Dead Wake (41 page)

In life, by Higgins’s estimate, Shields had weighed 14 or 15 stone, or roughly 200 pounds. His body was now in “an advanced state of decomposition,” Higgins noted. This was an understatement. “The soft parts of his face and head were entirely absent, including the scalp,” Higgins wrote. “The majority of the teeth were missing, including all the front teeth. The hands were also absent, and the soft parts of the upper right arm. The back of the
calf of the right leg was largely absent, as was a portion of the left calf. The genitals were very much decomposed, virtually missing.”

Mr. Shields lay there smiling up at them, but not in an endearing fashion. “I examined the skull,” Dr. Higgins wrote. “Externally it was totally bare as far as the lower part of the occipital bone.” The occipital forms the bottom rear portion of the skull. “I removed the skull-cap; and found that the brain was too much decomposed for examination, but the membranes were intact.” He removed the brain and examined the interior of the skull. He found no evidence of fracture at its base or to the cervical canal. This ruled out death by falling debris or other blunt trauma to the head. Nor did he discover any fractures along the spine, or injury to the back. Shields’s internal organs likewise failed to reveal what killed him, but they did provide Dr. Higgins with a look at what remained of the man’s last lunch aboard the
Lusitania
. “The stomach contained roughly a pint of a green semi-solid mass, apparently semi-digested food, but contained no water as such.”

The lack of a clear cause of death was perplexing. “In my opinion,” Higgins wrote, “there is no injury present which would account for death. There is no evidence of drowning; and the probability is that death was brought about as a result of shock or exposure, probably the former. From the contents of the stomach it would appear that death supervened within a very few hours after his last meal, possibly from two to three hours.”

After all that, the finding was death with no obvious cause. The other physician reached the same conclusion.

The peripatetic Mr. Shields was returned to his coffin and shipped to America. Consul Frost, in a letter to Washington, praised the effort taken by the police after the discovery of Shields’s body. “It would be a most graceful and commendable act if the estate of Mr. Shields should forward from two to five pounds to the sergeant and his colleagues for the excellent spirit in which they discharged their duties.”

The mystery as to what killed Shields remained, leaving the family to wonder what horror he had endured. This same fate fell
to nearly all the kin of the dead. There can be no doubt that for many passengers death came suddenly and utterly by surprise. The dozens of crewmen who were in the luggage bay at the time of impact were killed instantly by the force of the torpedo blast, but exactly how many and who they were was not known. Passengers were crushed by descending boats. Swimmers were struck by chairs, boxes, potted plants, and other debris falling from the decks high above. And then there were those most ill-starred of passengers, who had put on their life preservers incorrectly and found themselves floating with their heads submerged, legs up, as in some devil’s comedy.

One can only imagine the final minutes of the Crompton parents and their children. How do you save a child, let alone six children, especially when one of them is an infant and one is six years old? None of the Cromptons survived. Five of the children were never found. The infant, Master Peter Romilly Crompton, about nine months old, was Body No. 214.

Cunard chairman Booth knew the family well. “
My own personal loss is very great,” he wrote, in a May 8 letter to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner. “We are all at one in our feelings with regard to this terrible disaster to the ‘Lusitania,’ and it is quite hopeless to try to put anything in writing.” Sumner wrote back that the loss of the ship and so many passengers “
is sad beyond expression.”

T
HE MANY
unidentified bodies in the three morgues presented Cunard officials with an awkward predicament, and one that needed to be addressed quickly. The bodies—some 140 of them—had begun to decompose, at a rate quickened by the warm spring weather. The company decided on a mass burial. Each body would have its own coffin; mothers and babies would share; but all would be interred together in three separate excavations, lettered A, B, and C, in the Old Church Cemetery on a hillside outside Queenstown.

The date was set for Monday, May 10. All the previous day
and throughout the night, soldiers dug the graves and undertakers coffined the bodies, leaving the lids off as long as possible to encourage last-minute identifications. Owing to a shortage of vehicles, the coffins were transported in shifts beginning early Monday morning, but three coffins were held back for the actual funeral procession, which was to begin in the afternoon.

