A Higher Form of Killing (25 page)

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The German naval authorities later arrested and court-martialed Charles Voegele.

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 Had Schwieger launched the torpedo either five seconds earlier or twenty seconds later he would have missed his target altogether.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Wilful and Wholesale Murder”

In the water, passengers and crew tried to help one another. Charles Lauriat and a friend scrambled onto a collapsible lifeboat and, finding their penknives, “went at a kind of can-opening operation” to try to raise the boat’s canvas sides; however, terrified, half-drowning people were clinging to the rail to which the canvas was attached. Lauriat asked them to let go just for a moment and hold on to the life ropes instead, but many thought he meant to “push them off” and abandon them. Eventually he and his friend managed to raise the sides and loaded the boat with people “until it sunk flush with the water.” Lauriat recalled when there were “about as many in our boat as we ought to take,” he heard a woman say, “in just as natural a tone of voice as you would ask for another slice of bread and butter, ‘Won’t you take me next? I can’t swim.’ ” Peering into the water he saw “a woman’s head, with a piece of wreckage under her chin and with her hair streaming out . . . She was so jammed in she couldn’t even get her arms out, and with it all she had a half smile on her face and was placidly chewing gum.” Lauriat succeeded in dragging her in. He also rescued Margaret Gwyer, thoroughly coated in oil and soot from the funnel.

Elizabeth Duckworth had eventually found a place in one of the few lifeboats that had gotten away safely. Overwhelmed by the terrible sights and sounds, she had begun reciting the Twenty-third Psalm when she noticed “a man struggling in the water right near our boat and I said to the mate: ‘can’t we help him?’ He said ‘
NO
.’ I said ‘Yes, we can.’ ” After a hard struggle they pulled him on board.

Captain Turner was also saved. As the waters had risen around him on the bridge he had jumped into the sea where he clung first to an oar, then a chair, all the while fighting off seagulls which, he recalled—perhaps somewhat improbably—swooped “on the dazed and benumbed people floating helplessly on the surface and pecked their eyes out.” Growing weak from exposure he “flung up a gold-braided arm” hoping to attract attention. A crewman spotted him and supported him in the water until rescue arrived.

Those shivering in lifeboats or clinging to pieces of wreckage like bellboy Ben Holton, keeping afloat by hanging on to an upturned dog kennel, looked hopefully toward the shore that was so tantalizingly close and wondered when help would come. Steward Robert Barnes, sharing an upturned collapsible lifeboat with ten others including a dead woman, could not understand the delay since they were “in sight of Queenstown all the time” and feared their frail craft was drifting out to sea.

Marconi Operator Bob Leith’s distress calls, which had been picked up by stations along the Irish coast, had immediately been relayed to Vice Admiral Coke at naval headquarters in Queenstown. At two twenty
P.M.
he received the ship’s own request for help and then a further forwarded message:
LUSITANIA TEN MILES SOUTH EAST APPARENTLY SINKING
. At two forty-one
P.M.
a message from the signal station at Kinsale told him simply:
LUSITANIA SUNK
. As Coke set about organizing a rescue fleet, in the town the cry went up “the
Lusy’s
gone.”

U.S. consul Wesley Frost was in his office above O’Reilly’s bar in Queenstown when his assistant burst in to tell him of “a wildfire rumour about town that the
Lusitania
had been attacked.” From his window Frost saw “a very unusual stir in the harbor” as “tugs, tenders and trawlers, some two dozen in all, began to steam past the town toward the harbor-mouth.” Frost immediately rang the Cunard office, which “admitted . . . that it appeared probable that the vessel was sunk or sinking.” Frost hurried to the bank to withdraw funds to enable him to help American passengers and cabled Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in Washington:
LUSITANIA SUNK 2.30 TODAY PROBABLY MANY SURVIVORS RESCUE WORK ENERGETICALLY PROCEEDING SHALL I CABLE LIST OF SURVIVORS
.

