ENGINEER OF THE “HITACHI MARU.”
V
Victims of the “Wolf”
Carlsruhe Kriegsgefangenenlager being what was known as a Distribution Camp, there was a continual coming and going of officers. Here we had no continuing city. An occasional prisoner might linger on—as if entirely overlooked and forgotten—for a year or even two; in the majority of cases, however, the stay only extended for a few weeks, sometimes merely a few days. On three consecutive weeks the cast for one of our plays was removed almost en bloc. Friendships were formed overnight, to be violently disrupted by departure on the morrow. In our little world was a complete epitome of life.
One afternoon in early March there arrived in camp a cartload of trunks and sea-chests bearing strange hieroglyphics, with a rumour that these would be followed by the officers of various nationality, including Japanese, captured from the ships sunk by the notorious German cruiser Wolf.
Two days later they arrived, sailormen from the seven seas, British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, so that the next morning their blue suits and brown boots gave the salon d’appel the appearance of a mercantile marine office when a crew is signing on. Some of the Captains, grizzled and weather-beaten, had an easy gait, a quiet laying down of the foot, which inevitably suggested the bridge or the moving decks of ships; different entirely from the more formal military stride. Some of them were doubtless glad to stretch their legs, having been cruising in the piratical Wolf for a year or fifteen months.
The Japanese officers made me very heartily welcome to their hut, on a shelf in which I noticed immediately on my entry a little statue of Buddha. While I sketched some of these placid, not readily fathomable faces, I heard, in broken English, the tragic story of the broken life of their Captain, the Commander of the Hitachi Maru.
The Captain had intended suicide from the time he lost his vessel—thirteen of her crew were killed in the fight—and simply awaited his opportunity. This came to him in the darkness and amid the floes of Iceland, when the Wolf, with fangs red with blood, was running back for Kiel.