A Higher Form of Killing (26 page)

Notices began to appear in shop windows such as:
LUSITANIA. MISSING A BABY GIRL FIFTEEN MONTHS OLD. VERY FAIR CURLY HAIR . . . IN WHITE WOOLLEN JERSEY . . . TRIES TO WALK AND TALK. PLEASE SEND ANY INFORMATION TO MISS BROWN, QUEEN’S HOUSE, QUEENSTOWN
. Consul Wesley Frost quickly compiled a list of confirmed American dead which included Charles Frohman. However, many remained unaccounted for, such as Alfred Vanderbilt.

For most survivors their journey was not yet over. They still needed to get to England. Charles Lauriat was one of the first to depart, leaving on an Irish mail ship on May 8. However, the thought that other U-boats might yet be lurking made sleep difficult. Going to the saloon he saw that “every man who had been a passenger on the
Lusitania
was sitting by a table, or reclining on a couch, with a lifejacket strapped around him.” Many were still wearing those from the
Lusitania
.

By May 10, solemn mass funerals were taking place. Led by a military band, the corteges wound up the steep hill past Saint Coleman’s Cathedral to the small cemetery outside Queenstown where three large pits had been dug. However, even before the first burials, in fact on Saturday, May 8, the day after the sinking, county coroner John J. Horgan opened an inquest on five of the
Lusitania
’s victims at the old market house in the center of the nearby town of Kinsale. Captain Turner, the main witness, appeared on Monday, May 10, wearing “a badly fitting old suit” rather than his resplendent uniform.

Answering Horgan’s questions he confirmed he had been “fully aware” of the German warning, that the
Lusitania
had been unarmed, and that, when entering the danger area, he had taken precautions including having the lifeboats swung out and the watertight bulkhead doors closed as well as doubling the lookouts. He had been in radio contact “all the way across to receive but not to send messages” and had received messages that submarines were off the Irish coast. He answered other questions about the weather and the ship’s speed but was not prepared to discuss some issues in open court. He confirmed to Horgan that he had had “special instructions” but was “not at liberty to say what they were” although he had carried them out “to the best of [his] ability.”

On the sinking itself he said that a single torpedo had struck the
Lusitania
between “the third and fourth funnels” and he had not been able “to stop the ship.” There had been “headway” on the
Lusitania
“until the moment she went down.” He had not been zigzagging when attacked. A member of the jury of twelve “shopkeepers and fishermen” inquired whether he had asked the Admiralty for an escort because of the warning. He said he had not. “I leave that to them, it is their business.” Horgan’s own last question was whether the submarine had given any warning. “None whatever, sir. It was straight and done with, and the whole lot went up in the air,” Turner responded. The coroner said, “We all sympathise with you . . . in the terrible crime which has been committed against your vessel . . . We realise the deep feeling you must have in this matter,” whereupon Turner, sitting head bowed, burst into tears.

Horgan told the jury “the warning in the American papers . . . had no more legal or valid effect than that of an assassin who sent an anonymous letter to his intended victim.” He directed them to return a verdict placing the guilt on Germany: “We find that the deceased died from their prolonged immersion and exhaustion in the sea . . . owing to the sinking of the RMS
Lusitania
by a torpedo fired without warning from a German submarine. This appalling crime was contrary to international law and the convention of civilised nations, and we therefore charge the officers of the said submarine and the Emperor and government of Germany, under whose orders they acted, with the crime of wilful and wholesale murder.”

As Horgan was about to leave Old Market House half an hour later, Harry Wynne, crown solicitor for Cork, arrived to announce that the Admiralty had told him to stop the inquest so that nothing should be said “as to instructions issued by Naval Authorities for guidance of merchant vessels in avoiding submarines.” Captain Turner was ordered to remain silent until a formal Board of Trade inquiry into the sinking. Southern Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom and Horgan would have had to comply but—as he told Wynne—he was too late. The verdict was already with the world’s press. Horgan later claimed that the Admiralty were “as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the
Lusitania
against attack.”

*
 As his mother’s and siblings’ almost only means of financial support, George Wynne was soon back at sea. He later joined the army only to be gassed but survived that as well, living into his eighties.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Too Proud to Fight”

The final official death toll from the sinking of the
Lusitania
was 1,198. (If the three German agents still locked in their cell when the ship went down are included, which they were not, the figure would rise to 1,201.) Of the 1,257 passengers, 785—including 128 Americans—had perished as had 413 members of the 702-strong crew. Compared with daily casualty figures at the front the
Lusitania
fatalities were tiny. But world reaction to what had occurred off the Irish coast on Friday, May 7, 1915, was enormous.

The German press saluted the “extraordinary success” of a justified attack on the
Lusitania
, an armed ship carrying both munitions and Canadian troops that had been warned before she sailed. One paper stated that “hundreds of non-participant passengers were victims, victims of the haughty greed of English shipping lines.” Another accused Britain of cynically using “citizens from neutral nations as a shield.” The
Koelnische Volkszeitung
“with joyful pride” called the sinking “a success of our submarines which must be placed beside the greatest achievement of this naval war” claiming it as “of moral significance” and a just response to British attempts to starve the German people to death through her blockade. The
Neueste Nachrichten
declared, “The torpedoing . . . fills us with satisfaction . . . Now finally the firm of Wilson and Grey will realise that we will no longer be deterred by anything . . . Should he [Wilson] crave action with us, just let him begin . . . We would willingly bear the American declaration of war along with the Italian. Of victory we are certain.” Crown Prince Wilhelm, a firm supporter of unrestricted U-boat warfare, telegrammed the kaiser from his headquarters in northern France telling his father of the “great joy” there at the sinking, and urging that the more determinedly the U-boat war was waged, the quicker the war would be won.