The first telegram from Queenstown reporting the disaster only reached Cunard’s headquarters in Liverpool at five
P.M.
because the Admiralty censor delayed it. By early evening rumors were spreading throughout the city, and crowds converged on Cunard’s offices. In London, Lloyd’s
posted a bulletin announcing the disaster and at five fifteen
P.M.
the Foreign Office issued a statement. Admiral Jacky Fisher had learned of the sinking from Coke shortly before three
P.M.
but Churchill, still in France and now at Sir John French’s headquarters, was not informed until later that day.

Meanwhile, the small flotilla of converted fishing trawlers, armed naval patrol craft, and elderly torpedo boats that Frost had seen was hurrying from Queenstown to the scene of the disaster. Fishing smacks and lifeboats from elsewhere along the coast joined them, including the Courtmacsherry lifeboat which set out at three
P.M.
with twelve men at the oars. Having no engine, it would take the men some three hours heavy pulling to reach the scene. As they rowed they prayed “as hard as men could pray, a prayer with every stroke. ‘O God, keep them alive until we’re there.’ ”

The first rescue vessel to arrive was an Isle of Man fishing boat, the
Wanderer
. Some four hundred yards from where the
Lusitania
had gone down the fishermen found the first lifeboats. Elizabeth Duckworth was rowing hard in one of them. As she was helped aboard she saw another lifeboat “tossing about in the water” with only three occupants. One of them stood up and shouted that he and his two companions were the only survivors from an entire boatload. He begged for help to row back and rescue “some of the drowning.” The captain of the
Wanderer
refused, saying he could not spare the men. However, Elizabeth leaped the gap between the vessel and the lifeboat, seized an oar, and together with the men rescued “about forty of those struggling in the water” and brought them back to the
Wanderer
.

Charles Lauriat, aboard his heavily laden collapsible lifeboat, also reached the
Wanderer
. Margaret Gwyer was ecstatic to see the tall figure of her husband standing at the rail of the fishing boat but he looked at her with “a perfectly blank expression.” She was in such a terrible state and he was in such shock that he did not recognize her until he seemed to pull himself together, leaned over the side, and looked her squarely in the face.

Lauriat recalled that although “it was positively slippery with fish scales and the usual dirt of fishermen . . . the deck of that boat, under our feet, felt as good as the front hall of our own homes.” The fishermen were horrified at the state of the survivors—many naked and bleeding, some clutching fractured limbs or in the worst cases with broken bones protruding through torn flesh. They improvised bandages, pulled woolen blankets from their bunks, and brewed hot tea. When that ran out they handed round mugs of boiling water. Sips from the boat’s one bottle of whiskey were rationed out to those most in need.

The
Wanderer
also picked up Professor Holbourn. He sat huddled and sodden in the tiny hold, which smelled strongly of fish, worrying about Avis. Next to him lay a man with a broken leg and an expectant mother with crushed ribs. The vessel was so crowded that some were forced to dangle their legs over the side. Fearing she might sink beneath the weight, the
Wanderer
’s captain took two further lifeboats in tow and set out for Queenstown.

Not until around six
P.M.
—three and a half hours after the sinking—did the main rescue fleet begin to arrive. Oliver Bernard had managed to reach a badly waterlogged lifeboat and had been baling and rowing hard for some time when “gradually smoke appeared on the horizon, east and west” and “all kinds of steamers heaved in sight . . . A woman moaned, ‘Why didn’t they come before?’ ”

The fishing boat
Bluebell
rescued Captain Turner and the unconscious and badly bruised former suffragette Margaret Mackworth. Sucked from the deck into the sea, she had found a thin piece of board two or three feet long to cling on to. A man with “a white face and yellow moustache” had also grabbed it and begun to inch toward her. Instinct had told her “he wanted to hold on to me” and she had asked him to go back to his own end which he did. After a while he had disappeared. She had continued to cling on, shivering with cold and only dimly aware of people around her praying out loud or calling, “Bo-at . . . bo-at . . . bo-at . . .” Bellboy Ben Holton, who had passed out in the water with the cold, woke to find himself lying on a ship’s hatch among a pile of corpses. When he sat up an astonished sailor exclaimed, “Good gracious, are you alive? We put you amongst the dead ones.”

