Dead Wake (46 page)

He set out to publish a book about Room 40 and his exploits as intelligence chief, but in August 1933 the Admiralty and Foreign Office, sensing a new dark tilt in the world, made clear their displeasure and their wish that the story remain secret. Hall withdrew the manuscript, though his notes and a number of completed chapters reside today in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, England. In one notation Hall exults, “
How simple is intelligence!”

Hall believed that new trouble was indeed soon to come in Europe. He visited Germany and Austria in 1934. Ever the intelligence man, he reported his observations about the National Socialist movement to the government. He also described his experience to a friend in America. “
All the young are in the net,” he wrote, “anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed till they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.” He added, “It will, some time soon, be the duty of HUMAN BEINGS to deal with a mad dog; when that time comes your people will have to take their share.”

When the next war did begin, Hall joined Britain’s Home Guard. He became its chief of intelligence. His health, never good, declined as the war progressed. In July 1943 one of his former code breakers, Claude Serocold, by that point a director of Claridge’s Hotel, put him up in one of the hotel’s suites so that he could spend his last days in comfort. At one point a plumber arrived to deal with a problem in the bathroom. In keeping with the dignified character of the hotel, the plumber was dressed in a black suit. Hall said, “
If you’re the undertaker, my man, you’re too early.” He died on October 22, 1943.

A
MONG THE PASSENGERS
who survived—all of whom received from Cunard a lifetime discount of 25 percent—there were marriages, lifelong friendships forged, and at least two suicides. Rita Jolivet’s sister, Inez, a renowned violinist, was not herself a passenger,
but her husband was among the lost. She decided she could not live without him and in late July 1915 shot herself to death. At least two young men who had survived the sinking were subsequently killed in the war.

Margaret Mackworth experienced a complex suite of aftereffects. Her ordeal had the perverse result of eliminating her long-standing fear of water and substituting an exaggerated terror of being trapped in an enclosure
under
water. This fear came to her primarily when she took the train that passed through the Severn Tunnel, under the Severn River. It was a journey she had to take often, and every time, she wrote, “
I insistently pictured the tunnel giving way, the water rushing in, and the passengers being caught and suffocated and drowned like rats in a trap in the little boxes of carriages.”

Overall, though, she believed the disaster had made her a better person. She had a new confidence. “
If anyone had asked me whether I should behave as I ought in a shipwreck I should have had the gravest doubts,” she wrote. “And here I had got through this test without disgracing myself.” She also found, to her surprise, that the experience had eliminated a deep horror of death that she had harbored since childhood. “
I do not quite understand how or why it did this,” she wrote. “The only explanation I can give is that when I was lying back in that sunlit water I was, and I knew it, very near to death.” The prospect had not frightened her, she wrote: “Rather, somehow, one had a protected feeling, as if it were a kindly thing.”

Her friend and tablemate, Dorothy Conner, went on to join the war effort, working in a canteen in France close to the front. In honor of her help and bravery, the French awarded her the Croix de Guerre.

Young Dwight Harris presented his engagement ring to his betrothed, Miss Aileen Cavendish Foster, and they were married on July 2, 1915, in London. The little boy he saved, Percy Richards, reached the age of forty, but killed himself on June 24, 1949.

George Kessler, the Champagne King, made good on a pledge he had made during his time in the water—that if he survived he
would devote himself to the care of victims of the war.
He established a foundation to help soldiers and sailors blinded in battle. Helen Keller became a trustee and later gave her name to the organization, which operates today as Helen Keller International.

Five months after the disaster, Charles Lauriat wrote a book about his experience, entitled
The Lusitania’s Last Voyage
. It became a bestseller. He continued to sell books, manuscripts, and works of art, and in 1922 filed a claim against Germany with the U.S. Mixed Claims Commission for the value of the lost Thackeray drawings and the Dickens
Carol
. He wanted $51,399.31, which included interest; the commission awarded him $10,000. He died on December 28, 1937, at the age of sixty-three. His obituary in the
Boston Globe
noted the fact that over the years he had made sixty voyages to London and Europe.
A succession of new owners built the Lauriat company into an empire of 120 “Lauriat’s” stores, but this expansion came too quickly, at too great a cost, just as bookstores came under pressure from national chains and online sellers. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 1998 and a year later closed for good.

