A Higher Form of Killing (21 page)

On April 30, as the
U-20
put out into the North Sea, one issue Schwieger knew he would face was which route to take to the Irish Sea and Liverpool. British naval patrols, mines, and wire nets had made the shortest, and therefore fastest, route via the Dover Straits too hazardous. Consequently, as his orders required, he would first have to sail around the coast of northern Scotland, then decide between taking the faster but riskier North Channel between Britain and Ireland or the longer but safer route down and around the west coast of Ireland. As the
U-20
passed the Borkum Reef Lightship, Schwieger’s radio officer Otto Rikowski tested his equipment by sending two messages and found the signal quality good. The
U-20
was able to remain in contact up to five hundred miles from its base. However, Schwieger and his crew could not know that in the Admiralty’s Room 40 the British, using the captured German naval codes, were reading every message.

Aboard the
Lusitania
, passengers settled down to what promised to be a crossing in perfect weather. The suites and cabins of those fortunate enough to be traveling first class —only 290 compared to the ship’s 540 capacity—were located amidships where least movement was felt in rough seas. The suites were in every style from Georgian to Empire and fitted out in gleaming walnut, sycamore, satinwood, and mahogany. Their open fireplaces and curtained windows in place of portholes conveyed the impression that guests were not at sea at all but in a grand country house—or even a palace. The private drawing room of one of the two Regal Suites was modeled on a salon in the French château of Fontainebleau while its white-and-gold-paneled dining room evoked Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon at Versailles.

Occupants of the suites included Alfred Vanderbilt, who the night before sailing had been in the audience of
A Celebrated Case
on Broadway—a coproduction of David Belasco and impresario Charles Frohman, also aboard the
Lusitania
. Unlike Vanderbilt, Frohman preferred to keep to his suite, which he had equipped with a portable gramophone so he could listen to his favorite song, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” He relied on a walking stick and when he did venture around the ship he could use the first-class elevators decorated with Renaissance-style gilded rosettes and medallions rather than have to climb the stairs.

Also traveling in first class were Lady Mackworth—a former militant suffragette— and her Welsh coal magnate father David Thomas; Marie de Page, the king and queen of Belgium’s special envoy to the United States, where she had raised more than one hundred thousand dollars for the Belgian Red Cross; spiritualist and architect Theodate Pope from Connecticut; Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat and Surgeon Major Warren Pearl, who had served as a United States Army surgeon during the Spanish-American War. Pearl had been instructed to report to the American embassy in London and was accompanied by his wife, four children, and two nurses. Marie de Page’s husband, Antoine, was the medical director of a nurse-training hospital in occupied Brussels where the matron was an Englishwoman named Edith Cavell. Together with the other first-class passengers she and the Pearls dined in a domed, double-tiered dining saloon decorated in white and gilt in the style of Louis XVI where glistening caviar, served with wafer-thin toast, juicy oysters on beds of crushed ice, and classic dishes like beef Wellington and Dover sole were offered. Lanson and Perrier Jouet champagnes were on the wine list, though the war had pushed up prices, but “enemy” drinks like German lager and Austrian wines and mineral water were no longer served. The Pearls and their fellow passengers read or wrote letters in the gray-and-cream silk brocade–hung Adam-style writing room and library while their children played in a well-equipped nursery and had their own dining parlor decorated in eighteenth-century French style “like the adults” but “advisedly simpler.”

The
Lusitania
’s spacious second-class cabins were toward the stern and equipped with mahogany washstands and soft woolen hangings that could be pulled around the berths for privacy. The second-class section was designed for a maximum of 460 but on this voyage some 600 passengers had been squeezed in, necessitating two sittings for every meal served in the sixty-foot-long Georgian-style dining room. A typical dinner menu featured dishes such as roast gosling Normande, braised ham with Madeira sauce, fillets of plaice in a white wine sauce followed by puddings, cheese, nuts, and fruit. Passengers like Professor Ian Holbourn, writer and laird of the tiny Scottish island of Foula, returning from a lecture tour in America, and young English medical student Dick Prichard relaxed in a gray-and-rose-hued Louis XVI–style saloon and promenaded open decks linked to those of first class by a gangway.