Trains brought mourners and the curious. Shops closed for the day and pulled their blinds and fastened their shutters. Ship captains ordered flags hung at half-mast. As the procession advanced through Queenstown, a military band played Chopin’s “Funeral March.” Clerics led the cortege, among them Father Cowley Clark of London, himself a survivor of the disaster. Soldiers and mourners followed. U.S. consul Frost walked as well. Soldiers and citizens lined the entire route, standing bareheaded as a measure of respect. The road they followed passed through hills of vivid green stippled with wildflowers and slashed here and there by the garish yellow of blooming gorse. The sky was clear and without cloud, and in the distant harbor boats dipped and nodded in a light breeze, “
a picture of peace,” wrote one reporter, “that gave no hint of the recent tragedy.”

The procession bearing the three coffins arrived at the cemetery about three o’clock and stopped at the edge of the graves. The many other coffins, each an elongated diamond of elm, had been laid neatly within, arranged in two tiers, the body numbers and locations carefully mapped so that if the photographs and lists of personal effects cataloged by Cunard led to subsequent identifications, the families would at least know the exact whereabouts of their loved ones.

As the three coffins were lowered into the graves, the crowd sang “Abide with Me.” Gunfire followed, from a ceremonial guard, and a squad of buglers played “The Last Post,” the British military’s equivalent of taps. Soldiers converged and began filling the graves. A photograph shows a line of small boys standing on the hillock of excavated soil, watching with avid interest as the soldiers below fill the crevices between coffins.

It was lovely, and dignified, and deeply moving, but this mass
burial imposed a psychic cost on kin who learned, belatedly, that their own loved ones were interred within. Cunard’s final count found that of these anonymous dead, about half were later identified using personal effects and photographs. For some families the idea of their kin resting alone in that far-off terrain was too hard to bear.
The family of Elizabeth A. Seccombe, a thirty-eight-year-old woman from Petersborough, New Hampshire, pleaded with Consul Frost for help in retrieving her and bringing her home. She was the daughter of a Cunard captain who had died some years earlier. Her body was No. 164, buried on May 14 in grave B, sixth row, upper tier.

Frost did what he could. He argued that Seccombe’s location in the grave made her coffin particularly easy to locate. Though very much a miser when it came to U.S. funds, he went so far as to offer £100 to cover costs.

The British government was willing, but the local council said no, and its decision held sway. In part, the council was influenced by local superstition—“religious prejudice,” Frost called it—but mainly it did not want to set a precedent. At least twenty other families had sought to disinter their loved ones and had been refused. The council’s stance, Frost wrote, “is incomprehensible to me.”

The greatest burden by far was borne by the relatives of the many passengers and crew whose bodies were never found.
Of the 791 passengers designated by Cunard as missing, only 173 bodies, or about 22 percent, were eventually recovered, leaving 618 souls unaccounted for. The percentage for the crew was even more dismal, owing no doubt to the many deaths in the luggage room when the torpedo exploded.

Alice and Elbert Hubbard were never found; nor was Kansas City passenger Theodore Naish. In Queenstown, his wife, Belle, roomed for a time with young Robert Kay, as he recovered from his measles and waited for his grandfather to come and claim him. Joseph Frankum, who had huddled with his family in an unlaunched boat during the
Lusitania
’s last moments, survived, as did one of his sons, but his wife, his baby daughter, and his four-year-old son
were lost. Nellie Huston never got to mail that charming diary-like letter in which she confessed that the size of her derrière impeded her access to her berth. The letter was found in a purse floating on the sea. The three members of the Luck family—thirty-four-year-old Charlotte and her two young sons—disappeared as well. Alfred Vanderbilt was never found, despite a $5,000 reward—a fortune—offered by the Vanderbilt family. Charles Lauriat’s friend and traveling companion, Lothrop Withington, likewise disappeared.

