Authors: Erik Larson
Coming one after the other, the two messages were disconcerting—and confusing. The second seemed to contradict itself. On the one
hand, it advised ships in the English Channel to stay close to shore. On the other, it recommended that ships on Turner’s route stay in midchannel. It urged captains to race past harbors, but at the same time told them to stop and pick up a pilot at the entrance to the Mersey River. Nor did these messages offer any clue as to the actual number of submarines or their precise locations. The waters off the south coast of Ireland formed an immense expanse of ocean. The phrase “submarines off Fastnet” could mean half a mile or a hundred miles. Together, the two messages suggested waters teeming with U-boats.
For Captain Turner, one fact was certain: the
Lusitania
would be passing the Fastnet Rock the next morning and would be off the south coast of Ireland for the remainder of the voyage to Liverpool.
A
FTER DINNER
, Preston Prichard led the night’s “whist drive” in the second-class lounge, while in first class the evening concert got under way. The night’s program has vanished from history, but one passenger reportedly dressed up as Bonnie Prince Charlie, in full Highland regalia, and sang six Scottish songs.
On past voyages, passengers recited poetry, displayed their skills at “legerdemain,” read aloud from books, and gave “comic recitations”; they sang songs like “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Genevieve,” and “Tip Top Tipperary Mary”; and they showed off their instrumental talents, with solos on the euphonium and mandolin and cello—Godard’s “Berceuse d’Jocelyn” and Schumann’s “Traumerei.” There was one regular feature: each concert ended with the audience standing to sing “God Save the King” and its American cousin, “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” Same tune, very different lyrics.
It was here, during intermission, that Turner stepped forward to offer his sobering remarks about submarines and the war zone and assured the audience they would soon be securely in the embrace of the Royal Navy.
While the concert was under way, a team of officers conducted a night inspection of the ship, another measure prompted by the
submarine threat. In addition to wanting all portholes closed, Captain Turner now ordered that they all be curtained to prevent the escape of light, and that all doors that led to outside decks be closed. Turner also turned off the ship’s running lights.
The inspection team, led by Senior Third Mate John Lewis, checked all the portholes and windows in public rooms throughout the ship, and those that could be examined from the decks, but Cunard rules forbade the men from entering staterooms. The inspection team left a list of open portholes for the room stewards, tucked into a corridor light fixture. Passengers had been instructed to keep their portholes closed, but the weather was so mild that many opened them for ventilation.
Book dealer Charles Lauriat made it his business to observe the inspections and other shipboard operations. “
I was keenly interested in all that was done aboard ship as we approached the Irish Coast,” he wrote, “and in fact all through the voyage I kept my eyes unusually wide open.” That Thursday night, as he walked to his room on B Deck—which, being an interior room, did not have a porthole—he saw the list of open portholes, “stuck right in the lantern as you walk along the passageway.”
Captain Turner’s concern about open portholes was shared by all captains, whether in peace or war. A porthole was just what its name indicated: a hole in the side of a ship.
Under certain conditions, a single open porthole could admit water at a rate of 3.75 tons a minute.
T
HAT EVENING
a group of passengers got together and formed a committee to teach one another how to put on the new “Boddy” life jackets, “these being of a different pattern from the usual cork waistcoat,” said passenger Arthur J. Mitchell, a representative of the Raleigh Cycle Company. Mitchell had reason to be concerned. In his travels thus far he had survived two shipwrecks.
Captain Turner approved the idea, Mitchell said, provided “
that no suggestion would be made to the passengers that the use of the preservers was in any way imminent.”
There was enough unease as it was. A first-class passenger named Josephine Brandell, twenty-three years old, was so frightened she decided she could not sleep in her own cabin, and asked another passenger, Mabel Gardner Crichton, forty-two, if she could spend the night in hers.
Mrs. Crichton assented.
Wrote Brandell, “
She was only too happy to be of any assistance to me and did all she could during that whole night to quiet my nerves.”
