Death in the Silent Places

by Peter Hathaway Capstick

  To capsulize those eight days considerably, P.J. and his men spent most of the time rooting around the mainland after dark, trying to capture somebody who knew where the Königsberg was. Fortunately, the rainy season was in full force, and, although movement was not comfortable, it was at least safer. At last, having pushed inland from the deserted coastal villages—a German tactic that effectively advertised the presence of the warship by the very lack of people—the perfect “snatch” came along, two dawdling locals whom the spy party silently overpowered and dragged far enough off into the bush, so that their interrogation would not be overheard.

  With the willing prisoners as guides, Pretorius and his men spent a whole day within 300 yards of the ship, studying her closely with binoculars. No wonder she had not been spotted; her decks were covered with live trees, her guns entwined with leafy vines and her sides camouflaged to blend perfectly with the surrounding jungle banks. Sneaking back to Koma in a dugout, Pretorius signaled to be picked up and arrived back at Mafia on schedule.

  Advising King-Hall by coded message that the Königsberg had been found, Pretorius met with the admiral the next day on his arrival at Mafia. The mere location was not nearly enough for the Royal Navy, certain details being crucial to the assault operation. Back went Pretorius and his merry band to check on the enemy guns, the location of her torpedoes and the exact distance the ship lay from the coast. Also, a hydrographic chart would have to be made of the Rufiji channel and adjoining flowages.

  After a few days to work out his plans, he had his wireless operator call up another naval “taxi” to get him back to his forward position at Koma. To give some idea of the importance of P.J.’s mission as far as the Admiralty was concerned, the “taxi” turned out to be the tremendous Cunard Line Laconia, converted to wartime use. All this to move one officer, six askaris and two prisoners of war twenty miles. Under the veil of darkness and with strictest security, she safely deposited Pretorius and his men on Koma, lowering the dugout so they could paddle ashore. The following night, they again were guided by the now enthusiastic prisoners to the vantage point in the trees above the Königsberg Careful to avoid any lens reflection, Pretorius was able to study the finest detail of the man o’ war through powerful binoculars. Point one: Her eight big guns were apparently in perfect condition and undamaged. Somehow, he had determined that the distance to the ship from the coast was seventeen miles, but how this was calculated is not known. Next, he had to find out if the torpedoes were aboard and if any mines had been laid, and start measurements to compute the navigable channel of the Rufiji and its tide pattern. The Allies had no charts of the river’s hydrography, and the prospect of an attacking force being left stranded by the tide in the face of German fire created visions of the naval equivalent of another Balaclava for the British. Pretorius sweated over the implications of his assignments.

  Pretorius knew that the Germans had conscripted native labor and also knew that a certain chief from a nearby village would be bound to have a pretty good idea of what was going on. Consequently, he sent one of his prisoners to ask the chief to meet with him outside the village in the bush, where he waited in the rain. With some embarrassment at the chief’s lack of guile, Pretorius placed him under arrest and told him that, although he would not be permitted to return to his village, he would be paid five pounds per month and given all rations, a captivity much better than his liberty among the Germans. The chief was so delighted with the idea that he swore complete cooperation and even begged a half hour to go back to his kraal to kill five Germans who were making life generally and specifically unpleasant at his village.

  When Pretorius explained his purposes, the chief excitedly announced that his own son was a stoker aboard the Königsberg, and that, with the gift of a basket of live chickens, one would be permitted to visit a relative who was conscripted. On the spot, Pretorius decided to go with him.

  A lifetime of African sun and malaria provided Pretorius with a disguise requiring nothing but some rather seedy-looking Arab robes to pass as the genuine article. The chief was carefully coached in his role as Pretorius’ “servant” and many rehearsals held as to exactly what the chief should ask his son, as it might appear suspicious for the “Arab” to be directing questions at the boy while ostensibly on a social visit with his father. All finally straight between them, a day was chosen for the visit to the Königsberg.

  As they approached the lair of the warship very casually, they were stopped by a picket. Past him, Pretorius was able to see the tents where the sailors made their quarters, the crew living ashore. Fortunately, the German askari sentry was not a local man and did not recognize the chief. Pretorius explained in a very humble manner that his “boy” wanted to meet with his son for a few minutes, as they were passing by on their way to Mahoro. Accepting the basket of scrawny chickens, the askari went off to get permission from an officer and quickly returned with word that the chief’s son would be along shortly. In about fifteen very nervous minutes, the boy came from the ship and sat down with Pretorius and his father.

  Following the careful instructions P.J. had given the father, the question was asked: “Where are the long bullets that swim in the water?”

  The son replied that he was sure the torpedoes had been removed from the ship and thought they had been transferred to boats at the mouth of the Rufiji, in ambush for any British shipping that might come within range. This turned out to be very accurate and valuable intelligence, the leak of which confused all hell out of the Huns. When Pretorius immediately got word off to King-Hall, the admiral ordered all Allied ship traffic to keep well wide of the river mouth. Totally unaware of Pretorius’ reconnaissance, the Germans were furious when, just as the torpedo boats became operational, all British targets disappeared. In fact, so frustrated were the Germans that they actually arrested one of the Königsberg’s own officers and charged him with being a traitor! This was confirmed in the enemy press later in the war, so it’s safe to assume that some poor Hun officer had a mighty hot time for quite a while.

