by Nigel Barley
ROGUE
RAIDER
THE TALE OF CAPTAIN LAUTERBACH
AND THE SINGAPORE MUTINY
NIGEL BARLEY
Contents
Introduction
Book One: The Swan of the East
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Book Two: The Sepoy Mutiny
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Book Three: Wanted Dead or Alive
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
About the Author
Also by Nigel Barley
Island of Demons
Introduction
The life of Captain Julius Lauterbach was so extraordinary that no one would dare to invent it. Juli-bumm, as he was known to his friends, was very much a real person although he lives on chiefly as the myth he was transformed into. The Emden was a real ship. The events described here – for the most part – really happened, though they were later hushed up, especially by the British authorities.
The First World War left Germany feeling a little short of classic heroes. The circumstances of the land campaign were not conducive to gentlemanly conduct and it was only in the air and at sea that a space was left for the conventional hero the public still demanded in an age of callous Realpolitik. Hence the continuing importance of SMS Emden, a light cruiser of the Far East squadron, commanded by Lieutenant-Commander Karl von Mueller, whose story has often been told and is something of a cult in Germany, neatly offsetting that of the negative ‘Rape of Belgium,’ just as frequently repeated in the rest of Europe. Von Mueller was of military family and noble blood, cold, distant, ruthlessly correct and punctilious in the interpretation of the articles of war. In 1914, the Emden was sent as a raider into the Indian Ocean to prey on Britain’s merchant fleet. It was not expected she would return. In the course of three months, however, she sank sixteen merchant ships and two warships and carried out daring raids on the harbours of Penang and Madras, making a mockery of British naval supremacy, paralysing trade and making the Allies fear for their crucial troop convoys from Australasia. In the course of this, barely a life was lost. Von Mueller devoted himself to looking after the welfare of enemy crews and liberated them in safety and good health whenever circumstances permitted. Often, they cheered him as the Emden sailed off. His reputation and popularity throughout the Empire became a personal embarrassment for the First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill, who had seventy-eight vessels of British and allied navies searching the world for the enemy ship. In Germany, the legend of the Emden remained alive long after the war and spawned a whole series of vessels of similar name, becoming the official, acceptable face of the German navy.
But there is another side to the ship of legend – Captain Julius Lauterbach of the naval Reserve. His memoirs were written up as war propaganda and he too was portrayed as fearless, fanatically nationalistic and inevitably devoid of individual, intelligent thought. Yet, if we strip him of such conventional pieties and try to transform him back into a realistic human being, it seems likely that, for every austere virtue of von Mueller, Lauterbach possessed the corresponding vice. He was gross, beer-guzzling, cigar-smoking and uxorious, a seasoned filcher, braggart and – above all – a survivor. Lauterbach was made prize officer of the Emden in charge of loot. Rarely do navies match a man so ideally to his job. Lauterbach stuffed the warship with luxuries and one may suspect that, like others in his position in other navies, he had an eye to his own comfort and profit at the same time. When the Emden was finally shot to pieces Lauterbach was snugly installed in a prize ship a safe distance away.
Captured by the Allies, he was imprisoned in Singapore. In 1915, making opportunistic use of a mutiny amongst his Indian guards, Lauterbach made good his escape. His account of his involvement in that mutiny is inconsistent and shifty and has invited speculation. He now embarked on a protracted series of adventures as he tried to head back to Germany with a price of £1,000 (later inflated in his memoirs to £10,000) on his head and sought by all the British and Japanese agents in the East. He had contacts all over China and the Pacific from his sailing days as well as on German vessels interned in all the neutral harbours. He spoke Malay, pidgin Chinese, Dutch, Swedish and English as well as German. Beneath the flag of patriotism, Lauterbach performed several feats of great physical endurance and bravery, mixed with low cunning and self-interest. He was not a modest man. Often, when he had fooled or tricked anyone, he sent them a gloating postcard. After many adventures, he managed to return to Germany from the other side of the world and resumed an active role in the navy, though again one resting as much on deceit and cunning as military bravery.
