Dead Wake (20 page)

As U-20 descended, all activity ceased for a few moments, save for those tasks that made no noise. As always, the crew listened for leaks and monitored internal air pressure.

Then came the moment crews found so thrilling, when the boat was fully submerged and moving forward through the sea in a way unlike that of any other vessel, not grinding through waves like surface ships, but gliding, like a bird in air.

A sightless bird, however. The windows in the conning tower afforded a view only of things near at hand and in any case were usually covered by steel shutters. Traveling like this required a great deal of confidence, because Schwieger now had no way of knowing
what lay ahead. In this day before sonar, a submarine traveled utterly blind, trusting entirely in the accuracy of sea charts. One great fear of all U-boat men was that a half-sunk derelict or an uncharted rock might lie in their path.

S
HORTLY AFTER NOON
on Sunday, Schwieger gave orders to ascend. Now came “
the blind moment,” as commanders called it, that dismayingly long interval just before the periscope broke the surface. Everyone listened carefully for the sounds of ships transmitted through the hull—the rush of water past a prow, the thrum of propellers. There was no other way to tell what lay above. As Schwieger stared through the eyepiece, the water became brighter and more clear. These seconds were, according to one commander, “
some of the most nerve-racking that a man can endure.”

The biggest fear for Schwieger and fellow commanders was that the periscope would emerge within close range of a destroyer, or worse, in the destroyer’s path. One U-boat surfaced so close to a ship that the vessel’s black hull filled the lens. The commander at first thought he was looking at a particularly dark storm cloud.

The instant Schwieger’s periscope cleared the surface, he made a fast 360-degree sweep of the surrounding seascape. He saw nothing of concern. Here a U-boat had a significant advantage over surface ships. Schwieger could see the smoke coming from the funnels of steamships at a great distance, but the lookouts aboard those ships had to be much closer to spot him.

Schwieger gave the order to bring the submarine fully to the surface. Now, in addition to using the hydroplanes, the crew adjusted the air-water mix in the dive tanks to increase buoyancy. Within U-20, the crew heard a roar as compressed air was blasted into the tanks to force seawater out. Sometimes a commander chose to come all the way up, exposing the boat’s deck; at other times he ran “awash,” with just the conning tower above the surface, imparting a sensation akin to walking on water.

U-20
EMERGED
, but now Schwieger found a situation very different than his initial view through the periscope had led him to expect. The sea ahead was swarming with British patrol vessels—six of them—strung in a line between Fair Isle and the northernmost island of the Orkneys, North Ronaldsay, whose lighthouse was familiar to any mariner traversing these waters.

And behind him, Schwieger spotted two more destroyers. He had seen these earlier in the day but believed he had outdistanced them. In his log he wrote, “they heave in sight again, course towards ‘U20’; one of the patrol boats turns towards us.”

A
FTER HIS RENDEZVOUS WITH THE THREE BRITISH
warships, Captain Turner brought the
Lusitania
to the speed he hoped to maintain throughout the voyage, 21 knots. He set a northeasterly bearing to begin a “circle course” that would take him across the Atlantic. This being May, when icebergs calved in northern seas, Turner chose
the “long course,” which veered farther south than the route followed in late summer and fall. Assuming all went well, Turner would arrive at the Mersey Bar outside Liverpool Harbor shortly before dawn on Saturday, May 8.
Timing was crucial. Large ships could cross the bar only at high tide. Before the war, this had posed no particular problem. If a captain arrived too early or too late he could just stop and loiter awhile in the Irish Sea. But now that any such pause could prove fatal, captains timed their arrivals to cross the bar without stopping.

Throughout Sunday, May 2, the ship encountered rain and fog, and seas just turbulent enough to cause seasickness. Many passengers retreated to their rooms, but hardier souls walked the decks, played cards, engaged the ship’s typists for their correspondence, and sipped tea in the Verandah Cafe, a calming gardenlike place with five hanging baskets, six shrubs in containers, and forty other plants in boxes around the room. Some passengers read books on C Deck—also called the Shelter Deck—protected from rain by the
underside of the deck above. Passengers could rent deck chairs for a dollar per voyage; another dollar got them a blanket, known in the ship’s vernacular as a “rug.”

At 10:30 Sunday morning, church services began for two denominations: Church of England, in the first-class saloon; Roman Catholic in second. Many passengers slept late, planning to wake at about eleven, in time for lunch.

T
HEODATE
P
OPE
awoke after a difficult night. Her cabin had been noisy, owing to its proximity to the three staterooms booked by the Crompton family, who proved to be a boisterous group, as families of six, including an infant, tend to be. Always prone to insomnia, she found the noise intolerable and asked the purser, McCubbin, to find her a more suitable stateroom. Changing accommodations while under way could be a tricky business, but McCubbin obliged and placed her in a new stateroom three decks up.

S
ECOND
-
CLASS PASSENGER
William Uno Meriheina, a twenty-six-year-old race-car driver from New York traveling to South Africa as a “special agent” for the General Motors Export Company, got up early and took “a dandy salt water bath.” The tubs on board were supplied with heated seawater. Afterward, he dressed and went to breakfast. “Plenty of seasickness on board,” he noted, in a long day-by-day letter he was writing to his wife, Esther, “but I feel splendid.”