  In contacting King-Hall with his scoop on the “long bullets,” Pretorius received more instructions, this time for the most tedious part of his work, if any part of the business of sneaking around enemy lines could be considered tedious. The next step in the destruction of the cruiser was to select a channel that would permit close enough approach to the marauder without grounding. After several weeks of taking soundings with a wooden push-pole, often risking broad daylight to map his observations accurately, Pretorius concluded that the most northerly channel was the best choice. For seven miles, there was no obstacle, the depth running between six and seven feet. And then a solid ridge of unpredictable reef cut the passage as effectively as a submerged dike. It would be the end of the line, but close enough for the right craft. And the British had them: monitors, squat gunships, heavily armed and armored. With a draft of only four feet and packing six-inch guns, they could smash the German cruiser if only they could manage to get this far. At that moment, however, they were halfway around the world, off Belgium.

  Belgium be damned. When he received Pretorius’ findings, King-Hall immediately cut orders for two of the monitors to make for the Rufiji with all speed, while Allied forces did what they could to prevent a potential breakout of the raider. At this time, the dullest possible duty fell to the Afrikaaner and his men. They drove a pole into the sea floor some distance from shore and, for a full month, recorded the hourly changes of the tide. It was with a mighty sigh of relief that Pretorius finally handed the completed chart into the well-manicured hands of the admiral.

  At long last, the monitors arrived from Belgium, a pair of squat, ugly aquatic adders named Mersey and Severn. P.J. was ordered aboard the flagship of the fleet for a series of conferences, with the eventual end that he was chosen to command a pair of armed Arab-style dhows, or coastal sailboats, which, based upon retrospection, were supposed to draw the barracuda cruiser from its lair by acting as live bait. Why the Königsberg would be
expected to spring into the open just to eviscerate a couple of native sailing boats has never been made exactly lucid. But, in any case, both boats were separated in the darkness, and the craft carrying Pretorius splintered on one of the many reefs between Mafia and the Rufiji. The boat was hung up on the reef a mile offshore and some three miles from a known German outpost, which would spot the wreck at dawn like a large beetle on a white plate. Not knowing what to do, Pretorius decided to vacate the premises posthaste upon the appearance of a small steam launch from the German shore, containing armed and presumably displeased German naval personnel. The crew of the dhow bailed out into neck-deep water and made for Koma Island, a good mile and a half away. After 600 yards of floundering, they were mightily relieved to see an armed whaler under a Captain Wood coming to pick them up. The enemy steamer realized the practical side of the relationship between discretion and valor, and showed her tail.

  Nobody knew what had become of the second, missing dhow, but it was no longer much of a secret that the Limeys were out to tear a strip off that floating chunk of Deutschland hiding back in the boondocks. If there was any question of this, it was soon dispelled by Pretorius, who again scouted the Königsberg and discovered the lost dhow neatly trussed to the side of the cruiser. Hiding in the bush all day, P.J. overheard Germans speaking of defenses as he sneaked out to the coast with darkness. Certainly, the enemy would have some less than subtle methods of inducing enlightened conversation from the survivors of the sailboat, but how much his men actually knew of the British plans and how much they would spill was unknown. Certainly, the African prisoners were not in on the full strategy of the operation; actually, it hadn’t been completely formed yet. Thus, the enemy could learn little more than the obvious: The British lion was stalking the Königsberg. The German reaction to this knowledge would be of importance if their own plans were to be countered. Time to go man-hunting again.

  Returning to Koma, Pretorius gathered the rest of his cutthroats and organized another scouting raid to pick up somebody who would know what countermeasures the enemy was planning, hopefully a genuine German officer. Aware that the enemy was alert to the probability that he was being scouted, Pretorius instructed his two boatmen to remain where they landed on the mainland for one hour and, if no firing was heard by that time, to return in eight days to pick up his scouts and himself. On the chance that the raiding party was attacked or ambushed, he distributed small German change to his chaps to buy local food should they become separated. If the little kommando (an Afrikaans word coined in the Boer War) was hit, the men were to scatter and find their way back to the coast. Here, provided they weren’t full of Mauser bullets, they were to steal a boat of any kind and get offshore, where, with luck, a patrolling British ship would pick them up.