Belle Naish, the Kansas City passenger who lost her husband, found that long after the disaster she could not look at
a clear blue sky without feeling a deep sense of foreboding. Theodate Pope put Mrs. Naish in her will as thanks for that moment on the deck of the rescue ship
Julia
when Naish realized that Theodate was not in fact dead and called for help.

Theodate’s recovery took time. Her spiritualist friends rallied and arranged for her to stay in a private home in Cork. She arrived with her face still battered and vividly hued, wearing a mélange of clothing that she had selected from a collection donated by Queenstown residents. Her host family placed her in a guest room with white walls, tulips in window boxes, and a lively coal fire. Until this point she had existed in a kind of emotional trance, unable to feel much of anything. But now, suddenly, in this cozy home, she felt safe. “
I dropped into a chair and, for the first time, cried my heart out.” She received letters of consolation. Mary Cassatt
wrote, “
If you were saved it is because you have still something to do in this world.”

To complete her recovery, Theodate moved on to London, to the Hyde Park Hotel. Henry James was a regular visitor. Theodate described herself as being “
in such a state of exhaustion and shock” that she would drift off to sleep in his presence, but each time she awoke, he was there, “his folded hands on the top of his cane, so motionless that he looked like a mezzotint.” Though she had adored England on her past visits, she now found it utterly changed. “
You can have no idea of the war atmosphere here,” she wrote to her mother. “It is suffocating, it is so—not depressing—but so constantly in the thoughts and on the lips of everyone.” She returned to her beloved house, Hill-Stead. For long afterward she endured severe insomnia, and nightmares in which she searched for her young companion of the
Lusitania
, Edwin Friend. On the worst nights a cousin would walk her through her house until she had calmed enough to return to bed.

She eventually adopted the “gold collar” and married a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Wallace Riddle. She achieved her goal of creating a progressive boys’ school as a memorial to her late father. She built it in Avon, Connecticut, and called it Avon Old Farms School, which exists today.

Her companion, Edwin Friend, had indeed been lost but was reported by members of the reconstituted American Society for Psychical Research to have paid the group several visits.

I
N THE DUSTY TIMELINE
of world events installed in my brain back in high school, the
Lusitania
affair constituted the skimpiest of entries, tucked somewhere between the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. I always had the impression, shared I suspect by many, that the sinking immediately drove President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany, when in fact America did not enter World War I for another two years—half the span of the entire war. But that was just one of the many aspects of the episode that took me by surprise. As I began reading into the subject, and digging into archives in America and Britain, I found myself intrigued, charmed, and moved.

What especially drew me was the rich array of materials available to help tell the story in as vivid a manner as possible—such archival treasures as telegrams, intercepted wireless messages, survivor depositions, secret intelligence ledgers, Kapitänleutnant Schwieger’s actual war log, Edith Galt’s love letters, and even a film of the
Lusitania
’s final departure from New York. Together these made a palette of the richest colors. I can only hope I used them to best effect.

Finding these things was half the fun. Every book is an expedition into unfamiliar realms, with both an intellectual and a physical component. The intellectual journey takes you deep into a subject, to the point where you achieve a level of expertise. A
focused
expertise, however. Am I an expert on World War I? No. Do I know a lot now about the
Lusitania
and World War I–era U-boats? Yes. Will I ever write another book about a sinking ship or submarine warfare? Most likely not.

The physical journey proved especially compelling, in ways I had not anticipated. At one point I found myself aboard Cunard’s
Queen Mary 2
in a Force 10 gale during a winter crossing from New York to Southampton. At another, I wound up horribly lost in Hamburg with a German-speaking GPS system that unbeknownst to me had been tuned to a different city but gamely tried to direct me to my hotel all the same. I felt like a character in the
Bourne Identity
, taking wild turns down alleys and into cul-de-sacs, until I realized no GPS system would ever send a driver the wrong way down a one-way street. My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge. There will always be an England, and I am so very glad.

