Dead Wake (41 page)

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.

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.”

On Monday, May 10, the coroner’s jury issued its finding: that the submarine’s officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed “
willful and wholesale murder.”

Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty,
ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, “
That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the
Lusitania
against attack.”

T
HE
A
DMIRALTY
was far more prompt in laying out the contours of its strategy for assigning fault to Turner. The day after the disaster, Richard Webb, director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, circulated a two-page memorandum, marked “Secret,” in which he charged that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s instructions that called for him to zigzag and to “give prominent headlands a wide berth.” Instead, Webb wrote, Turner had “
proceeded along the usual trade route, at a speed approximately three-quarters of what he was able to get out of this vessel. He thus kept his valuable vessel for an unnecessary length of time in the area where she was most liable to attack, inviting disaster.”

Webb made a formal request for an investigation by Britain’s Wreck Commission, under Lord Mersey, who had led inquiries into the losses of many ships, including the
Titanic
and the
Empress of Ireland
.

On Wednesday, May 12, Webb intensified his attack on Captain Turner. In a new memorandum, he wrote that Turner “
appears to have displayed an almost inconceivable negligence, and one is forced to conclude that he is either utterly incompetent, or that he has been got at by the Germans.” In the left-hand margin, First Sea Lord Fisher, in his wild fulminating hand, jotted, “I hope Captain Turner will be arrested
immediately
after the inquiry
whatever
the verdict of finding may be.”

The Admiralty took the unprecedented step of insisting that key parts of the planned inquiry, especially the examination of Turner, be held in secret.

U.S.
CONSUL
F
ROST
sensed early on that the Admiralty’s soul had hardened against Turner. On Sunday, May 9, Frost paid a call on Admiral Coke, senior naval officer in Queenstown, accompanied
by two U.S. military attachés who had just arrived from London to help arrange the return of American dead.

Admiral Coke openly criticized Turner for sailing too close to shore and too slowly and read aloud the warnings that had been sent to the
Lusitania
on Friday. But Consul Frost was surprised at how little detail these messages contained. “
Bare facts only,” Frost noted, later. “No instructions or interpretation. It is true that Turner should have kept farther out; but to my mind it seemed that the Admiralty had by no means done their full duty by him.”

One of the American attachés, Capt. W. A. Castle, wrote his own account of the meeting and noted that a particular subject was glaringly absent from the conversation. “
I was struck by the fact that the Admiral while seeming to be desirous of justifying the Admiralty in its measures of protection, did not mention the presence of any destroyers or other Naval vessels.” Castle added that during his train trip back to London he had discussed the subject with a fellow passenger, a Royal Navy lieutenant, “who spoke quite frankly, although I suppose of course confidentially, and said that he could not understand nor could his brother officers, why so many torpedo boats of the old type, which could make 25 knots an hour without difficulty, and would be just the thing to protect an incoming steamer, are left at various wharves, instead of being used for this purpose, and said that had they placed one of these to starboard, another to port, and another in front of the
Lusitania
, she could not have been torpedoed.”

W
HY THE
A
DMIRALTY
would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the
Lusitania
. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “
Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but
also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere.

The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.

In the first message of the series, Schwieger reported: “
Have sunk off the South Coast of Ireland, one sailing ship, two steamers, and LUSITANIA. Am steering for the mouth of the Ems.”

The Admiralty received it at 9:49
A
.
M
.; the decrypted copy was marked “Most Secret.” This message confirmed that the culprit had indeed been U-20, the submarine that Room 40 had been tracking since April 30.

That afternoon, Room 40 received the intercept of a reply sent to Schwieger by the commander of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, which read, “
My highest appreciation of Commander and crew for the success they have achieved. Am proud of their achievement and express best wishes for their return.”