Dead Wake (24 page)

The quiet meant nothing. At some point U-20 would make its presence known.

U-20

FRUSTRATION

A
T
7:40
P
.
M
., T
UESDAY
, S
CHWIEGER AT LAST SIGHTED
the coast of Ireland. A lighthouse lay on the horizon, barely visible in the rising mist.

The day had been a disappointment. Strong swells had made the going uncomfortable for the crew below, and Schwieger had found no targets worthy of attack. An armed trawler briefly had come into view, but he realized its draft was so shallow that a torpedo would likely run underneath its keel. Visibility had been poor for most of the day, though by evening it improved to the point where he could see distant objects. The gathering haze, however, foretold a night of fog.

Fifteen minutes later, a steamship appeared, heading in U-20’s direction. It was still far off but looked to be a vessel of significant tonnage. Schwieger ordered a dive to periscope depth and prepared his attack. He placed U-20 at a 90-degree angle to the ship’s course, to set up what he called a “clean bow shot,” and once again selected a bronze torpedo.

As the ship approached, however, it seemed to shrink in size. Something about the fading light and mist had produced an optical illusion that made the vessel at first look large, but the closer it got, the smaller it got. Schwieger estimated its tonnage at a mere 1,500 tons. Still, it was something. He maneuvered so that when
the ship’s course intersected his, he would be just 300 meters away. The target was still a mile off.

And then, as he watched through the periscope, the ship sheered from its course. At that distance, there was no chance for him to catch up.

Even in the spare prose of his log, Schwieger’s frustration was evident. “It was impossible that the steamer could have seen us,” he wrote. He identified the ship as a Swedish vessel, the
Hibernia
, “with neutral signs, without flag.”

Schwieger brought U-20 back to the surface, and continued south, through a night he described as being exceptionally dark.

LONDON; BERLIN; WASHINGTON

COMFORT DENIED

O
N THAT
W
EDNESDAY
, M
AY
5, B
RITAIN
’
S TOP NAVAL
official, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, left London for Paris. He could do so with relative safety because a combination of protective measures—sea mines and submarine nets at the eastern end of the English Channel and heavy patrols along its length—had made the channel too dangerous for submarines to traverse on a routine basis. Although Churchill traveled incognito and checked into his hotel under a false name, there was little mystery about his visit. He was to meet with Italian and French officials to determine how the Italian navy should be used in the Mediterranean Sea, now that Italy—on April 26—had joined the war on the side of Britain, France, and Russia. Afterward, as he had done on previous occasions, Churchill planned to travel to the front to spend time with Field Marshal Sir John French—Sir John Denton Pinkstone French—commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France.

With Churchill absent, the Admiralty became a much quieter place. Ordinarily, he kept a very close hand on naval matters, including details of day-to-day operations that, at least in theory, were supposed to be left to the number two Admiralty official, the First Sea Lord. This put the forty-year-old Churchill in direct conflict with the seventy-four-year-old occupant of that post, Adm. Jacky Fisher.

If Churchill resembled a bulldog, Fisher was a large bulb-eyed toad, dead ringer for a future actor named László Löwenstein, better known by the stage name Peter Lorre. Like Churchill, Fisher was strong-willed and tended to consume himself with the minute details of naval operations. When both men were present, tension was the order of the day. One naval official wrote to his wife, “
The situation is curious—two very strong and clever men, one old, wily and of vast experience, one young, self-assertive, with a great self-satisfaction but unstable. They cannot work together, they cannot both run the show.” Churchill seemed bent on usurping Fisher’s role.
Churchill’s “energy and capacity for work were almost frightening,” wrote intelligence chief Blinker Hall. “Notes and memoranda on every conceivable subject would stream forth from his room at all hours of the day and night. What was worse, he would demand information which would ordinarily and properly have gone only to the First Sea Lord or Chief of Staff, a fact which more than once led to some confusion and an unmerited word of rebuke.”

