Dead Wake (30 page)

Lunch for first-class passengers began at one o’clock; he wanted to take a ten-minute stroll first. He noted that the ship seemed to be “loafing along” and saw as well that the results of the mileage pool, posted at noon, showed the ship had traveled only 484 miles. Although Lauriat found this slow, in fact it worked out to an average of slightly more than 20 knots, and that included several hours through fog at 15. Still, this was well below the 25-knot pace he had expected the ship to maintain.

“
It was a beautiful day then, light wind, a smooth sea, and bright sunshine,” Lauriat wrote. Along the port side, he saw “the good old Irish Coast.” The coast, though, was still a long way off, merely a green slash on the horizon. The fine weather made Lauriat uneasy. “I thought to myself that if a German submarine really
meant business, she would have to wait weeks for a more ideal chance than the present weather conditions. With a flat, unbroken sea, such as that around us, the periscope of a submarine could certainly carry a long distance.”

The smoothness of the sea was the remarkable thing. Lauriat likened it to a pancake; one of the ship’s bellboys said it was “
just flat as a billiard table.”

C
ONNECTICUT PASSENGER
Jane MacFarquhar climbed to one of the upper decks and looked out over the glittering seascape. She and her sixteen-year-old daughter had just finished setting out the clothes they would wear upon arrival in Liverpool the next morning. They planned to leave their current outfits behind, on the ship. “
The view was grand,” MacFarquhar said, “the sun shining, the water smooth and land visible on either side. As I gazed around the beautiful scene, I thought:—‘Where is this spoken-of danger?’ The end of our voyage is almost in view and we have had no sign of danger whatever.”

O
N
F
RIDAY MORNING
, Schwieger kept U-20 on the surface to continue recharging its batteries. He stood atop the conning tower. The sea was quilted with fog, but here and there sunlight gleamed through. Visibility improved quickly. The sea was flat, under a 1-knot breeze.

“
All of a sudden visibility has become very good,” Schwieger wrote in his log. While this gave him a long view of the surrounding sea, it also provided that view to any British patrol boat or destroyer that happened to be in the vicinity. The flatness of the surface increased the danger that enemy lookouts would spot U-20, even when submerged to periscope depth, for the feathery white wake of Schwieger’s periscope would be visible for miles.

And in fact, a trawler off in the distance now began moving in U-20’s direction. Schwieger ordered a fast dive and raised his periscope. The vessel approached slowly, in a manner he found unsettling.

“Therefore,” he wrote, “we dive to a depth of 24 meters to get away from the trawler.” The time was 10:30
A
.
M
. “At 12
P
.
M
.,” he wrote, “I shall rise again to a depth of 11 meters and take a periscopic observation.”

But shortly before that was to happen, at 11:50
A
.
M
., a surge of excitement passed through the submarine. Even 80 feet below the surface, the men in U-20 could hear the sound of a ship overhead, transmitted through the hull. Schwieger wrote in his log, “A vessel with a very heavy engine passes over our boat.”

From the sound, Schwieger knew it was neither a destroyer nor a trawler but something far larger, moving fast. It passed directly above, confirming the prudence of cruising at a depth that cleared even the largest ships’ keels.

Schwieger waited a few minutes, then returned to periscope depth to try to identify the ship.

W
ITH THE
foghorn off, and the sun high and bright, the
Lusitania
’s passengers took to the open decks to play shuffleboard, throw medicine balls, and take part in other deck games. Older children played jump rope, as always. The youngest paraded the decks with nannies and stewardesses, on foot or in prams, with their sucking tubes hung around their necks or affixed to their clothing. In the shaded portions of the deck and in those areas exposed to the 18-knot breeze generated by the ship’s forward motion, it was still cool enough to require coats. One woman wore a large black fur.