The absence of so many bodies raised haunting questions for families. Were their loved ones now among the anonymous corpses buried at Queenstown? Were they locked somewhere within the hull, owing to an ill-advised last-minute dash for a personal belonging? Did chivalry do them in, or cowardice? Or did they suffer a fate like that of one unidentified woman, whose body came to rest on Straw Island, off Galway, where she was found by the keeper of the island’s lighthouse? She was wearing her Boddy life jacket correctly and had drifted alone for thirty-six days.

Mothers lost children and would be left forever to imagine their final moments or to wonder if somehow, miraculously, their babies had actually been saved and were now in the care of another. Norah Bretherton, the Los Angeles woman who had handed her Betty to a stranger, was spared that brand of haunting. Betty was Body No. 156. Her mother buried her in the graveyard at the Ursuline Convent in Cork. Bretherton’s son survived.

For families at home, waiting for news, the absence of a body left them suspended somewhere between hope and grief. One mother set out to learn as much as possible about her lost boy, Preston Prichard. She was aided by her surviving son, Mostyn, who traveled to Queenstown to search the morgues. “
The place is alive with miserable creatures like ourselves,” he wrote. He found no trace of his brother. “It is bewildering to know what to do.”

Mrs. Prichard wrote to dozens of survivors, and, on the basis of information she received, she wrote to dozens more. She sent a flyer with Preston’s picture and a detailed description. Among those she
contacted was Grace French, Prichard’s dining companion, who told Mrs. Prichard that she believed herself to be the last person on the ship to have spoken with him. In one of several letters, French told Mrs. Prichard that she had thought of her son often and of their interrupted excursion to find her double on board. French wrote, “
I can see his face so clearly in my mind so sunburned and full of life and ambition.”

The many replies offered a fresh view of the voyage and of the trials and sorrows of the last day. The writers recalled fleeting glimpses of Prichard, especially his gregariousness and popularity, and offered their own stories. Mostly, though, survivors tried to offer some small bit of consolation, despite having had only glancing contact with Prichard, or none at all. They assured Mrs. Prichard that her son, given his physical prowess, must surely have been helping women and children up to the last moment.

Theodate Pope, ever true to her spiritualist beliefs, wrote to Mrs. Prichard on February 4, 1916. “
I beg of you not to dwell on the thought of what has become of the physical part of the boy you love,” she urged. “Can you not constantly keep in mind that whatever has happened to his body has not in any way affected his spirit and that surely lives and will await reunion with you?”

A second-class passenger named Ruth M. Wordsworth, of Salisbury, England, sought to address the disparity between how things actually unfolded on the ship and the nightmarish scenes conjured in the minds of next of kin.

“
I know you must be tempted to have most terrible imaginings; may I tell you that although it was very awful, it was not so ghastly as you are sure to imagine it. When the thing really comes, God gives to each the help he needs to live or to die.” She described the quiet and the lack of panic among passengers. “They were calm, many of them quite cheerful, and everyone was trying to do the sensible thing, the men were forgetting themselves, and seeing after the women and children. They could not do much, because the list prevented the launching of most of the boats, but they were doing their best and playing the man.”

Of the four men in Preston Prichard’s cabin, D-90, only one
survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

PART V

THE SEA OF SECRETS

LONDON

BLAME

W
HAT HAPPENED NEXT CAME AS A SURPRISE TO
C
APTAIN
Turner. Even though the cause of the disaster was obvious—an act of war—the Admiralty moved at once to place the blame on him. Anyone privy to the internal communications, or “minutes,” flung between the offices of senior Admiralty officials in the week after the disaster could have had no doubt as to the zeal with which the Admiralty intended to forge a case against Turner. In one, Churchill himself wrote, “
We sh’d pursue the Captain without check.”

Before the effort could get started, however, the coroner in Kinsale, Ireland, John J. Horgan, convened an inquest of his own, much to the Admiralty’s displeasure. Horgan claimed the responsibility fell to him because five of the
Lusitania
’s dead had been landed in his district. The inquest began the day after the sinking, Saturday, May 8. Horgan called Turner as a witness and after hearing his testimony praised the captain for his courage in staying with the ship until the last moment. At this, Turner began to cry. Horgan, in a later memoir, called the captain “
a brave but unlucky man.”