Oddly, Captain von Mueller refused to write his own story, feeling it would be a base profiteering that would dishonour so many dead comrades. Lauterbach’s tale has been told several times. It appeared twice in German, with a deadly patriotic twist for wartime propaganda purposes, first under his own name as 1000Pf Sterling Kopfpreis – tot oder lebendig in 1917 and again as Als Fluechtling um den halben Erdball by Reinhard Roehle n.d. Then, in 1930 Lowell Thomas, an American journalist, took up the story and reworked it for the German-American market as Lauterbach of the China Sea which went back into German as Mein Freund Julibumm by Graf Luckner. It is with the luxury of hindsight that we can now see him as a far more interesting character than the nationalistic obsessions and hatreds of the time allowed him ever to appear. Thomas calls him ‘Falstaffian’ but we should perhaps nowadays see him as more ‘Flashmanesque’. Any truth about Julius Lauterbach goes far beyond the extant straightjacketed patriotic renditions. The version given here is no more than a possible version but to offer it is in no way to denigrate Julius Lauterbach. If anything, it seeks to humanise an exceptional man who has been caricatured as a fanatical martinet and return to him his deserved human condition. He is a man for whom I have a particular fondness. I hope readers will feel the same way.
Nigel Barley
Book One
THE SWAN OF THE EAST
Chapter One
The hard heat beat down upon Tsingtao. No one could remember a hot season like it. For week after week, the black-white-red of Germany hung limp in the air till the meteorological station’s equipment, fresh from Berlin, gave one final, desperate click and locked solid. With a thousand brass hammers the sun cracked the red rooftiles of the Chinese shophouses and bleached out the features of the Kaiser’s portraits, nailed patriotically above all cash registers. It mined and split the concrete of the new German harbour and sucked the very life from the roses planted by homesick Europeans in the gardens of their villas. On the roof-terrace of the Dachsaal beergarden, the troops bleared wistfully at the cool but distant Laoshan mountains, grew tearful and confused at the unwonted tropical vigour of the imported German pinetrees there, drank another beer, sang another “Muss i Denn” and fumbled absently at the breastless Chinese serving wenches whose Dirndl bodices flapped limp with unfulfilled expectation. Colonial life was a thin membrane of glory stretched over a yawning pit of boredom.
“Bloody mockery,” snivelled Captain Schulz, gulping fizzy beer and belching. Another month and he was due for the more solid forms of German home leave. He would be there now if it hadn’t been for the last-minute malaria. Instead he was on his jack, on this roof, in this mockery of a town, that yodelled with dumpy south German towers and all the gingerbread cosiness of Bavaria. A lissom Chinese waiter in Lederhosen minced past on hairless legs and Schulz shook his head in pain.
At the neighbouring table sprawled a bunch of young naval office
rs, empty steins discarded around them in puddles of beer, sporting a muddled variety of uniforms, military and merchant, that meant nothing to Schulz. The whole of this Kiaochow Chinese protectorate was treated like some bloody great ship of the Reich, Admiral Tirpitz in charge, another popinjay captain as governor. Even the soldiers were called ‘marines’ and only he and a few other officers were real army men, stuck like bored housewives in the stinking barracks at Fort Bismarck while the navy went off to play their silly games at sea.
“Bloody mockery,” he snarled again.
Tsingtao, the capital, was a model city, the teeming humanity of mainland China tamed and dammed by German colonial efficiency and the pouring in of millions of marks – water, roads, street-lighting, hospitals, schools, a railway, a floating drydock, and everywhere great naval guns poking at sky and sea. Undersea cables linked them to the wider world of Shanghai and the Pacific colony of Yap. The other side of the bay, disappearing in blue haze, was German too but under Chinese administration, a convenient muddle that gave excuses for military intervention whenever Germany needed them. The wind shifted and blew a sweet miasma of excrement, Chinese excrement over the town. Costive European dung was disdained as poisonous and fed into the maws of proud modern sewers to be belched out beyond the lighthouse but Chinese was traditionally composted for manure on one of the harbour islands and shovelled lavishly over their food. One way or another the Chinese made them all eat their shit. Schulz belched again. The wind shifted anew and now it was loud, beery conversation that blew over from the next table.