This being the last full day of the voyage, with the sun so bright and the air so clear, passengers seemed to take a special effort to dress well and with a little flair.
A seven-year-old girl wore a pink-and-white-striped cotton frock under a black velvet coat lined with red silk, then added a gold ring, a red coral necklet, and a mother-of-pearl brooch. The coat imparted to her the look of a red-winged blackbird. Pink seemed to be a popular color—for boys. One five-year-old boy tore around in a pink wool coat over a checked jacket and knickers. A man in his late twenties dressed with clear intent to dazzle. He wore:

Blue serge trousers

Striped cotton shirt (“Anderson Bros., Makers, 27, Bridge Street, Glasgow”)

White merino pants

Light lace-up boots (stamped inside with “Holober Bros., 501, West 14th Street, New York”)

Gray socks, with light-blue soles

Light-colored suspenders

Leather belt and nickel buckle

  And this:

A pink merino vest.

M
ANY PASSENGERS
settled into deck chairs to read, just as they’d done over the preceding six days. Dwight Harris sat on deck for a time reading a book about the Medicis, then went to the purser’s office to retrieve his engagement ring, his other jewels, and the $500 in gold that he had parked there at the start of the voyage. He went to his cabin and used a watch chain to hang several pieces around his neck, including the ring. “
I pinned the big diamond brooch inside the pocket of my coat,” he wrote, “and before leaving my cabin unlocked the camera bag that held my life belt.” This was the belt he had bought at Wanamaker’s in New York the day before sailing. Harris had not yet run out of exclamation points. “I put the gold in my trousers pocket, and then went down to lunch!”

Despite the calm weather, Kansas City passenger Theodore Naish was seasick, as he had been throughout the voyage. He urged his wife, Belle, to go up on deck without him to see the Irish coast and its islands in sunshine. He knew from past experience how lovely the view was. Belle at first demurred: “
I replied that his word was enough, I would see them when we returned, and if fog prevented, pictures would satisfy me.” But Theodore insisted, and she obliged; she was glad that she had. “A lovelier day cannot be imagined—the air was warm, no wind, bright sun, smooth sea.”

Throughout the ship there was that mix of sorrow and expectation that always marked the end of a voyage, but now it was joined by the relief of having made it to England safe and sound.

O
N THE BRIDGE
, Turner received a new message from the Admiralty that confused things further: “
Submarines 5 miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at 10
A
.
M
.”

The
Lusitania
had already passed Cape Clear. If correct, this message indicated the threat might also be past—the submarines, plural again, were behind and heading out to sea. Captain Turner congratulated himself on apparently missing these in the fog. He knew that even if their commanders now spotted the smoke from the ship’s funnels and turned around, they would have no hope of catching up.

While this offered some comfort, there was still the matter of the earlier report of submarines active in the St. George’s Channel, south of the Coningbeg Light Vessel, dead ahead.

A
T HIS PERISCOPE
, Schwieger made a fast 360-degree sweep of the sea, then rotated the apparatus until he found the ship that had just passed overhead. It was a prize indeed, and not just in terms of tonnage. Long and narrow, with a razor bow, it sliced easily through the flat sea. Its funnels blew thick black smoke that showed its engine crew were working hard to achieve maximum speed. Schwieger did not need his war pilot, Lanz, to help identify this ship. It was a large armored cruiser, British, of about 6,000 tons.

He let it go. He had no choice. At his top submerged speed of 9 knots, Schwieger had no chance of catching the cruiser. Even his surface maximum of 15 knots would not have helped, for the cruiser was speeding away at what he estimated to be 18 knots. And had Schwieger for some reason been foolhardy enough to try surfacing, the warship’s guns would have sunk his boat within minutes.

Schwieger followed anyway, at periscope depth, in case the cruiser happened to change its course in a manner that would allow him to overtake it and launch an attack. But the ship ran at top speed, zigzagging, and soon was far in the distance. Schwieger later told his friend Valentiner how at this point, exasperated, he unleashed a torrent of profanity. “After the early days of the war,” Valentiner explained, “you rarely had a chance to loose a torpedo at any warship as big as a cruiser, and many a U-boat never caught sight of one during the entire war.” The British navy, like its German counterpart, kept its big warships locked safely away “and did not send them roaming around to act as good targets for U-boats.”

