Dead Wake (30 page)

This being the last full day of the voyage, with the sun so bright and the air so clear, passengers seemed to take a special effort to dress well and with a little flair.
A seven-year-old girl wore a pink-and-white-striped cotton frock under a black velvet coat lined with red silk, then added a gold ring, a red coral necklet, and a mother-of-pearl brooch. The coat imparted to her the look of a red-winged blackbird. Pink seemed to be a popular color—for boys. One five-year-old boy tore around in a pink wool coat over a checked jacket and knickers. A man in his late twenties dressed with clear intent to dazzle. He wore:

M
ANY PASSENGERS
settled into deck chairs to read, just as they’d done over the preceding six days. Dwight Harris sat on deck for a time reading a book about the Medicis, then went to the purser’s office to retrieve his engagement ring, his other jewels, and the $500 in gold that he had parked there at the start of the voyage. He went to his cabin and used a watch chain to hang several pieces around his neck, including the ring. “
I pinned the big diamond brooch inside the pocket of my coat,” he wrote, “and before leaving my cabin unlocked the camera bag that held my life belt.” This was the belt he had bought at Wanamaker’s in New York the day before sailing. Harris had not yet run out of exclamation points. “I put the gold in my trousers pocket, and then went down to lunch!”

Despite the calm weather, Kansas City passenger Theodore Naish was seasick, as he had been throughout the voyage. He urged his wife, Belle, to go up on deck without him to see the Irish coast and its islands in sunshine. He knew from past experience how lovely the view was. Belle at first demurred: “
I replied that his word was enough, I would see them when we returned, and if fog prevented, pictures would satisfy me.” But Theodore insisted, and she obliged; she was glad that she had. “A lovelier day cannot be imagined—the air was warm, no wind, bright sun, smooth sea.”

Throughout the ship there was that mix of sorrow and expectation that always marked the end of a voyage, but now it was joined by the relief of having made it to England safe and sound.

O
N THE BRIDGE
, Turner received a new message from the Admiralty that confused things further: “
Submarines 5 miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at 10
A
.
M
.”

The
Lusitania
had already passed Cape Clear. If correct, this message indicated the threat might also be past—the submarines, plural again, were behind and heading out to sea. Captain Turner congratulated himself on apparently missing these in the fog. He knew that even if their commanders now spotted the smoke from the ship’s funnels and turned around, they would have no hope of catching up.

While this offered some comfort, there was still the matter of the earlier report of submarines active in the St. George’s Channel, south of the Coningbeg Light Vessel, dead ahead.

A
T HIS PERISCOPE
, Schwieger made a fast 360-degree sweep of the sea, then rotated the apparatus until he found the ship that had just passed overhead. It was a prize indeed, and not just in terms of tonnage. Long and narrow, with a razor bow, it sliced easily through the flat sea. Its funnels blew thick black smoke that showed its engine crew were working hard to achieve maximum speed. Schwieger did not need his war pilot, Lanz, to help identify this ship. It was a large armored cruiser, British, of about 6,000 tons.

He let it go. He had no choice. At his top submerged speed of 9 knots, Schwieger had no chance of catching the cruiser. Even his surface maximum of 15 knots would not have helped, for the cruiser was speeding away at what he estimated to be 18 knots. And had Schwieger for some reason been foolhardy enough to try surfacing, the warship’s guns would have sunk his boat within minutes.

Schwieger followed anyway, at periscope depth, in case the cruiser happened to change its course in a manner that would allow him to overtake it and launch an attack. But the ship ran at top speed, zigzagging, and soon was far in the distance. Schwieger later told his friend Valentiner how at this point, exasperated, he unleashed a torrent of profanity. “After the early days of the war,” Valentiner explained, “you rarely had a chance to loose a torpedo at any warship as big as a cruiser, and many a U-boat never caught sight of one during the entire war.” The British navy, like its German counterpart, kept its big warships locked safely away “and did not send them roaming around to act as good targets for U-boats.”

The ship was in fact the HMS
Juno
, an old cruiser now serving as a coastal patrol vessel. It was based in Queenstown and was speeding back to port precisely because of the latest submarine alerts issued by the Admiralty. As it traveled, its crew took a routine measure of water temperature and found it to be 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

“
After I was through swearing,” Schwieger told Valentiner, “I noticed that the fog was lifting. Presently I could see blue sky.”

Schwieger recorded the encounter at 12:15
P
.
M
. Half an hour later, he surfaced and returned to his westward course, to continue his voyage home. Conservation of fuel was now a priority. He could not delay—the journey back to Emden would take another week.

By now the weather had cleared to a degree that was almost startling. “
Unusually good visibility,” Schwieger noted; “very beautiful weather.”

On the horizon, something new caught his eye.

I
N
L
ONDON
,
ON
F
RIDAY
, C
OLONEL
H
OUSE
,
STILL ACTING
in his role as President Wilson’s unofficial emissary, met with Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary, and the two traveled to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for a walk among the garden’s beds of spring flowers, its alleys, or “vistas,” of cedars, and its most celebrated structure, the Palm House, an immense conservatory built of glass and iron said to have influenced the design of London’s Crystal Palace. The two men discussed the submarine war. “
We spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk,” House wrote, “and I told him if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into war.”

Oddly enough, the subject came up again a couple of hours later, when Colonel House paid a call on King George V at Buckingham Palace.

The king turned to House at one point, and asked, “
Suppose they should sink the
Lusitania
with American passengers aboard?”

E
ARLY THAT MORNING
, Churchill, having concluded his naval negotiations with his French and Italian counterparts, left Paris on his journey to the headquarters of Britain’s forces in France, at St. Omer, where Sir John French was planning an offensive against
German forces at Aubers despite a
severe shortage of artillery shells.