T
HE SHIP
’
S
Marconi room now received a new message, this of a different sort. It was for Alfred Vanderbilt, from a woman. It read, “
Hope you have a safe crossing looking forward very much to seeing you soon.”
N
EWS OF THE SINKING OF THE
C
ANDIDATE
TOOK TIME
to reach the Admiralty. A trawler, the
Lord Allendale
, stumbled across the ship’s three lifeboats at about three o’clock Thursday afternoon. The men had been adrift in the fog for five hours. The trawler was not equipped with wireless and so could not report the sinking or the rescue until it returned to its base at Milford Haven, on the English coast, far from where the
Candidate
had sunk. The commander of naval forces at Milford Haven notified the Admiralty of the attack in a telegram sent shortly after midnight.
A telegram from the Queenstown Naval Center came in that day as well, with another report of a submarine sighted off Daunt Rock, this one at 9:45 that morning. The U-boat had remained “
in sight for five minutes” before submerging. This was relayed to Director of Intelligence Hall as well as to First Sea Lord Fisher. A copy also was circulated to Churchill’s office, though he was still in France.
The HMS
Orion
continued on its way north, zigzagging in open sea 150 miles west of Ireland.
I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, President Wilson struggled anew with depression. Edith Galt’s rejection had cast him into a state akin to grief, to
the extent that he found it difficult to concentrate on world events, though these continued to press. The
Gulflight
was still major news. An inquest by an English coroner had confirmed that the ship’s captain, Alfred Gunter, had died of “
heart failure, accelerated by shock, caused by the torpedoing of the ship.” The
Gulflight
’s second officer testified that the submarine captain had to have realized the ship was American, for the day had been clear and the tanker was flying a large American flag. There was also news of fresh U-boat predations. The
Washington Times
reported on Wednesday evening that a German submarine, “
running amok,” had sunk eleven unarmed fishing trawlers in the North Sea, off England.
That night, however, Wilson’s attention was focused solely on Edith. He resolved that despite his new grief he would not
—could not
—let her exit his life. He composed a long letter, really a prose poem of despair, in which he, the man so many Americans thought of as distant and professorial, wrote, “
There are some things I must
try
to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.”
He was willing to accept friendship, he told her—for now. “If you cannot give me
all
that I want—what my heart finds it hard now to breathe without—it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you
could
give it if I were—and if you understood,—understood the boy’s heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days would be radiant.”
He made it clear that she
would
come to love him. “Do not misunderstand,” he added, in one of three impassioned postscripts. “What I have now at your generous hands is infinitely precious to me. It would kill me to part with it,—I could not and I hope you could not. And I will be patient, patient without end, to see what, if anything, the future may have [in] store for me.”
Not so patient, as it happened, for the next morning, Thursday, May 6, before sending off this letter, he added a codicil that was five pages long.
He had read her letter again, he told her, and now appraised it in a more hopeful light. “
I can hardly see to write for the tears as I lift my eyes from it,—the tears of joy and sweet yearning.”
For the time being, he chose to position himself as her knight. “I seem to have been put into the world to serve, not to take, and serve I will to the utmost, and demand nothing in return.”
Edith’s resistance, meanwhile, had begun to waver, but amid a crush of conflicting anxieties. The fact Wilson was president of the United States placed a barrier in her thoughts that she found hard to overcome. His power, his ever-present detail of Secret Service men, his visibility in the public eye, and corollary restraints on his private behavior all complicated matters, as did the simple fact that any woman inclined to marry Wilson was likely to have her motives questioned, given his high office. “
There was the fear,” she wrote, “that some might think I loved him for that; then the terrible thought of the publicity inevitably entailed; and the feeling that I had no training for the responsibilities such a life held.” On the other hand, she felt deep affection for the man. “
Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts,” she wrote; “and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.” She was enthralled, too, by the trust he placed in her and his willingness to discuss with her “
all the problems which confronted him and the fears, even then, that the fires of war raging in Europe might leap the Atlantic and involve our own country.”
