Dead Wake (37 page)

Countless souls struggled in the sea around him. There was little he could do beyond shoving an oar or some other piece of floating debris in their direction. Many passengers wore heavy coats; women wore multiple layers of clothing—corsets, camisoles, petticoats, jumpers, furs—and all these quickly became sodden and heavy. Passengers without life jackets sank. The complicated clothing of children and infants bore them under as well.

One of the most disconcerting sights reported by survivors was
of hundreds of hands waving above the water, beseeching help. But soon there was quiet. Survivors reported seeing a plume of smoke from a steamer to the south, but it came no closer. The time that had elapsed since the impact of the torpedo was eighteen minutes.

Seagulls came now and moved among the floating bodies.

C
APTAIN
T
URNER
was still on the bridge as the navigation deck submerged. The sea in the distance was a shimmery blue, but up close, green and clear. The sun penetrating the upper strata of water caught the paint and brightwork of the deck as it fell away below him.

Helmsman Hugh Johnston saw Turner on the bridge wing, moving from port to starboard and back, wearing a life jacket but otherwise making no attempt to dodge the customary fate of a sea captain. Johnston said, later, that he’d “
never met anyone as ‘cool’ ” as Turner.

The ship at that point was still moving, but slowly, with a wake full of wreckage and corpses spreading behind it, fed by the hundreds of men, women, and children who through accident or fear had remained on the ship. They streamed off like the knots in a kite’s tail.

A
T
2:33
P
.
M
., the wireless station at the Old Head of Kinsale sent the Admiralty a two-word message: “ 
‘Lusitania’ sunk.”

Observers on the Old Head had seen it happen. A great ship, present one moment, gone the next, leaving what appeared at a distance to be an empty blue sea.

Captain Turner’s pocket watch, which would eventually make its way into a Liverpool museum, stopped at 2:36:15.

ALL POINTS

RUMOR

T
HE
A
MERICAN CONSULATE IN
Q
UEENSTOWN
, I
RELAND
, was located in a suite of rooms above a bar, overlooking the harbor. Behind the building stood the great spire of St. Colman’s Cathedral, which dwarfed every other structure in town. That afternoon, Consul Wesley Frost was at work revising his annual report on commercial conditions in various Irish counties when, at 2:30, his vice-consul came pounding up the stairs to report a fast-spreading rumor that a submarine had attacked the
Lusitania
.

Frost walked to the windows and saw an unusual surge of activity in the harbor below. Every vessel, of every size, seemed to be leaving, including the big cruiser
Juno
, which had arrived only a short while earlier. Frost counted two dozen craft in all.

He went to his telephone and called the office of Adm. Charles Henry Coke, the senior naval officer for Queenstown, and spoke to the admiral’s secretary. Frost chose his words with care, not wishing to appear to be a dupe of someone’s practical joke. He said, “
I hear there is some sort of street rumor that the
Lusitania
has been attacked.”

The secretary replied, “It’s true, Mr. Frost. We fear she is gone.”

Frost listened in a daze as the secretary told him about the SOS messages and the report from eyewitnesses on Kinsale Head confirming the disappearance of the ship.

After hanging up, Frost paced his office, trying to absorb what had occurred and thinking about what to do next. He telegraphed the news to U.S. ambassador Page in London.

A
DMIRAL
C
OKE
had dispatched all the rescue craft he could, including the
Juno
, and telegraphed the Admiralty that he had done so.

The
Juno
was the fastest ship available. Queenstown was two dozen miles from the reported site of the attack. Most of the smaller vessels would be lucky to cover that distance in three or four hours; given the calm air, sail-powered craft would take even longer. The
Juno
, capable of making 18 knots, or 20 miles an hour, could do it in just over one hour. Its crew moved with great haste, and soon the old cruiser was under way.

But the Admiralty fired back a reply: “
Urgent: Recall
Juno
.” The order was a direct offspring of the
Aboukir, Cressy
, and
Hogue
disaster: no large warship was to go to the aid of victims of a U-boat attack. The risk was too great that the submarine might still be present, waiting to sink ships coming to the rescue.

Coke apparently had second thoughts of his own, for even before the Admiralty’s message arrived he ordered the
Juno
back into port. His rationale for deciding to recall the ship did not conform to the Admiralty’s, however. After dispatching the
Juno
, he explained, “
I then received a telegram stating that the
Lusitania
had sunk. The urgent necessity for the
Juno
no longer obtaining I recalled her.”

This was curious logic, for the “urgent necessity” was if anything far greater, with hundreds of passengers and crew now adrift in 55-degree waters. It testified to the importance the Admiralty placed on protecting its big warships and heeding the hard lesson taught by the
Aboukir
disaster, to never go to the aid of submarine victims.

I
N
L
ONDON
, at four o’clock that afternoon, U.S. ambassador Walter H. Page learned for the first time that the
Lusitania
had been attacked and sunk, but, in an eerie echo of the
Titanic
disaster, initial reports also indicated that all passengers and crew had been saved. Since no lives had been lost, there seemed little reason to call off a dinner party the ambassador and his wife had scheduled for that evening to honor President Wilson’s personal emissary, Colonel House.

By the time Page got home at seven o’clock that night, the news from Queenstown had grown darker, but by then it was too late to cancel dinner. The guests arrived and spoke of nothing but the sinking. The telephone rang repeatedly.
Each call brought fresh reports from Page’s staff at the embassy, which were delivered to the ambassador on small slips of yellow paper. He read each aloud to his guests. The news grew steadily more dire, until it became clear that this was a disaster of historic proportions. The guests spoke in quiet tones and debated the potential consequences.

Colonel House told the group, “
We shall be at war with Germany within a month.”