Meriheina—who, except when traveling, went by the name William Merry Heina—had been born in Russia, in the Duchy of Finland (which would become independent in 1917), and emigrated to New York in 1893. He had a fascination with speed and by 1909 was racing cars in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, including one race that lasted twenty-four hours. He was also one of the first drivers to race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway after it opened in 1909. He survived two crashes, one in which his car, a Lozier, rolled over twice, but left him unhurt. He also tried his hand at
flying and survived a collision at an airfield in Garden City, Long Island, in which another aircraft settled on top of his in midair. Once again he emerged unscathed. Said his wife, “
A braver man never lived.”

He had chosen the
Lusitania
because he believed it to be the “safest” ship. In the rush to board and say good-bye to his wife and their daughter, Charlotte, he had not had a chance to open the newspaper he had bought before boarding. It was only when the ship was about fifty miles from New York that he read about the German warning.

He wasn’t worried. Now and then the ship encountered French and British warships. One French dreadnought turned around and followed, but the
Lusitania
left it behind.

Like other passengers, he was unaware that the liner was traveling at reduced speed with one boiler room closed, despite the obvious visible clue provided by the lack of smoke coming from the fourth funnel. He believed the ship was moving at its top speed of 25 knots and took pride in the pace. “
We have passed quite a few vessels bound both ways,” he wrote. “Owing to our great speed we don’t stay in sight of any one ship very long.”

He was also under the impression the ship was being watched over by British naval forces. “Evidently,” he wrote, “we are being carefully convoyed all the way across.”

T
HAT MORNING
Charles Lauriat got up at 8:00
A
.
M
., called back to consciousness by his steward. He also took a sea bath. Once dressed, he strolled the first-class promenade, stopping to chat with the Hubbards and other acquaintances. He dined with his traveling companion, Lothrop Withington. They took their meals together in the opulent first-class dining room at the center of D Deck, where some 470 passengers at a time dined at tables arrayed on two levels under a dome frescoed with cherubs, amid palm trees, potted plants, white plaster walls, and fluted Corinthian columns with gilded capitals. Gold leaf seemed to coat every raised surface, from plaster wreaths and vines to balustrade rails.

Lauriat was sufficiently well known to Cunard officers and crew that on some past voyages he had been allowed to climb up
into the crow’s nest on the ship’s forward wireless mast and stay there throughout the day. This was not, however, something Captain Turner was likely to let him do. Dealing with bloody monkeys on deck was one thing; having them climbing the wireless mast was another.

Lauriat knew well the routines of shipboard life, including the daily pools where passengers placed bets on how many miles the ship would travel in a given day. Places in the pool denoted a particular distance and were auctioned by a ship’s officer. Passengers based their bets on their sense of how the ship would fare given the weather and sea conditions likely to prevail over the next twenty-four hours. The most unpredictable factor was fog, which if it persisted would sharply limit a ship’s progress, for the only safe way of coping with fog was to cut speed and start blowing the ship’s foghorn. The mileage pool and its associated strategizing and arguing and the cigars and whiskey consumed by those present invariably helped spark friendships and break down barriers of formal courtesy and convention.

On Sunday, the ship’s first full day at sea, it traveled 501 miles, according to Lauriat’s recollection. He found this surprising. He too assumed the ship was moving at 25 knots. At that rate, equivalent to about 29 miles an hour, it should have covered 700 miles. The periodic fog accounted for part of this sluggishness, he gauged, but certainly not all. At noon the next day, Lauriat and Withington would discover the ship was traveling even more slowly. “
At this rate,” Lauriat told Withington, “we’re not going to make Liverpool on time.”

Lauriat retired to his stateroom to examine the Thackeray drawings.
He looked them over, mulling what he would ask Lady Ritchie to write and planning how each drawing would be mounted.

F
OR
C
APTAIN
T
URNER
, the voyage thus far was routine, and it was likely to remain so for at least the next four days. The weather was peaceful, for the most part, and there was little likelihood of encountering a German submarine in mid-ocean. When the ship neared Ireland, however, the danger of attack would grow. While Turner himself expressed little anxiety about submarines, within Cunard there was a growing sense that the threat they posed was becoming more acute.

Before each crossing, the company gave Turner confidential advisories and notices about conditions that might affect the voyage. Lately these had included Admiralty memoranda that delineated the growing submarine threat and offered advice on what to do if confronted by a U-boat. Cunard’s managers still shared the widely held belief that no U-boat commander would dare sink a passenger liner; at the same time, they had watched as Germany began conducting attacks against other merchant ships without scruple. U-boats now ventured as far as Liverpool. One merchant victim, the
Princess Victoria
, was torpedoed just off the Mersey Bar.

These attacks prompted the Admiralty to issue new advisories to address the danger. Cunard relayed to Turner orders to halt all wireless transmissions from the ship’s Marconi room except when “
absolutely necessary.” Its wireless operators were
expressly prohibited from “gossiping.” Passengers could receive messages but could not send them. Another Admiralty advisory warned, in italics,
“
Ships should give prominent headlands a wide berth
.”