What made their relationship still more turbulent was the fact that Fisher seemed to be tottering on the verge of madness. Wrote Hall, “
Gradually we in the Admiralty could not help becoming aware that the Fisher we had known was no longer with us. In his place was a sorely harassed and disillusioned man who was overtaxing his strength in the attempt to carry on. He might still on occasion show the old flashes of brilliance, but, beneath the surface, all was far from being well.… At any moment, we felt, the breaking-point would come.” Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, likewise grew concerned. “
The state of affairs at Head Quarters,” he wrote, in an April 26 letter to a fellow officer, “is as bad or worse than I feared. It is lamentable that things should be as they are, and there is no doubt whatever that the Fleet is rapidly losing confidence in the administration.”

Churchill acknowledged Fisher’s energy and prior genius. “
But he was seventy-four years old,” Churchill wrote, in an oblique evisceration. “As in a great castle which has long contended with time, the mighty central mass of the donjon towered up intact
and seemingly everlasting. But the outworks and the battlements had fallen away, and its imperious ruler dwelt only in the special apartments and corridors with which he had a lifelong familiarity.” This, however, was exactly what Churchill had hoped for in bringing Fisher back as First Sea Lord. “
I took him because I knew he was
old
and
weak
, and that I should be able to keep things in my own hands.”

By May 1915, Churchill wrote, Fisher was suffering from “
great nervous exhaustion.” With Churchill gone to Paris, Fisher was in charge and seemed barely up to the task. “
He had evinced unconcealed distress and anxiety at being left alone in sole charge of the admiralty,” Churchill wrote. “There is no doubt that the old Admiral was worried almost out of his wits by the immense pressure of the times and by the course events had taken.”

In Churchill’s absence, an incident took place that seemed to reinforce his concerns about Fisher’s sanity. Before leaving for France, Churchill had told his wife, Clementine, “
Just look after ‘the old boy’ for me,” and so Clementine invited Fisher to come to lunch. She neither liked nor trusted Fisher and doubted he could withstand the stress of having to run the Admiralty in her husband’s absence. The lunch went well, however, and Fisher departed. Or so Clementine thought.

Soon afterward, she too left the sitting room, and found that Fisher was still in the house, “lurking in the passage,” according to an account by the Churchills’ daughter Mary. Clementine was startled, Mary recalled. “She asked him what he wanted, whereupon, in a brusque and somewhat incoherent manner he told her that, while she no doubt was under the impression that Winston was conferring with Sir John French, he was in fact frolicking with a mistress in Paris!”

To Clementine, this was a ludicrous charge. She snapped, “Be quiet, you silly old man, and get out.”

With Churchill in Paris, the torrent of notes and telegrams he generated daily—“
the constant bombardment of memoranda and minutes on every conceivable subject, technical or otherwise,” as Fisher’s assistant described it—abruptly subsided. Relative to the
turmoil that ordinarily existed in its halls, the Admiralty now became quiescent, if not to say inattentive.

A
T THE
U.S. E
MBASSY
in Berlin, Ambassador James W. Gerard received a curt, two-paragraph note from the German Foreign Office. The message, dated Wednesday, May 5, cited the fact that in preceding weeks “
it has repeatedly occurred” that neutral ships had been sunk by German submarines in the designated war zone. In one case, the note said, a U-boat sank a neutral ship “on account of the inadequate illumination of its neutral markings in the darkness.”

The note urged Gerard to convey these facts to Washington and to recommend that the United States “again warn American shipping circles against traversing the war zone without taking due precautions.” Ships, the note said, should be sure to make their neutral markings “as plain as possible and especially to have them illuminated promptly at nightfall and throughout the night.”

Gerard relayed this to the State Department the next day.

I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, President Wilson found himself in emotional turmoil, for reasons unrelated to ships and war.

By now he had fallen ever more deeply in love with Edith Galt, and with the prospect of no longer being alone. On the evening of Tuesday, May 4, Wilson sent his Pierce-Arrow to pick up Edith and bring her to the White House for dinner. She wore a white satin gown with “
creamy lace, and just a touch of emerald-green velvet at the edge of the deep square neck, and green slippers to match,” she recalled. Afterward, Wilson led her out onto the South Portico, where they sat by themselves, without chaperone. The evening was warm, the air fragrant with the rich perfume of a Washington spring. He told her he loved her.

