After providing adequate safeguards, the shell was taken to pieces, and at once proved to be everything that all but one of the several score of rescued Huns had declared it was not, which meant, of course, that if it had been handled in the way these had insisted would be perfectly safe, all near it would have been killed. Since there is no punishment provided for this brand of treachery, no action was taken against the prisoners, and the incident was remembered principally for the illuminative sidelight it threw on the unexpected moral obliquity of the German sailor. It was something quite new in the annals of civilised naval warfare, and Sturdee's officers were scarcely less grieved than shocked that men who had fought so bravely could behave so despicably. Yet that (to the Germans) incomprehensible sporting code of the British, by which it reckoned as not "playing the game" to speak ill of a brave foe after he is beaten, has prevented the story from finding its way to the public, and it is only now, when four years more of war have established the fact that the action of the Huns on this occasion was characteristic rather than (as so many of Sturdee's officers tried so hard to persuade themselves at the time) exceptional, that I am given permission (by one who observed at first hand all that took place) to publish it. Perhaps (doubtless on account of the greater spectacularity of the lone-hand game she played) the _Emden_ and her able and resourceful Captain came in for more of this misplaced credit than any other of the German cruisers of similar career. In one instance this even went so far as to prompt the people of the sporting Australian city from which the ship which brought the _Emden's_ career to a finish took her name to request that the doughty Von Müller and his surviving officers should be sent to Sydney that they might be tendered a public reception. This kindly but misdirected instance of sportsmanship on the part of a people who--at this stage of the war at least--saw nothing incongruous in treating an enemy who had put up a good fight in precisely similar a way to which they had been accustomed to treat a visiting cricket eleven, was occasioned largely by the fact that the officers of the _Sydney_, in their eagerness to do full justice to a beaten foe, laid stress in their accounts of the fight on his bravery and said little or nothing of anything else. Yet, when one comes to learn the real facts of this historic battle (as I have done recently, by talking at length with a number of the British officers and men who took part in it), he finds evidences of "Hunnisms" splashing with muddy spots a record which might have been golden bright on the score of physical courage and devotion to duty.