“There is absolutely no doubt about it. A missionary assured me … with his own eyes …”
“Ah, Juli-bumm, missionaries …”
Missionaries had a certain mythic power in Tsingtao. The protectorate had been seized following the murder of a couple back in 1897. German righteous outrage had led to an armed landing, a fine exacted in silver coin, raising of the German flag and the establishment of a profitable trading colony – all in search, not of gain, but allegedly to teach the Chinese a well-deserved moral lesson.
“No, no, a reliable man of experience – with a long white beard – I have known for many years, a Dutchman, a bishop even …” The speaker was huge, a great bear of a man, well over six feet, 18 stone of bullish flesh, bone and luxuriant fat, barrel-chested, vast Bismarckian head topped by a crewcut, full moustache and beard and little piggy eyes that gleamed like the colonial dollars the sailors were paid in. In his late thirties, he was far older than the clean-cut and pared young men at his table, a sea-dog amongst sea-puppies. He sighed and wiped his sweaty face with a pink, hairy hand, gestured for another round and poured it down as if dousing a fire in a waste-basket.
“I picked the Dutchman up in Talien, the end of the Trans-Siberian railroad.” With a finger, he drew elegant cartography, as in a primary school, in the slops on the table. “He’d come through from the West and everywhere, he said, Russian troops were moving back the other way. Germany, Austria. Great trains full of them – pale Ukrainians and Siberians – stuffed with rifles. Thousands more shunted into sidings. I tell you there’s a war coming.”
Howls of derision. “Juli-bumm, rubbish. Who are the Russians going to fight?” The Japanese had given them a bloody nose just the other year and sunk their navy. There would be no war. The boys had just come from the beach. The sun was shining. Their skin was taut and tanned. Hair bleached and sleek. Just last week that British navy had dropped by for football, horseracing, horseplay. The admirals had gone snipe shooting together and chortled in their clubs. The ratings got drunk and danced fraternally entwined. There would be no war. The big man sighed and wiped the ruined railway away, flicked the drops from his palm onto the floor.
“It’s this way.” He leaned forward, his voice growling and booming over their boyish piping “You know I have my two months’ reserve duty to do, same as every year?”
Yes, yes, they nodded. “And if a war starts, they can assign me anywhere?” Yes, yes. “But if I’m already serving on a ship they automatically make me part of that crew? Well, if it comes to a war, I can’t think of a better berth than the Emden, or better, braver mates to serve with …”
“Oh Juli-bumm …” Comradely tears started to their eyes for no heart is more sentimental than the caloused heart of a sailor, riven by a hundred reluctant farewells and with no second home to suborn its affections and Lauterbach knew that the constant presence of a disdainful sea and sky made men on ships huddle together against the cosmic chill.
… Softly … “So I wonder if maybe we can fix it that I start my reserve with you boys right here and now …? What do you think?”
“Oh Juli-bumm. Don’t worry. We can fix it.” Hugs, manly choking. Their smooth, young faces lit up with pure joy. “Franz Josef can fix it. You know, the Kaiser’s nephew. On the Emden, a technician looking after the torpedoes. A word with the admiral and he can fix anything. But there will be no war.” Still – a war – their eyes shone with bright excitement as they rolled the word round in their mouths. It would mean medals, bugles, cowboys and Indians, promotions … They pouted, “But we’re all headed for Mexico on a dull official cruise, haven’t you heard?” There could, after all, be no war. Other arrangements had already been made. “Have another little beer.”
