everyone left off work to cheer. Good old
Sydney
!'
⁴⁰

After chasing the
Buresk
to see it also sunk, Captain Glossop gives the order for
Sydney
to head back to
Emden
. They arrive at 4 pm to find that, though
Emden
is beached, she still flies her colours – which he takes as a signal that she has still not surrendered. Thus, just to make sure there will be no further resistance, from a range of 4300 yards aft, Glossop gives the orders for several more salvos to be fired into the stricken German cruiser, which kills and wounds dozens more of the Kaiser's sailors before the national flag is frantically lowered, by Kapitän von Müller's own brave cabin servant, and burned. A white flag is soon seen lolling in its stead.

(As to this tragic loss of yet more life after the battle is well over, it would later be asserted by von Müller in his German Admiralty report – possibly to cover for the fact he had neglected to take his flag down – that the whole affair was ‘very embarrassing for Captain Glossop himself and that he had let mainly his first officer determine himself to act in this way'.)
⁴¹

It is over. Now at battle's end, with this settling of accounts, it is time to check that account. The net result of the whole confrontation is that the Germans have lost two ships, 134 men killed and 189 men captured, while
Sydney
has come off comparatively lightly, with many wounded but just three fatalities and one man also likely to succumb to his wounds. As recorded by the first Australian doctor to board
Emden
, ‘Men were lying killed and mutilated in heaps, with large blackened flesh wounds. One man had a horizontal section of the head taken off, exposing mangled brain tissue … 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 …'
⁴²

As a gesture of respect for the gallantry of von Müller – who is the last man to leave
Emden
, and who Charles Bean judges to be ‘a gaunt clean-shaven, big-boned sailor, far more resembling an Englishman than a German in both his appearance and his outlook'
⁴³
– Churchill sends a message that he and his officers are allowed to keep their swords. It does not happen, however, because their swords had been lost in the carnage; and von Müller's rapport with the Australian captain remains strained, somewhat, by the firing on his ship after it was beached.

The proprieties of the victor over the vanquished are observed and, while the wounded are given immediate medical treatment, the unscathed survivors of
Emden
are taken aboard
Sydney
and accommodated comfortably upon their words as gentlemen that, on the trip to the Ceylonese capital of Colombo, they will not cause trouble. (A condition that is observed, with the exception of some of the German sailors destroying their crockery and throwing their cutlery out the window. No problem – from that point on, their food is simply slopped on the table and they must eat it with their fingers.)

When
Sydney
again comes within sight of the convoy, Captain Glossop sends his 16-year-old messenger, Ernie Boston, to fetch Kapitän von Müller, saying he would like to see him on the bridge. On his way there, the German comes out on deck and for the first time sees the troopships in every direction.

‘Boy,' he says to the underling, ‘what is all this?'

‘That,' he is told, ‘is the [38] transports with the Australian and New Zealand [soldiers, heading to the war].'

The German naval officer continues to stare at all the ships for a full minute, before coming to his conclusion. ‘It'll go hard for the Fatherland,' the Kapitän says morosely, ‘if all Dominions rally to their England like this.'
⁴⁴

A short time later, he is asked what would have happened had he been aware that the convoy of troopships had been so close to
Emden
. Kapitän von Müller is crisp in his reply, first pointing to the cruiser on their port bow. ‘I should have run alongside her and fired a torpedo. Then, in the confusion, I should have got in among the transports. I would have sunk half of them, I think, before your escort came up. I should have been sunk in the end, I expect – I always expected that.'
⁴⁵

As for the men on the convoys, they know that aboard the approaching
Sydney
are the survivors of the
Emden
, ‘and, out of consideration for them, the troops kept silent as the ship passed'.
⁴⁶

And the 53 German sailors ashore on the Cocos Islands, with Kapitänleutnant Hellmuth von Mücke, at the time of the battle? That's them there, sailing nor' by nor'west in a 70-ton schooner,
Ayesha
, that they have stolen from some powerful local family by the name of Clunies-Ross. After watching the battle from the shore, and realising that he and his men would inevitably be captured unless they did something, Lieutenant von Mücke had had the yacht provisioned with everything they could quickly get their hands on, and by 6 pm on the evening of the battle had made good their escape.