The ship was in fact the HMS
Juno
, an old cruiser now serving as a coastal patrol vessel. It was based in Queenstown and was speeding back to port precisely because of the latest submarine alerts issued by the Admiralty. As it traveled, its crew took a routine measure of water temperature and found it to be 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

“
After I was through swearing,” Schwieger told Valentiner, “I noticed that the fog was lifting. Presently I could see blue sky.”

Schwieger recorded the encounter at 12:15
P
.
M
. Half an hour later, he surfaced and returned to his westward course, to continue his voyage home. Conservation of fuel was now a priority. He could not delay—the journey back to Emden would take another week.

By now the weather had cleared to a degree that was almost startling. “
Unusually good visibility,” Schwieger noted; “very beautiful weather.”

On the horizon, something new caught his eye.

LONDON; WASHINGTON

THE KING’S QUESTION

I
N
L
ONDON
,
ON
F
RIDAY
, C
OLONEL
H
OUSE
,
STILL ACTING
in his role as President Wilson’s unofficial emissary, met with Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary, and the two traveled to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for a walk among the garden’s beds of spring flowers, its alleys, or “vistas,” of cedars, and its most celebrated structure, the Palm House, an immense conservatory built of glass and iron said to have influenced the design of London’s Crystal Palace. The two men discussed the submarine war. “
We spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk,” House wrote, “and I told him if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into war.”

Oddly enough, the subject came up again a couple of hours later, when Colonel House paid a call on King George V at Buckingham Palace.

The king turned to House at one point, and asked, “
Suppose they should sink the
Lusitania
with American passengers aboard?”

E
ARLY THAT MORNING
, Churchill, having concluded his naval negotiations with his French and Italian counterparts, left Paris on his journey to the headquarters of Britain’s forces in France, at St. Omer, where Sir John French was planning an offensive against
German forces at Aubers despite a
severe shortage of artillery shells.

Seeking to experience battle firsthand, Churchill hoped to get as close to the front as possible, while not, as he put it, “
incurring unjustifiable risks.” He saw shellfire and smoke but little else. “
Without actually taking part in the assault it was impossible to measure the real conditions,” he wrote. “To see them you had to feel them, and feeling them might well feel nothing more. To stand outside was to see nothing, to plunge in was to be dominated by personal experiences of an absorbing kind.”

He received his most vivid sense of the war at a “casualty clearing station” in a convent at Merville, about 40 miles east of headquarters, where men “
suffering from every form of horrible injury, seared, torn, pierced, choking, dying, were being sorted according to their miseries.” Ambulance after ambulance pulled up at the door. The dead were carried out the back and buried. As Churchill passed the operating theater, he saw doctors at work trepanning a soldier, that is, cutting a hole in his skull. “Everywhere was blood and bloody rags,” Churchill wrote.

A
T THE
White House, with a fresh spring Friday in the offing, Wilson wrote again to Edith. She had come to dinner the night before, and he was feeling far more optimistic about the possibility of one day marrying her.

“
In this clear morning air,” he wrote, “the world seems less in the way, seems less to stand between us.”

THE IRISH SEA

FUNNELS ON THE HORIZON

U-20
MOVED THROUGH A BLUE
-
ON
-
BLUE MORNING
. T
HE
fog was gone, the sky was empty of clouds, the sea was still. Schwieger trained his binoculars—his Zeiss “godseyes”—on a smudge at the horizon and was startled to see “a forest of masts and stacks,” as he later described it to Max Valentiner. “
At first I thought they must belong to several ships,” he said. “Then I saw it was a great steamer coming over the horizon. It was coming our way. I dived at once, hoping to get a shot at it.”

In his log, at 1:20
P
.
M
., Schwieger wrote, “
Ahead and to starboard four funnels and two masts of a steamer with course triangular to us comes into sight (coming from SSW it steered towards Galley Head). Ship is made out to be a large passenger steamer.”