The German Admiralty learned for certain on May 12 which U-boat had sunk the
Lusitania
. Back in radio range, Walther Schwieger signalled:
HAVE SUNK ONE SAILING VESSEL TWO STEAMERS AND LUSITANIA
. Later he added that he had sunk the liner with one torpedo. The British Room 40 team intercepted both messages, immediately recognized their significance, and carefully checked them before forwarding them to Churchill, Fisher, and other senior figures in the Admiralty. Each recipient now knew that whatever else had caused the second explosion reported by so many
Lusitania
survivors, it was not a second torpedo.

The British press’s reaction, meanwhile, had been predictably hostile, raging about the “Latest Achievements of German Frightfulness at Sea” and “The Hun’s Most Ghastly Crime” perpetrated by “German pirates” and “Tirpitz’s murderers.” Images of confused, pale-faced orphans, bereaved women, and dead babies stared out from the pages. Several accounts pictured submarines circling as gloating U-boatmen leaned from their conning towers to taunt their victims. Some even described submariners machine-gunning people in the water.

Editorials suggested the sinking was a further case of a new unprincipled form of warfare. The
Daily Chronicle
, for example, believed: “Sowing of illegal mines, submarining of merchantmen, butchery of fishermen, the
Falaba
case, the
Lusitania
case—it is a long and terrible list. On land the sacking of towns, the massacres of non-combatants, the use of explosive bullets and asphyxiating gas.” The
Times
demanded the whole world “join in branding . . . the renegade among the nations.” The
Daily Mirror
believed “this cold bloodiest piece of murder was specifically planned to provoke the USA.” The
Daily Express
hoped that President Wilson, “good man that he is,” would do “something more than protest.”
*

Anti-German rioting erupted in many British cities. Some newspapers incited it with headlines like
HUNT THEM DOWN, NOW FOR A VENDETTA
, and
DOWN WITH THE SWINE,
and all reported violent unrest from “widespread havoc” to “pillage and fire.” In London, German-owned businesses were looted from the East End to Kentish Town. A bystander described how “when the news . . . went round that the
Lusitania
had been sunk . . . all the women turned out furious, cursing the Germans, and suddenly began to talk about people who had German names . . . From nowhere came a great rush of women . . . outside this draper’s shop shouting and shaking their fists.” The women produced half bricks from beneath their shawls and threw them through the window. They made “a mad rush . . . into the shop elbowing one another, shoving, thumping, and . . . snatch[ed] at everything . . . Stock boxes were pulled out . . . things snatched from the shelves . . . boots, men’s suits, socks, anything . . . Even those who couldn’t get anything tried to thieve what the others had stolen.”

The disturbances were particularly violent in Liverpool where mobs numbered up to two or three thousand. By May 13 forty thousand pounds worth of property had been destroyed in the city. Two Americans, newly arrived on the liner
New York
, joined in. One later told the
New York Times
how the mob attacked a cutlery shop:

The crowd was muttering and growling and the shop was dark but there were people upstairs. So I just picked up a brick and heaved it through the window . . . Then everyone took to shying them, and in a few minutes the place was a wreck . . . Soon all the furniture, carpets and everything else were thrown out of the windows into the street. There were policemen at the corner . . . and they only grinned. The crowd then went on down the street and wrecked four German pork shops . . . I saw one young fellow going off with half a hog and an old woman was dancing in the middle of the street with strings of sausages all over her and flying in the wind.”

There was also serious anti-German rioting in Britain’s dominions. In Canada the capital of British Columbia, Victoria, had to be placed under martial law.

On May 13 Prime Minister Asquith announced the internment of all male enemy aliens of military age (seventeen to forty-five years old). The following day the kaiser’s banner was unceremoniously hauled down from the Chapel Royal at Windsor Castle to mark his expulsion from the British Order of the Garter, bestowed on him thirty-eight years earlier by his adored grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Elsewhere, the French press declared “the German’s divorce from civilisation is complete” and predicted that neutral countries would now join the Allies.

Many neutrals indeed condemned the attack. The Dutch
Telegraaf
thought, “Criminal is too mild a word to be applied to this outrage; it is devilish”; the Norwegian
Morgenblad
that “the news of the sinking of the
Lusitania
puts . . . all other events in the background and arouses the whole world to a feeling of horror. The Germans have meant to terrify. They have terrified their friends and terror breeds hate.”

The British government quickly realized the sinking was a powerful weapon in the propaganda war and wished no portion of the blame for it to attach to them. When Churchill returned to London from France on May 10, three days after the sinking, he faced a barrage of questions in the House of Commons. Members of Parliament asked him how fast was
Lusitania
traveling when torpedoed? What were the captain’s instructions? Why had the
Lusitania
not been escorted when submarines were known to be active in the area? What had been done in response to the newspaper warning in the United States?

Churchill’s performance was not among his most distinguished. Insisting he was hampered by being unable to disclose classified information, he told the Commons that the Board of Trade had set up an independent inquiry into the sinking to be chaired by Lord Mersey, Britain’s commissioner for wrecks, and that the
Lusitania
had received instructions and at least two warnings from the Admiralty. However, he could not discuss them since “it might appear I was trying to throw blame on the Captain of the
Lusitania
in regard to an affair which will be the subject of full investigation.”