In the meantime, Banjo Paterson reports that
Sydney
– the ‘idol of all in this fleet' – came through the line and, though all had wanted to cheer her, a strict order had been read to all the officers from the flagship: the
Sydney
will pass through the transport about 3 am tomorrow morning. Owing to the presence of wounded on board her, there will be no demonstration. As she passes, all ranks will stand at attention and the bugles will blow the attention.
⁴⁷

As to the news of the sinking of
Emden
, it is greeted with acclaim and celebration throughout Australia, but likely nowhere is there more pure joy evinced than in the breast of Lieutenant-Commander Dacre Stoker of the
AE2
, now on the way back from the tour of duty in the Pacific. Together with the news shortly afterwards that all bar the light cruiser
Dresden
of Admiral von Spee's squadron had been sunk during the Battle of the Falkland Islands, it means ‘the Pacific was now clear of enemy ships, and a submarine lying in Sydney harbour could not claim to be of any useful purpose in the war'.
⁴⁸
And Stoker already has an idea of how he might be able to get his submarine closer to the action …

14 NOVEMBER 1914, IN CONSTANTINOPLE, A CALL TO THE FURIOUS FAITHFUL

And so it has come to this.

While Turkey is certainly the ‘sick old man of Europe', the sick old man of Turkey is the Sultan and Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed V. In his lifetime, this man – proclaimed as a direct-line descendant of the Prophet Muhammad – has seen the power of his throne go from a golden absolute to a tinny facade, entirely dependent on the support of the Young Turks, the militant leaders of the CUP, who actually run the country.

The old man still has his purposes, however, and on this day in the hall of the old Topkapı Palace, where some relics of Prophet Muhammad lie – including a sole strand of hair from Muhammad's beard – he attends a ceremony where the Ottoman Empire's chief religious leader, Esad Efendi, Sheik-Ul-Islam, reads out a fatwah in the Sultan's name allowing for the proclamation of jihad upon the British, French and Russian infidels.

The fatwah judges that, among other things:

Following on from the fatwah, on 23 November, Sultan Mehmed V decrees as Caliph that the proclamation of jihad should be disseminated throughout the Muslim world – published in all the major newspapers around the Ottoman Empire the following day, through all of Medina, Baghdad, Damascus, Basra and Jerusalem – justifying the Empire's bellicosity:

It is now nothing less than a religious
duty
for no fewer than 300 million Muslims to rise up, rise up, rise up, my children, and throw them out!

24–28 NOVEMBER 1914, ABOARD THE CONVOY, THE NEWS BREAKS

For the 30,000 Australasian soldiers, imbued with the glory of the British Empire, it is nothing less than a duty of membership of this Empire to be answering this call-up.

And it is good, and it is great, and in his cabin on
Euripides
Banjo Paterson composes the words that will soon be sent back (once it passes the censors) to Australia, to be published by
The Sydney Morning Herald
: ‘It is strange to look out over the grey sea, not a ripple on the water, the horizon shrouded in haze, and to think of England calling up men from the ends of the earth – to think of these great flotillas … of which one is, perhaps, even now behind that haze, all steaming steadily and purposefully towards the goal. Has anything like it ever been seen in the world before? The ends of the earth are called in for troops, the sea is furrowed with keels, and the very air is called into service to carry messages. If anything would cure a man of being a “little Australian”, it would be such an expedition as this.'
⁵²

No more ‘little Australians' for them. This is big Australia!

But, have yers
heard?
They reckon the bottle-washer heard it from the Chief Cook, who heard it from the Lieutenant, who heard it from the Navigator, who overheard the Captain telling the Chief Engineer that they had received orders from the Admiralty today that we're
not
going to land in England after all! Nup, instead of being on board for the next few weeks, we're going to land somewhere soon, and maybe train there!

‘Everyone naturally quite excited as this means landing under the week,' records one officer, Lieutenant Henry Coe, in his diary. ‘The news was received with great enthusiasm by the men who cheered and cheered. This will be ever so much more comfortable for us anyhow as the climate is much more like our own. We need not bother about the cold now.'
⁵³

On every ship, the news travels from stern to starboard to port to bow and back again in an instant flat, and if the proof is not in the pudding that night, it comes with the crusty boiled potatoes at lunch the next day, when the soldiers receive confirmation that they will be heading up the hundred miles of the Suez Canal before heading west to make a landing in Alexandria and then taken on a train to Cairo.