The third-class section toward the bows was, by contrast, relatively empty with only 367 occupying cabins designed to hold twelve hundred—Cunard had always made the bulk of its profits from the “steerage” passengers. Though plain and utilitarian, the cabins were better fitted and larger than on other ships, with crisply laundered sheets and toilets that flushed automatically—a precaution dreamed up by the
Lusitania
’s designers in case third-class passengers did not know how to flush. Plentiful meals were served in a large dining hall at long tables lined with steel-legged, wooden-backed chairs, ten to a side. Many traveling third class on
Lusitania
reckoned they had never eaten so well in their lives before with large cooked breakfasts, a substantial midday “dinner” of roasts, pies, and puddings and a “tea” with plates of mutton chops, sausages, and fish cakes.
*

Among those now enjoying the meals in third class was fifty-two-year-old twice-widowed Elizabeth Duckworth. She had been employed as a weaver in a cotton mill in Taftville, Connecticut, but had felt a strong desire to return to her roots in Lancashire in the northwest of England. Also traveling in third class was Annie Williams, a recent emigrant from England to the United States whose husband John had deserted her and their six children immediately on arrival. She was returning home in hopes of tracking him down.

Regular transatlantic travelers like Theodate Pope sensed from the start that the atmosphere on board was unusually subdued. Reminders of the war were everywhere from the Red Cross collecting boxes around the ship to the
Cunard Daily Bulletin
reporting Germany’s “lavish use of gases against the British.” Tactfully it made no mention of U-boats but people could not forget the German warning. As soon as she came aboard, one young woman “looked about and mentally decided upon the place to make for in the event of any incident.”

Twelve-year-old Avis Dolphin, traveling in second class to school in England in the care of two nurses, thought the
Lusitania
“like a floating palace” but was nervous about the German warning that she had heard the adults discussing. Professor Holbourn noticed her lying seasick and homesick in a deck chair. Missing his own young family, he befriended her. When she confessed her fears about U-boats he promised that if any attack happened he would find her wherever she was on the ship and rescue her.

Professor Holbourn was among the few passengers to consider practicalities in the event of a U-boat attack. He thought it only common sense that people should know how to put on their life jackets, but when he suggested an exercise to other passengers, a deputation came to him asking him not to talk about the possibility of trouble for fear of upsetting the women. He nicknamed them “the Ostrich Club.” Holbourn was also critical of Captain Turner’s reluctance to hold a passenger lifeboat drill because it might “cause panic or worry.” The passengers were not even assigned to specific lifeboats. The only drills were for the crew. Though held daily, they seemed to Holbourn to be a perfunctory formality. Eight crew members lined up in front of one of the heavy wooden lifeboats and after an officer inspected them “climbed up the davits into the boat; they then stood for a moment in the boat with oars dressed, and immediately sat down ready for the boat to be launched.” At a further command they jumped back onto the deck.

Oliver Bernard, a young British theatrical designer traveling in first class, shared Holbourn’s concerns about the cursory crew drills, noting that no attempt was made to lower the boats. He wondered what would happen if the lifeboats had to be launched fully loaded and in difficult conditions. However, unlike on the
Titanic
there were enough lifeboats for all, both crew and passengers, should the worst happen. The
Lusitania
’s twenty-two wooden clinker-built boats suspended from davits could hold 1,322 while her twenty-six wooden and canvas-sided collapsible boats, mostly stowed beneath them, could carry a further 1,283. There were also plenty of life jackets—bulky, fiber-filled “Boddy’s Patent Jackets.”

