Dead Wake (27 page)

By midweek Robert himself had begun to feel poorly. The ship’s surgeon examined him and diagnosed a full-blown case of measles. The boy, he said, would have to spend the rest of the voyage in quarantine, two decks down. The Kays were traveling in second class, but his mother chose to go below as well, to room with her son.

The monotony was crushing, but there was, at least, a porthole through which the boy could watch the sea.

C
APTAIN
T
URNER
ordered the usual midmorning lifeboat drill. The team of “picked” crewmen climbed into one of the emergency boats as an audience of passengers looked on. One witness was George Kessler, the “Champagne King,” who went up to the sailor in charge, and told him, “
It’s alright drilling your crew, but why don’t you drill your passengers?”

The man replied, “Why not tell Captain Turner, sir?”

Kessler resolved to do so.

U-20

SPECTACLE

T
HURSDAY MORNING
, M
AY
6,
FOUND
U-20
ADVANCING
slowly along the southwest coast of Ireland, into waters mariners knew as the
St. George’s Channel. Though the term
channel
connotes a narrow body of water, the St. George’s at its broadest was about 90 miles wide, tapering to 45 miles between Carnsore Point on the Irish coast and St. David’s Head in Wales. A lightship was anchored at the Irish side to steer ships away from a notorious hazard, the Coningbeg Rock, routinely misspelled by telegraph and wireless operators as Coningberg or Koninbeg. Beyond this point, the waters broadened again to form the Irish Sea, Muir Éireann, with Liverpool another 250 nautical miles to the north and east. Even at Schwieger’s best speed of 15 knots, he would need another sixteen hours to reach his assigned patrol zone.

But the weather was not cooperating. Persistent fog had forced him to remain submerged throughout the night. Just before 8:00
A
.
M
., he found signs of clearing and brought the boat to the surface, but did so using only its hydroplanes. He kept the diving tanks filled with seawater in case of emergency. The boat moved through striations of heavy fog.

A steamship appeared ahead, off to starboard. It flew no flag and showed no other indicator of registry. Schwieger ordered his
gun crew on deck for a surface attack. Despite the poor visibility, some sharp-eyed soul aboard the steamer spotted the submarine. The ship turned hard and fled at full speed.

Schwieger raced after it, his gun crew firing round after round. Two shells hit the steamer, but it continued to run. The ship entered a fog bank and disappeared from view. Schwieger followed.

Clarity returned. Schwieger’s men resumed fire. U-20 was making 15 knots; the steamer probably only 8 to 10. The attack went on for nearly two hours, with U-20 gradually gaining, until one shell struck the target’s bridge. This proved persuasive. The steamship stopped and lowered its boats. One foundered, Schwieger saw, but three others pulled away, “full to capacity.”

Schwieger brought the submarine closer. He fired a bronze torpedo into the hull, from a distance of 500 meters (550 yards). It exploded at a point opposite what Schwieger believed to be the ship’s engine room. “Effect slight,” he wrote. The ship sagged at the stern but did not sink.

Schwieger’s gun crew began firing at the ship’s waterline as he brought U-20 slowly around to its stern. The ship’s name had been painted over, but up close Schwieger was able to read it:
Candidate
. His ship-identification book showed it to be a British freighter of about 5,000 tons, owned by the Harrison Line of Liverpool, a company prone to giving ships such romantic names as
Auditor, Administrator
, and
Electrician
.

Schwieger’s men continued firing until the ship’s bow rose high out of the water and the stern began to sink. He recorded the latitude and longitude of the wreck, which put it 20 miles south of the Coningbeg lightship, at about the middle of the narrowest portion of the Saint George’s Channel. The time was 10:30
A
.
M
.

Ten minutes later, he sighted another potential target coming over the horizon, this one the biggest yet, on a course that would converge with his. Fog obscured the ship. Schwieger ordered full speed and set a course that he anticipated would put U-20 ahead of the ship and in position to fire a torpedo.

The big steamer burst from the fog, moving fast. Schwieger saw
now that it was a passenger liner of about 14,000 tons. A true prize. He ordered a fast dive and raced at the highest speed his battery-powered engines could muster, 9 knots, but this proved not nearly enough. The ship was still 2 miles off and moving at full speed. Schwieger realized that the best he could do would be to position U-20 so that a torpedo would strike the liner at a glancing 20-degree angle—too oblique to be successful. He called off the attack.

Although he didn’t name the ship in his log, the liner was the
Arabic
, of the White Star Line, which had owned the
Titanic
.

A
N HOUR LATER
, shortly before one o’clock, Schwieger spotted yet another target, ahead and to port.

He set up his attack. This time he chose one of the newer G6 torpedoes and ordered its depth set at 3 meters, about 10 feet. He fired from a distance of 300 meters. The torpedo struck the ship at a point below its forward mast. The bow took on water, but the ship stayed afloat. Its crew fled in boats. Schwieger surfaced.

He determined that the vessel was an English freighter, the
Centurion
, about 6,000 tons, owned by the same line that owned the freighter he had sunk earlier in the day.

The fog again began to build. Schwieger did not want to take a chance that the
Centurion
would survive. He fired a second torpedo, “to make foundering sure.” This too exploded on contact, and Schwieger heard the telltale hiss of air that fled the ship as water filled its hull. U-boat commanders always found this a satisfying moment. Kapitänleutnant Forstner, in his memoir, described how the air “escapes with a shrill whistle from every possible aperture, and the sound resembles the shriek of a steam siren. This is a wonderful spectacle to behold!” Often at this point stricken ships gave one last exhalation as water filled their boiler rooms, causing a final explosion and releasing a cloud of black smoke and soot, known to U-boat commanders as “the black soul.”