It was pointless to argue. The young knew themselves to be confidently immortal while the fat man had attained a terrible awareness of the fragility of human flesh. A fat man has limited options in this world, reduced to the choice between embodying the virtue of joviality or the vice of greed. But Lauterbach, while he might slip in and out of either of these roles, could not make them permanently his own. In truth, he was horribly sensitive and as the years rolled by, he needed ever more flesh, piled up as a barrier against the world, just as he needed money and possessions to protect him from its bruising reality. Among the wildly gesturing boys, he sat back provisionally satisfied, like a man who had spent all day working his way against the wind and finally made it to a safe port. On the Emden he would be safe. Over the swimming table, Schulz caught his eye and a strange knowledge flowed between them. The big man stroked his moustache and smirked boldly into Schulz’s crazed grey eyes.
“Of course,” he said, staring, half-challenging, half-sharing cynical insight, “I suppose joining the Emden would mean a quiet war. After all, they won’t risk the Kaiser’s nephew’s life on anything too exciting. But one thing I’ve found from all my years in the Eastern seas.” He laid a hand melodramatically on his heart and used the sort of flattery he normally used on women. ”It’s comrades that count more than excitement. Just great comrades like you fine boys.”
“Oh Juli-bumm.” They simpered, bathed in rugged mutual respect. Another little beer. Another little beer. A toast to Julius Lauterbach, the best mate a bloke ever had.
Schulz coughed and tittered. Lauterbach. There was a cheap little song that had gone round the world by squeeze-box. In English it ran “Oh where oh where has my little dog gone …” In German it was “In Lauterbach I lost my sock. / I won’t be going back there. / But if I went to Lauterbach, / I’d once more have a pair there.”
Schulz guffawed and lah-lahed secretly under his breath. “Socks,” he sniggered to no one in particular and stared gleefully down at his boots. Lauterbach raised his glass and smiled peacefully. He had heard it all before. It had no power to upset him. Safe. On the Emden, he was safe.
“One for our friend over there,” he smirked with fat generosity, pointing with fingers like pork sausages. “The navy must not totally forget the army.” It was young von Guerard’s round anyway. In such circumstances, generosity cost nothing.
The wind shifted again and the sweet stink of the new brewery doused them in its catholic blessing. It did not smell that different from the dungheap really.
Julius Lauterbach was thirty-seven years old and life – thus far – had been good to him. He would have been the first to admit it. He was a Baltic German, born within sight of Mecklenburg Bay
– the same name as that fancy sanatorium up in the Laoshan hills. Bloody mock … No, wait, that was someone else.
A Baltic twang still salted his speech. Six years of military school at Lichterfelde had demonstrated beyond all doubt, to himself and the world, his unsuitability for the intended career in the army or the law. He could still feel the knuckles of his Latin master as they pummeled his shaved, schoolboy skull. “Examinations, Lauterbach, Are-Not-For-You. I fear that when the time comes you will have to resit your post-mortem.”
The death of his father, which had seemed at first to cast something of a shadow over the preparations for his eighteenth birthday, had been the making of him. He was free. Not the army then, not the law, not even the navy, but the merchant marine! In those days, it was still all sail. Sixteen months back and forth around the Horn at two dollars a month had hardened his hands and coarsened his speech. He had a pet monkey and a parrot. To be the complete sailor, all he needed was a wooden leg. His bourgeois family had withdrawn into shocked silence. Over the years, he had swopped ships and women, soft berths and hard, got a mate’s ticket, switched astutely to the new thing of steam, gone three times round the world and settled in as quartermaster on the China run of the big smug steamers of the Hamburg–America line. In the East, everything was big but the people and Lauterbach had begun to absorb that bigness into his own unshakeable flesh as quiet peculation lined his pockets from the company’s coffers. There were hurricanes and mountains, elephants and snakes. Once, six of them had wrestled a huge python back into its cage in a darkened cargo hold in a force nine gale, having stupefied it first with goat. At twenty-nine, finally, he was master of his own ship, the Gouverneur Jaeschke, a trim vessel with a gaping Chinese crew that he ruled with a rod of iron as he worked it round every port and up and down every river in the Orient. Shanghai, Tsingtao, Manila, Vladivostok and Hongkong were his regular fare.