At the Cunard Wharf in Queenstown, police erected a makeshift barrier to keep back onlookers as toward nightfall the rescue vessels began to return. Wesley Frost watched “the ghastly procession . . . as they landed the living and the dead that night under the flaring gas torches” with “bruised and shuddering women, crippled and half-clothed men, and a few wide-eyed little children” having to be helped or carried up the gangplank. Many grabbed at the sleeves of officials begging for news of their loved ones. One woman with a baby in her arms and a blanket given her by a sailor around her shoulders refused to leave the quayside “but waited until the last survivor had passed, searching each face as it went by, in the vain hope of finding her husband.”

American shipowner Charles Bowring, hobbling ashore in his sodden Norfolk jacket, put his hand in his pocket to retrieve his glasses. He found that “they were all twisted in a piece of paper.” Putting them on he found that the paper was the German warning that had appeared in the New York newspapers the day the
Lusitania
sailed. He reflected wryly that he had at least one souvenir of the day’s events.

Those strong enough were ushered into the Cunard offices to register their names on a list of survivors that flustered company staff were trying to compile. Young cook George Wynne, who had been dragged half drowned aboard a trawler and revived by sailors who worked his arms to pump the water from his lungs, was among them. In the
Lusitania
’s last moments, his semi-invalid father Joseph, knowing George could not swim, had rushed off to find him a life jacket. He had not returned and George had not seen him since. Nevertheless, unable to bear the thought of causing his mother anxiety, he sent a telegram to her in Liverpool telling her they were both safe.

U.S. consul Wesley Frost had received a cable from Secretary of State Bryan:
COMPANY REPORTS ALL PASSENGERS SAVED. IF REPORT UNTRUE CABLE NAMES OF AMERICANS LOST OR NOT ACCOUNTED FOR
. In London U.S. ambassador Walter Hines Page was waiting for Frost’s latest updates. During the afternoon Sir Edward Grey had called him to the Foreign Office to tell him that the
Lusitania
“had been torpedoed and sunk by German submarines off the Irish coast.” The ambassador was giving a farewell dinner for Colonel House and his wife that night. Since the initial reports suggested there had been no fatalities, Page decided not to cancel it. However, returning home he learned that the first reports had been wrong and that there had been a massive loss of life. It was too late to cancel the dinner, but during the subdued affair Page read out to his guests the ever grimmer updates arriving from Frost and the Admiralty. Colonel House predicted: “We shall be at war with Germany within a month.”

In Queenstown, as the night wore on, many arriving vessels now carried more dead than living. Wesley Frost watched as “piles of corpses like cordwood began to appear among the paint-kegs and coils of rope on the shadowy old wharves.” Corpses were placed on stretchers and carried to the temporary mortuaries set up in a shed on the Cunard quay and then, as the numbers of dead rose, in the large town hall and in a disused ship’s chandlery. Leslie Morton, the young seaman who had been the first to spot the torpedo and had later dived overboard after trying to help launch the lifeboats, went to one of the mortuaries looking for his brother John who had also been on board. Hesitantly, he reached out to twitch the sheet off a corpse when, as he later recalled, “by the most amazing coincidence a hand on the other side went to turn the sheet back and I looked up and there was my brother.”

Professor Holbourn learned that night to his great relief that a rescue ship had picked up Avis Dolphin. Margaret Mackworth was helped off the
Bluebell
to find her father David Thomas, fortified with brandy given him by a Catholic priest, waiting on the quayside desperate for news of her. Not all were so fortunate. George Wynne soon learned that his father Joseph was among the dead. On his return to Liverpool he would wander the streets, postponing the moment when he had to tell his mother the truth. He only eventually managed to do so with the aid of another priest.
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Charlotte Pye, whom Vanderbilt had helped, and Mabel Henshaw both lost their babies. Major Pearl found that though his wife, baby Audrey, five-year-old Stuart, and their nurse Alice Lines were alive, the other nurse Greta Lorenson and the two daughters in her care were missing.