Schwieger did not wait to see the ship disappear below the surface. The fog had grown too thick. At 2:15 p.m., he submerged and
set a course that would take U-20 well out to sea so that he could recharge its batteries in safety and consider how next to proceed.

Schwieger faced a decision. His fuel was running low—surprisingly so—and he had yet to reach his assigned hunting zone off Liverpool, still nearly a day’s voyage away.

LUSITANIA

LIFE AFTER DEATH

T
HAT
T
HURSDAY AFTERNOON
, T
HEODATE
P
OPE AND
Edwin Friend sat in their deck chairs enjoying the fine weather and blue vista. They were not lovers, but Theodate spent most of her time in Friend’s company. While on deck, Friend read aloud to her from a book, Henri Bergson’s
Matière et mémoire
, or
Matter and Memory
, published in 1896. Broadly, it dealt with the relationship between mind and body. Bergson, a past president of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, was sympathetic to the idea that some element of an individual persisted after death.

Theodate too was a member of the society, an organization founded in London in 1882, not by crackpots or would-be mediums, but by philosophers, writers, scientists, and journalists who sought to bring the principles of scientific rigor to the investigation of paranormal phenomena. Its membership included dozens of scientific and literary notables, among them H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, William James, and Oliver Lodge, a leading British physicist who would lose his own son to the war in September 1915 and spend the rest of his life trying to reach him beyond the veil. From time to time Theodate had assisted Lodge and James in an investigation of Mrs. Piper, the medium, for which James convened seventy-five séances. The medium’s apparent talents so resisted his attempts to debunk her skills that James came to believe she
might be legitimate. “
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, famously, “you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper.”

Theodate also participated in séances independently of William James and in an unpublished memoir described a 1909 sitting with another famed medium, Eusapia Palladino, during which
Theodate claimed her own turban levitated from her scalp and settled on the table in front of her. Palladino was subsequently proven to be a very talented fraud.

Theodate began serious study of the powers of the mind and the occult in her thirties. In 1900, at thirty-three, she read her first issues of
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
, which included investigations of supposed hauntings and incidences of “survival,” the society’s preferred term for life after death; the
Proceedings
were also where Sigmund Freud in 1912 published his first detailed articulation of his theory of subconscious thought. Theodate joined the society in 1904 and soon afterward began helping William James with his investigation of Mrs. Piper. (James’s brother Henry, though the author of ten ghost stories including
Turn of the Screw
, scorned spiritualism and paranormal dabbling.)
In 1907, the year Theodate turned forty, she helped found a new institute for psychical research in New York and contributed $25,000, over $600,000 today. Her traveling companion, Edwin Friend, had been editor of the institute’s journal until a decidedly non-astral conflict over what sorts of articles to publish led to his removal.
Though only in his twenties, Friend had already received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard and had taught classics at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. Theodate, angered by his removal, resigned from the institute’s board. Her reason for traveling with him now on the
Lusitania
was to visit Oliver Lodge and others in London to seek support for the founding of a wholly new American society.

Bergson’s book was in French, but Friend translated as he read. This was no mean feat.
Matter and Memory
was a stupefying
read in any language. Yet there they sat, contentedly filling the warm afternoon air with murmured language and knowing smiles, grasping the ungraspable.

“
There were passages that illustrated so wonderfully some of the common difficulties in communication,” Theodate wrote—and by
communication
she meant contact with the dead. “They were most illuminating and I could see the vividness of the inspiration they were to Mr. Friend; and as we sat side by side in our deck chairs I marveled to myself that such a man as Mr. Friend had been found to carry on the investigations. I felt very deeply the quality of my respect and admiration for him. He was endowed so richly in heart and mind.”

She saw Friend as an intellectual helpmate and believed that in coming years he would be an important, albeit platonic, presence in her life.

A
MONG THE
younger crowd, shipboard life gained a new intensity with the end of the voyage so near. New-made friends asked each other to sign memento books. Flirtations became more flirty; the ongoing sporting competitions more zesty, with prizes offered at the ship’s barbershop. The boundaries between families began to blur. Children roamed the deck in packs, led by stewardesses. One stewardess had charge of twenty-two children, whom she watched while their parents dined. Ethel Moore Lamping Lines, thirty-four, traveling with her husband, Stanley, befriended a young couple from Toronto who were on their way home to Scotland with their three children: a toddler and a pair of one-and-a-half-year-old twins. “
All around us were nice little growing families,” Mrs. Lines wrote, “and all so happy.”

She and a friend joked about what to do if the ship were attacked. “Our stewardess laughed,” Mrs. Lines recalled, “and said we would not go down, but up, as we were well loaded with munitions.”

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, Captain Turner and Staff Captain Anderson toured the ship to make sure all the lifeboats were in fact swung out and ready for lowering. Turner also ordered Anderson to see that all the ship’s portholes were closed, up to B Deck, and that all bulkhead doors likewise were closed.

As of noon Thursday, the ship was 465 miles west of Ireland’s Fastnet Rock, and moving at 21 knots.

U-20

CHANGE OF PLAN

O
N
T
HURSDAY AFTERNOON
,
WITH
U-20
SUBMERGED
and headed out to sea, Schwieger made his decision: he resolved to abandon his effort to reach Liverpool, despite his orders. Within the culture of U-boat leadership, this was his prerogative. Out of touch with superiors and friendly vessels, only a commander could know how his patrol was unfolding and what threats or challenges he faced. Still, Schwieger devoted nearly a full page of his War Log to his rationale.