Some passengers were interested to know whether the ship was mounting guns and what she might be carrying. Michael Byrne, an American in first class, searched for guns on the first day at sea, inspecting every deck above the waterline, but could find none. The
Lusitania
’s relatively limited cargo space, located near the bows on the orlop and lower decks, was of course off limits to passengers. When asked what the
Lusitania
had in the hold, crew members replied “general cargo.” This was true according to the one-page manifest sworn by Captain Turner the day before the
Lusitania
sailed for submission to the New York customs authorities. However, four days after the
Lusitania
had left New York, Cunard staff handed to the New York customs authorities a twenty-four page handwritten “Supplemental Manifest.” It detailed eighty consignments including cheese, beef, lard, and bacon as well as furs, confectionery, bales of leather, automobile parts, dental goods, crates of books, sewing machines, wool, beeswax, and a case of oil paintings belonging to first-class passenger Sir Hugh Lane, director of the National Gallery of Ireland. Although not specified in the manifest, the paintings reputedly included works by Rembrandt, Monet, and Rubens.

The Supplemental Manifest, a summary of which would be published in New York on May 8, also listed a significant amount of war matériel: 4,200 cases of Remington rifle cartrideges, packed one thousand to a box; 1,250 boxes of empty shrapnel shells—powder, propellant charge, and fuse were to be fitted in Britain—and eighteen cases of fuses (both shells and fuses supplied by the Bethlehem Steel Company); a large amount of aluminum powder and fifty cases of bronze powder. In monetary terms, over half the
Lusitania
’s cargo consisted of munitions for the Allies’ war effort. According to a U.S. Treasury official, “practically all of her cargo was contraband of some kind” in the sense that, had the ship been stopped by a German vessel and boarded, the Germans would have been entitled to impound or destroy most of the contents in her hold. However, the carriage of all the war matériel in the manifest, including small-arms ammunition and empty shell cases, was perfectly legal under U.S. law. Since May 1911, following extensive testing by both manufacturers and the military, including exposure to severe shock and direct flame, the Department of Commerce and Labor had permitted small-arms ammunition to be carried on passenger ships. The cases of small-arms ammunition and fuses now in the
Lusitania
’s hold were accordingly all stamped “non-explosive in bulk.”

As the
Lusitania
sailed eastward, U-boats were making their presence felt in the war zone declared by Germany around the British Isles. On the day the liner left New York, a U-boat torpedoed the American oil tanker
Gulflight
off the Isles of Scilly near the southern entrance to the Irish Channel and in the waters for which the
Lusitania
was now making. However, the British authorities were taking the danger the
Lusitania
might be in rather lightly. Cunard chairman Sir Alfred Booth only learned of the German threat the day after the
Lusitania
had sailed and only then from his newspaper. Charles Sumner, his general manager in New York, had not bothered to send a cable to the Cunard headquarters. Booth’s initial reaction was that there was no reason to believe “the ship was in any serious danger of being sunk.” In mid-April Cunard had briefed its captains about how to respond to the submarine menace: within the danger zone watertight doors were to be closed, boats swung out, portholes closed, and the ship darkened. Ships bound for Liverpool were not to wait to take on a pilot at the Mersey Bar but to head straight in. In the event of any specific risk to the
Lusitania
on this voyage, Booth was certain the Admiralty would issue special instructions to Captain Turner and send a naval escort to bring the ship safely home.

The British and American press were similarly sanguine. The
Daily Telegraph
derided the German warning as “Berlin’s latest bluff” which had been “Ridiculed in America.” Beneath bold headlines:
THE INEFFECTIVE BLOCKADE—NEW TRICKS TO FRIGHTEN AMERICANS—LUSITANIA WARNED
, the
Times
(London) assured its readers that “the manoeuvre is simply an ill-timed and excessively impertinent effort, begotten probably of the failure of the submarine blockade, to advertise German frightfulness.” The
American Tribune
of May 2 stated, “No big passenger steamer has yet been sunk.”