She was stunned. “Oh, you can’t love me,” she said, “for you don’t really know me; and it is less than a year since your wife died.”

Wilson, unfazed, said, “I was afraid, knowing you, that I would shock you,” he said, “but I would be less than a gentleman if I continued to make opportunities to see you without telling you what I have told my daughters and Helen: that I want you to be my wife.”

So not just love, itself a striking declaration—but marriage.

Edith turned him down. She leavened her rejection with a note she composed later that night, after Wilson dropped her at her apartment. “It is long past midnight,” she wrote, early Wednesday morning, May 5. “I have been sitting in the big chair by the window, looking out into the night, ever since you went away, my whole being is awake and vibrant!”

She told him that his expression of love and confession of loneliness had left her anguished. “How I want to help! What an unspeakable pleasure and privilege I deem it to be allowed to share these tense, terrible days of responsibility, how I thrill to my very finger tips when I remember the tremendous thing you said to me tonight, and how pitifully poor I am, to have nothing to offer you in return. Nothing—I mean—in proportion to your own great gift!”

Here she joined the universal struggle shared by men and women throughout time, to temper rejection so as not to lose a friend forever.

“I am a woman—and the thought that you have
need
of me—is sweet!” she wrote. “But, dear kindred spirit, can you not trust me and let me lead you from the thought that you have forfeited anything by your fearless honesty to the conviction that, with such frankness between us, there is nothing to fear—we will help and hearten each other.”

She added, “You have been honest with me, and, perhaps, I was too frank with you—but if so forgive me!”

Later that morning, with the sun up and the day under way, Edith and Helen Bones went for another walk in Rock Creek Park. They sat on some rocks to rest. Helen glared at Edith and said, “
Cousin Woodrow looks really ill this morning.” Helen loved her cousin and was protective of him.
She nicknamed him “Tiger,” not
because of some lascivious bent, but because, as Edith later told the story, “he was so pathetic caged there in the White House, longing to come and go, as she did, that he reminded her of a splendid Bengal tiger she had once seen—never still, moving, restless, resentful of his bars that shut out the larger life God had made for him.” Now, in the park, Helen burst into tears. “
Just as I thought some happiness was coming into his life!” she said. “And now you are breaking his heart.”

In a strangely cinematic intervention, Dr. Grayson suddenly appeared from a nearby stand of trees, riding a horse—a large white horse no less. He asked Helen what had happened, and she quickly answered that she had tripped and fallen. “
I don’t think he believed her,” Edith wrote, “but he pretended to and rode on.”

His arrival was a timely thing, she added, “for I was starting to feel like a criminal, and guilty of base ingratitude.” She tried to explain to Helen that she wasn’t being an “ogre”; rather, she simply could not “consent to something I did not feel.” She told Helen that she understood she was “
playing with fire where [Wilson] was concerned, for his whole nature was intense and did not willingly wait; but that I must have time really to know my own heart.”

Edith’s rejection caused Wilson great sorrow and left him feeling almost disoriented as world events clamored for his attention. Even Britain had become a growing source of irritation. In its drive to halt the flow of war matériel to Germany, British warships had stopped American ships and seized American cargoes. Early in the war Wilson had grown concerned that Britain’s actions might so outrage the American public as to cause serious conflict between the two nations. Diplomacy eased tensions, for a time. But then on March 11, 1915, in response to Germany’s “war zone” declaration of the preceding month, the British government issued a new, and startling, “Order in Council” proclaiming its formal intent to stop every ship sailing to or from Germany, whether neutral or not, and to stop ships bound even for neutral ports, to determine whether their cargoes might ultimately end up in German hands. Britain also sharply increased the list of products it would henceforth view
as contraband. The order outraged Wilson, who sent a formal protest in which he described Britain’s plan as “
an almost unqualified denial of the sovereign rights of the nations now at peace.”