Five Months on a German Raider: Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf'Trayes, Frederic George
History
Five Months on a German Raider: Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf'
Trayes, Frederic George
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives; World War, 1914-1918 -- Prisoners and prisons, German
After lunch, the first square meal we had had for months, we set off to
telegraph to our relatives and friends, to announce we were still in the
world. It was one of our greatest anxieties on board that we could not
communicate with our friends, who we knew would be grieving over our
disappearance and, we feared, would have given us up for lost, for we
had been out of communication with the outside world for five months.
Never daring to hope that an opportunity to despatch it might ever
occur, I had many a time mentally framed a cablegram which, in the
fewest possible words, should tell our friends of our adventures since
we disappeared from human ken. But the long-delayed opportunity had at
last arrived, and our wildest hopes and dreams were realized. They had
become solid fact, and the words flashed over the wires from Denmark to
friends in Siam and relatives in England were: "Captured September
26th--proceeding Germany--ashore Denmark--lifeboat rescue--both well."
The last two words were not, of course, strictly true, but they would at
least serve to reassure our friends that we had been less unfortunate
than only too many British captives in German hands.
The same afternoon we walked back to the beach to see if we could go
aboard the stranded ship to retrieve our luggage, but the sea was far
too rough to allow of this, and the German and Spanish crew had not been
taken off. While on the beach we saw two floating mines exploded by a
Danish gunboat. We had not only had a narrow escape from the Germans,
but also from the dangers of a minefield. The next day was also too
rough for us to go aboard; in fact, it was so rough that the lifeboat
went out and took everybody off the ship, both Spanish and German. The
Spanish first mate was thus saved, and after all did not serve his
sentence in Germany. We congratulated him once more on his lucky escape.
He had escaped even more than we had. It was reported that a German
submarine appeared to take off the German officers on this day, but as
it was too rough to lower the boats this could not be contrived.
The _Igotz Mendi_ was now deserted, but as the Danish authorities had
adjudged her, twenty-four hours after her stranding, to be a Spanish
ship, she had reverted to her original owners. Accordingly, before
leaving her the Spanish Captain had hoisted the Spanish flag at her
stern, the first time that or any other flag had appeared there since
that November morning when the Germans had captured her far away in the
Indian Ocean. She was no longer a German prize. She would have been the
only one the _Wolf_ had secured to take home--a neutral ship with only a
few tons of coal on board, and a few married couples, and sick and
elderly men as prisoners--not much to show for a fifteen months' cruise;
and even that small prey was denied the Germans, though the _Wolf_ had
certainly carried home a valuable cargo and some hundreds of prisoners,
besides doing considerable damage to the shipping of the Allies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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