  It was nine o’clock on an especially filthy, rain-swept evening when the German-hunters left Koma, the paddles silently dipping and swirling soft kaleidoscopes of disturbed phosphorescent plankton. With a muffled crunch of wet, scraping sand, the dugout was beached and pulled a few feet up the shore. Pretorius, with three men, began to pick his way inland, covering some 500 yards, when he realized that even he and his catpawed henchmen had little chance of passing undetected through an alerted enemy picket line. There were shouts from every direction ordering them to halt, and the bright tongues of muzzle flashes flared in the blackness like savage, giant fireflies. It was flame and dark insanity. An officer screamed to concentrate fire on those running back to the beach—Pretorius and one of his men—the crashing they made through the thick bush betraying their position. Was it all to be for nothing? P.J. wondered wildly. The brutal agony of his escape all wasted? Full-jacketed slugs chwiped and chwinged through the branches, clawing like blind fingers for flesh. As they reached the water, they saw that the dugout had already pulled out but bobbed forty yards offshore. It stopped and backed up as they swam hard to it, bullets blowing columns of water into the air around them in a spurting, lashing torrent. The boatmen pulled them aboard and struck out for the dark waters through the misting rain. By the most improbable turn of luck, not one of the men was hit, although the entire enemy force stood on the beach, emptying their weapons in a random sleet of lead. At last back at Koma, Pretorius had the oil-soaked sacks fired, and Captain Wood soon arrived to pick them up in the whaler.

  Of the two other men with Pretorius who did not run for the boat, nothing was known. He prayed that they had not been captured and, knowing of their resourcefulness, continued a four-day vigil on a rescue craft, up and down the coast. At long last, a small object was spotted in the distant swells; it proved to be the missing men, unwounded, but almost dead from exposure, thirst and hunger in a small native boat. With no paddles, they were steering with a piece of wood from a broken box, their power supplied by a tattered sail made from their loincloths.

  Although the last “snatching” raid had been spectacularly unsuccessful, it was mutually clear that the “cute” part of the sparring was over. The British knew where the Königsberg was to within a few hundred yards, and the Germans knew that the British knew. Would the cruiser break out for the open sea, seizing the initiative, or could the Royal Navy position herself quickly enough to fight the coming action on her own terms? Although he must have been understandably weary of getting shot at by most of the German East African forces, Pretorius and Captain Wood opened sealed orders at midnight a few nights later and found instructions for the whaler to come to anchor, acting as a living marker buoy, in a position smack in front of the shore batteries Pretorius knew to have been moved to the coast. It could not have been a pleasant sensation.

  As the sea behind them began to glow with the carmine promise of an April dawn, the little whaler’s men were relieved to note sixteen columns of smoke from warships on the horizon, gathering tight the steel net meant to snare the Königsberg. The flagship anchored right alongside the whaler, and Pretorius was called aboard by King-Hall. From his vantage point on the bridge, he watched the two squat monitors steam into the northern channel—the one with the reef selected by Pretorius—led by a pair of minesweepers. Suddenly, right between them, the sea erupted into a tremendous explosion of foaming water and whining shrapnel, as a heavy German gun opened the fight with a probing shot. It was frighteningly close, coming from the Königsberg, which was using the shore batteries as forward observers of her shell strikes. Within moments, more enemy shells began falling, both from the cruiser and now from the artillery near the beaches.

  The monitors stuck to their course like the bulldogs they resembled, guns silent. Not so the flagship, which began to belch broadsides with a thunder and concussion never dreamed of by Pretorius. As the fire from both sides rose in intensity, Pretorius, ever the hunter, was able to spot and point out several tree platforms of snipers and artillery observers to Hyacinth’s officers, who were unable to make them out at first, even with powerful naval binoculars. Pretorius needed no binoculars. The fleet’s big guns obliterated the platforms, trees and all, the lyddite of the high-explosive shells blasting the nests to scraps.

  Before the sun was an hour old, the northern channel had begun to echo with the quaking crunch of the monitors, which had reached the reef, lobbing six-inch incendiary rounds in high arcs over the jungle. After a few corrections, they were dead on the mark, confirmed by a pair of spotter aircraft repeatedly signaling: “FIRE AGAIN AT THE SAME MARK.” Count on it, they did.

  The battle boomed and raged from dawn until two in the afternoon, the British pouring on all the firepower they could muster for as long as they dared stay in position. The damage to the Königsberg was impossible to assay, as she was completely hidden from the sea, and even the spotter aircraft could determine little through the pall of smoke from the incendiaries, although it was clear that where there was smoke there was fire. Pretorius watched the greasy smudge over the jungle, standing behind King-Hall, who was pouring over the tidal chart that was the product of the awful month of boredom. His fingers crossed in hope that he had made no m
iscalculation, he listened to the admiral order, “Cease fire,” as he prepared to get underway. Bells clanged and gargantuan engines thumped. Hyacinth shuddered. So did Pretorius. She did not move, her hull on the bottom, her screws blowing maelstroms of dirty water. The scout’s heart seemed to stop in his chest as the big propellers raced, pushing and pulling for an interminable five minutes. Had he fouled up the tide chart? Would it cost the lives of a great warship and her crew? Had King-Hall simply waited too long to run for deeper water? With an audible metallic groan of release, the flagship lurched sluggishly forward, then slid free.

  “Enter in the log book,” remarked Admiral King-Hall quietly, “that the flagship grounded for five minutes.”

  As the attackers steamed out to sea, the action stopped as quickly as it had started. Rain began to darken the sky, and evil-looking gray-flannel clouds raced over the choppy surface of the Indian Ocean. When the short squall had passed, an impenetrable fog crept in on leopard’s pads, settling as obstinately as an anvil for the next six days. Königsberg? Who knew? Was she crippled? Dead? Wait and see.