T
HAT MORNING
, in New York, where the time was far behind that in London, Jack Lawrence, the ship-news reporter for the
New York Evening Mail
, went to a bar on Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan frequented by sailors, harbor pilots, and the like and ordered a gin daisy, which the bartender delivered to him in a stone mug.
Daisy
was a bastardization of “doozy.” Lawrence saw a harbor pilot whom he knew. The pilot, just back from docking a small freighter in Hoboken, New Jersey, suggested they move to the quiet end of the bar, where he told Lawrence something he had overheard that morning.

The pilot explained that he had docked the freighter next to the
Vaterland
, the big German ocean liner interned for the war. After disembarking, he went to a nearby sidewalk café that was full of the
Vaterland
’s crewmen, all clearly in high spirits, slapping one
another on the back and speaking animated German. A woman tending the bar, who spoke English and German, told the pilot that the
Vaterland
had just received a message, via wireless, that the
Lusitania
had been torpedoed off Ireland and had sunk rapidly.

Lawrence set his drink aside and left the bar. The Cunard offices were a short walk away, on State Street. As soon as he walked in, he concluded that the pilot’s report had been false. The bureau operated just as it always had, with typewriters clacking and passengers buying tickets. A clerk who knew Lawrence commented on the weather. The reporter continued past and climbed a stairway to the next floor, where he walked unannounced into the office of Charles Sumner, Cunard’s New York manager. The heavy carpet on Sumner’s floor suppressed the sound of his entry.

Sumner was a tall man who dressed well and always wore a white carnation in his lapel. “My first glimpse of him told me that something was wrong,” Lawrence recalled. “He was slumped over his desk. He looked all caved in.” Lawrence moved closer and saw two telegrams on Sumner’s desk, one in code, the other apparently a decoded copy. Lawrence read it over Sumner’s shoulder.

Sumner looked up. “She’s gone,” he said. It was more gasp than declaration. “They’ve torpedoed the
Lusitania
.” The message said the ship had gone down in fifteen minutes (though this would later be revised to eighteen). Sumner had no illusions. “I doubt if they saved anybody. What in God’s name am I to do?”

Lawrence agreed to wait one hour before telephoning the news to his editor. Fifteen minutes later, he was on the phone. This news was too big to hold.

T
HE FIRST REPORT
reached President Wilson in Washington at about one o’clock, as he was about to leave for his daily round of golf. The report bore no mention of casualties, but he canceled his game anyway. He waited in the White House, by himself, for more news to arrive. At one point he left to take a drive in the Pierce-Arrow, his tried-and-true way of easing inner tension.

The day had begun clear and warm, but by evening a light rain was falling. Wilson had dinner at home and had just finished when, at 7:55
P
.
M
., he received a cable from Consul Frost in Queenstown warning, for the first time, that it was likely that many of the
Lusitania
’s passengers had lost their lives.

At this, Wilson left the White House, on his own, telling no one, and took a walk in the rain. “
I was pacing the streets to get my mind in hand,” he wrote later, to Edith Galt.

He walked across Lafayette Square past the cannon-surrounded statue of Andrew Jackson on a rearing horse, then continued up Sixteenth Street toward Dupont Circle, Edith’s neighborhood. He passed newsboys hawking fresh “Extra” editions of the city’s newspapers that already carried reports of the sinking. At Corcoran Street, Wilson made a right turn, then headed back down Fifteenth to return to the White House, where he went to his study.

At ten o’clock the worst news arrived: an estimate that the
Lusitania
attack had taken as many as one thousand lives. That some of the dead would prove to be Americans seemed certain. The thing Wilson had feared had come to pass.

A
S
U-20 traveled west, Schwieger took a final look back through his periscope.

He wrote in his War Log: “
Astern in the distance, a number of lifeboats active; nothing more seen of the
Lusitania
. The wreck must have sunk.” He gave the location as 14 sea miles from the Old Head of Kinsale, 27 sea miles from Queenstown, in waters 90 meters deep, about 300 feet.

What he did not know was that among his many victims were the three German stowaways arrested on the first morning of the
Lusitania
’s voyage. The men were still locked away in the ship’s improvised brig.

LUSITANIA

ADRIFT

A
LIFE JACKET DID NOT GUARANTEE SURVIVAL
. M
ANY
who entered the sea had their jackets on incorrectly and found themselves struggling to keep their heads out of the water. The struggle did not last long, and soon survivors who did manage to outfit themselves properly found themselves swimming among bodies upended in poses their owners would have found humiliating. Able-bodied seaman E. S. Heighway wrote, with a degree of exaggeration, “
I saw myself hundreds of men & women dead with life belts on in the water after the ship had gone.”

For children—those who did not drown outright—
the killer was hypothermia. Fifty-five degrees was not nearly as cold as the water confronted by passengers of the
Titanic
, but it was cold enough to lower the core temperatures of people large and small to dangerous levels. A drop in the body’s internal temperature of just 3 or 4 degrees, from the norm of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit to 95, was enough to kill over time. Passengers in the water found that their lower bodies went numb within minutes, despite the warm sun above. Those who wore coats under their life jackets were better off than those who had stripped down, for coats and other warm clothing, even though wet, provided insulation for the heart. Thin people, old people, women, and children, and especially infants, lost body heat the fastest, as did any passenger who had drunk wine or spirits with lunch. With the onset of hypothermia, those in the water
began to shiver severely; as the danger rose, the shivering subsided. With a water temperature of 55 degrees, adults could be expected to experience exhaustion and loss of consciousness within one to two hours; after this the skin took on a blue-gray pallor, the body became rigid, and the heart rate slowed to almost imperceptible levels. Death soon followed.