Along the way came quiet moments of revelation where past and present for an instant joined and history became a tactile thing. I live for these moments. No sooner did I sit down to work at the Hoover Library at Stanford University than an archivist brought me, unbidden, a fragment of planking from a lifeboat stamped with the name
Lusitania
, originally found beside the corpse of a passenger who had washed ashore. In the Strandingsmuseum St. George, in Thorsminde, Denmark, I was able to stand beside and touch the deck gun of U-20—the actual gun that had sunk the
Earl of Lathom
—adopting poses that my wife assured me were beyond dorky. At the National Archives of the United Kingdom, in Kew—well guarded by swans—I opened one file box to find the actual codebook, the SKM, or
Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine
, that had been retrieved by the Russians and given to Room 40 in 1914. One of the most powerful moments came when I was given permission
by the University of Liverpool, repository of the Cunard Archive, to view morgue photos of
Lusitania
victims. The effect of such moments is like sticking a finger in a mildly charged electric socket. It is always reassuring, because no matter how deeply I immerse myself in a subject, I still like having actual, physical proof that the events I’m writing about really did occur.

Strangely, in the week before I sent my initial draft to my editor, the Korean ferry
Sewol
sank in the Yellow Sea, subjecting hundreds of schoolchildren to an experience very close to that of the passengers on the
Lusitania
. One morning I finished rewriting a passage dealing with the
Lusitania
’s severe list and how it impaired the launching of lifeboats, only to visit CNN’s website a few minutes later to read about exactly the same phenomenon occurring with the
Sewol
.

My voyage on the
Queen Mary 2
—a beautiful and gracious ship, by the way—brought me invaluable insights into the nature of transoceanic travel. Even today, when you are in the middle of the Atlantic you are very much alone, and far from rescue if something cataclysmic were to occur. Unlike the passengers of the
Lusitania
, before we left New York we all were required to try on our life jackets. No one was exempted, regardless of how many voyages he or she had already made. This was serious business and, frankly, a bit scary, for putting on a life jacket forces you to imagine the unimaginable.

W
HEN WRITING
about the
Lusitania
, one has to be very careful to sift and weigh the things that appear in books already published on the subject. There are falsehoods and false facts, and these, once dropped into the scholarly stream, appear over and over again, with footnotes always leading back to the same culprits. Fortunately, I had a guide to help me through all this, Mike Poirier of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, an amateur historian who very likely knows more about the ship and its passengers than any other living soul, and who read my manuscript for things that might cause
Lusitania
buffs to howl with laughter. One gets the sense that Mike
cares about the “Lucy’s” passengers as if they were his nephews and nieces. His help was invaluable. I was aided as well by another
Lusitania
aficionado, Geoffrey Whitfield, who gave me a tour of modern-day Liverpool. I must assert, however, that if any errors persist in this book, the fault is solely my own.

For evaluations of pace and narrative integrity—whether the book worked or not—I relied on my trusted cadre of advance readers, my great friends Carrie Dolan and Penny Simon, my friend and agent David Black, and my secret weapon, my wife, Christine Gleason, whose margin notations—smiley faces, tear-streamed eyes, down arrows, and long rows of zzzzzs—as always provided excellent markers as to where I went wrong and what I did right. My editor at Crown Publishing, Amanda Cook, wrote me an elevenpage letter that provided a brilliant road map to tweaking the narrative. She proved a master at the art of offering praise, while at the same time shoving tiny knives under each of my fingernails, propelling me into a month of narrative renovation that was probably the most intense writing experience of my life. Thanks as well to copy editor Elisabeth Magnus for saving me from having one character engage in the decidedly dangerous practice of dressing with “flare,” and from having passengers go “clamoring” aboard. I must of course thank the three Superheroes—my term—of Crown, Maya Mavjee, Molly Stern, and David Drake, who I confess are far more adept at managing martinis than I. Thanks also to Chris Brand and Darren Haggar for a truly excellent cover. And finally cheers to the
real
heroes, Emma Berry and Sarah Smith.