Seeking to experience battle firsthand, Churchill hoped to get as close to the front as possible, while not, as he put it, “
incurring unjustifiable risks.” He saw shellfire and smoke but little else. “
Without actually taking part in the assault it was impossible to measure the real conditions,” he wrote. “To see them you had to feel them, and feeling them might well feel nothing more. To stand outside was to see nothing, to plunge in was to be dominated by personal experiences of an absorbing kind.”

He received his most vivid sense of the war at a “casualty clearing station” in a convent at Merville, about 40 miles east of headquarters, where men “
suffering from every form of horrible injury, seared, torn, pierced, choking, dying, were being sorted according to their miseries.” Ambulance after ambulance pulled up at the door. The dead were carried out the back and buried. As Churchill passed the operating theater, he saw doctors at work trepanning a soldier, that is, cutting a hole in his skull. “Everywhere was blood and bloody rags,” Churchill wrote.

A
T THE
White House, with a fresh spring Friday in the offing, Wilson wrote again to Edith. She had come to dinner the night before, and he was feeling far more optimistic about the possibility of one day marrying her.

“
In this clear morning air,” he wrote, “the world seems less in the way, seems less to stand between us.”

U-20
MOVED THROUGH A BLUE
-
ON
-
BLUE MORNING
. T
HE
fog was gone, the sky was empty of clouds, the sea was still. Schwieger trained his binoculars—his Zeiss “godseyes”—on a smudge at the horizon and was startled to see “a forest of masts and stacks,” as he later described it to Max Valentiner. “
At first I thought they must belong to several ships,” he said. “Then I saw it was a great steamer coming over the horizon. It was coming our way. I dived at once, hoping to get a shot at it.”

In his log, at 1:20
P
.
M
., Schwieger wrote, “
Ahead and to starboard four funnels and two masts of a steamer with course triangular to us comes into sight (coming from SSW it steered towards Galley Head). Ship is made out to be a large passenger steamer.”

Once at periscope depth, Schwieger ordered his maximum submerged speed—9 knots—and set a course “converging with that of the steamer.” The ship was still miles off, however. When the liner was 2 miles away, it veered onto a new course that further widened the gap. Frustrated again, Schwieger wrote, “I had no hope now, even if we hurried at our best speed, of getting near enough to attack her.”

Schwieger followed anyway, just as he had done earlier with the cruiser
Juno
, in case the liner happened to make another course change that would bring it back onto a converging trajectory.

He called for his pilot, Lanz, to come to the periscope to take a
look. Why he felt the need to do so is unclear. The ship was one of the most distinctive on the high seas, and a prize of the first order. He was near despair: this one ship, by itself, would have given him his best monthly tonnage count of the war.

The day remained startlingly clear and still. This meant that Schwieger could not keep the periscope raised for long, lest it be detected by the target’s lookouts or, worse, by a destroyer on patrol. In weather this clear and with seas this smooth there’d be little chance for escape. On two previous occasions, the wake cast by his periscope on a flat sea had forced him to abort attacks. One would-be target, a Royal Mail steamer, had turned toward him with obvious intent to ram, causing him to order a fast dive and full speed away.

Lanz entered the control room. At about the same moment, something happened that Schwieger deemed the equivalent of a miracle.

O
N THE
Lusitania
’s bridge, Captain Turner faced a dilemma that nothing in his long experience at sea had prepared him to manage. If the morning’s wireless messages were correct, there were U-boats directly ahead of him, and behind.

On top of this, he faced a timing problem. Liverpool at this point still lay about 250 nautical miles ahead. At the entrance to the city’s harbor lay the notorious Mersey Bar, which he could pass only at high tide. If Turner accelerated and proceeded at the highest speed he could achieve with only three boiler rooms in operation, or 21 knots, he would arrive far too early. With stopping out of the question, he would be forced to circle in the Irish Sea, smoke billowing from the ship’s three operating funnels in open invitation to any submarine within a radius of twenty miles.

There was another dimension to the problem. The time was now just past noon. No matter what speed Turner traveled, he would end up having to pass through the St. George’s Channel at night, with fog an ever-present danger. As it was, the fog that had enclosed the ship all morning had left Turner with a less precise
sense of his location than he would have liked. Compounding this imprecision was the fact that he was farther from the coast than usual—about 20 miles, when in fine weather he might come as close as 1 mile.

He called his two most senior officers to the bridge, Staff Captain Anderson and First Officer John Preston Piper, to ask their advice, and at length reached a decision. First, he would pinpoint his location. The Irish coast was by now visible, but the ship’s distance from shore was difficult to reckon precisely. Being a sailor of the old school, Turner liked to use a procedure known as a four-point bearing. This would require him to run parallel to the coast at a steady speed for roughly thirty minutes while First Office Piper took four bearings off a single shore landmark, in this case the lighthouse atop the Old Head.

Once Turner knew his precise position, he planned to maintain a speed of 18 knots so that he would arrive at the Mersey Bar early the next morning, at just the right time to enter the harbor without pause. Though slower than the 21 knots his three operating boiler rooms would allow, it was still faster than any other merchant ship then in service and certainly faster than any submarine. Turner planned as well to alter his course later in the day to bring the
Lusitania
closer to shore, so that he would pass near the Coningbeg Light Vessel before entering the narrowest portion of the St. George’s Channel. He understood that this contravened the Admiralty’s advisory that captains pass lightships and other navigational markers at “mid-channel.” But the Admiralty had reported submarines 20 miles south of the lightship, a location that any mariner traversing that 45-mile-wide stretch would have described as midchannel. To follow the Admiralty’s advisory would have meant sailing directly toward the waiting submarines.