There was, too, the case of the Australians taken prisoner on the S.S. Matunga.  The women and military doctors had certainly escaped on the Igotz Mendi, but there were taken into Germany from the Matunga three military officers and three elderly married civilians over military age.  They were going but a week’s voyage from their homes (July 1917); but, torn from their homes and families, they were to languish for months in a German internment camp.  Neither must be forgotten the old captains and mates and young boys—­some of the latter making their first sea voyage—­taken into captivity in Germany, where they have probably been exhibited as illustrating the straits to which the war, and especially the U boat part of it, has reduced the glorious British mercantile marine.  Our young men friends on the Hitachi, and the hundreds of prisoners, some of them captured more than a year before from British ships, were all taken into Germany, there to remain in captivity till the war was over.

I thought, until our timely rescue came, that our own case was a fairly hard one.  I had retired from Government service in Siam, after spending twenty years there, and we had decided to spend some months at least, possibly “the duration,” or even longer, in South Africa before proceeding home.  It seemed hard lines that after twenty years in the Far East we were to come to Europe only to be imprisoned in Germany!  We have escaped that, but our plans have gone hopelessly astray, for which I will never forgive the Huns, and our health has not improved by the treatment on our long voyage.  But although we took six months to get from Siam to London, the Germans have succeeded in getting us home much earlier than we, or they, anticipated.  I had been shipwrecked on my first voyage out to Siam in 1897, and on my last voyage home, twenty years after, had been taken prisoner and again shipwrecked!  So my account was nicely balanced!  But the culminating touch of escaping imprisonment in Germany by shipwreck was indeed wonderful!

Fortunately, one usually forgets the miseries of sea travel soon after one gets ashore.  But never, I think, will one of us forget our long captivity at sea with our enemies; neither shall we forget the details of our capture and imprisonment, the dreary days and still drearier nights on the Wolf and Igotz Mendi, especially those spent in the icy north.  Every detail of it all and of our wonderful escape at the last moment stands out so vividly in our memories.  And assuredly, not one of us will ever forget the canned crab, the bully beef, the beans, and the roll of the Igotz Mendi.

     Printed in Great Britain by
       UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
          WOKING AND LONDON

Selection from Headley’s List of Books

THE YEAR 1918 ILLUSTRATED

EDITED BY S. GRAVESON