They could not see each other too often, lest they draw “
unwelcome publicity,” she wrote; and when they did see each other, it had to be at the White House, or during a drive with a chaperone always at hand, whether Helen Bones, or Dr. Grayson, or Wilson’s daughter Margaret. A car full of Secret Service men invariably followed. The only wholly private means of communication was by mail, and so their letters continued, his ever passionate and filled with declamations of love, hers welcoming and warm but at the same time curiously distant.
I
N
B
ERLIN
, Germany’s Chancellor Bethmann was growing increasingly perturbed. The war in the trenches was not going well, and he feared that Germany’s U-boats might make things much worse. A month earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm had issued an order that
permitted U-boat commanders to keep their vessels submerged when attacking merchant ships in order to avoid the danger inherent in surfacing and approaching suspected enemy freighters to first confirm their identity. The effect was to give commanders still more freedom. Combined with improved spring weather at sea, this had led to a startling increase in attacks on neutrals, like that against the American tanker
Gulflight
.
On Thursday, May 6, Bethmann wrote a letter to Germany’s top naval official, in which he complained that over the preceding week U-boats had sunk “more and more” neutral ships. “
This fact is eminently bound not only to alter our good relations with the neutral states but also to create the gravest complications and, finally, to throw those states into the enemy’s camp.” The empire’s situation was “tense” enough as it was, he wrote, and warned, “I cannot accept the responsibility of seeing our relations with the neutral states further worsened, to which the pursuit of the submarine war in its present form will certainly lead.”
He demanded that the naval high command “take necessary measures to guarantee that our submarines will in all circumstances avoid attacking neutral ships.”
T
HAT EVENING
, the
Washington Times
reported that four more ships had been sunk, including two neutral steamers and an English schooner. Two of the ships had been attacked by submarines; the other two were destroyed by a sea mine and shellfire from a German warship.
T
HE
L
USITANIA
was now two days out from Liverpool.
At midnight that Thursday, May 6, the powerful German transmitter at Norddeich broadcast a message to all U-boats that the
Lusitania
would begin its return trip to New York on May 15.
This message was intercepted and relayed to Room 40.
S
CHWIEGER AND HIS CREW SPENT A PEACEFUL NIGHT FAR
out at sea. At five o’clock Friday morning, May 7, he ordered the submarine back to the surface and climbed into the conning tower. He shifted to diesel power and began charging the batteries below.
At intervals U-20 passed through mist and clarity. “From time to time, it clears up a little,” Schwieger wrote. These brief periods of clearing at first gave hope of better visibility to come, but soon all sunshine disappeared and the fog returned as dense as ever.
It was discouraging and affirmed Schwieger’s earlier decision not to proceed to Liverpool. He later recounted the story of that morning to his friend and fellow U-boat commander Max Valentiner. The heavy fog allowed “small chance of sinking anything,” Schwieger told him. “At the same time, a destroyer steaming through the fog might stumble over us before we knew anything about it.”
Schwieger wrote in his War Log, “Since the fog didn’t subside, decided already to begin the return trip now.”
He set a new course for home. As far as he was concerned, this patrol was over.
E
ARLY
F
RIDAY MORNING A NUMBER OF PASSENGERS
awoke and dressed and climbed to the topmost decks to watch the sun come up. Although sunrise would not officially occur until 5:30, already the eastern sky was beginning to brighten. Elbridge and Maude Thompson of Seymour, Indiana, both thirty-two years old and traveling in first class, were in position by 4:30
A
.
M
., as were second-cabin passengers Belle, forty-nine, and Theodore Naish, fifty-nine, of Kansas City. At about five, the two couples spotted a warship off the port side, distant, traveling fast on a course parallel to the
Lusitania
. Mrs. Thompson called it a “battleship,” though in fact it was the HMS
Partridge
, a high-speed destroyer with three funnels. Aboard the
Partridge
, the officers and crew of the early morning watch also saw the
Lusitania
.