Dead Wake (31 page)

Once at periscope depth, Schwieger ordered his maximum submerged speed—9 knots—and set a course “converging with that of the steamer.” The ship was still miles off, however. When the liner was 2 miles away, it veered onto a new course that further widened the gap. Frustrated again, Schwieger wrote, “I had no hope now, even if we hurried at our best speed, of getting near enough to attack her.”

Schwieger followed anyway, just as he had done earlier with the cruiser
Juno
, in case the liner happened to make another course change that would bring it back onto a converging trajectory.

He called for his pilot, Lanz, to come to the periscope to take a
look. Why he felt the need to do so is unclear. The ship was one of the most distinctive on the high seas, and a prize of the first order. He was near despair: this one ship, by itself, would have given him his best monthly tonnage count of the war.

The day remained startlingly clear and still. This meant that Schwieger could not keep the periscope raised for long, lest it be detected by the target’s lookouts or, worse, by a destroyer on patrol. In weather this clear and with seas this smooth there’d be little chance for escape. On two previous occasions, the wake cast by his periscope on a flat sea had forced him to abort attacks. One would-be target, a Royal Mail steamer, had turned toward him with obvious intent to ram, causing him to order a fast dive and full speed away.

Lanz entered the control room. At about the same moment, something happened that Schwieger deemed the equivalent of a miracle.

O
N THE
Lusitania
’s bridge, Captain Turner faced a dilemma that nothing in his long experience at sea had prepared him to manage. If the morning’s wireless messages were correct, there were U-boats directly ahead of him, and behind.

On top of this, he faced a timing problem. Liverpool at this point still lay about 250 nautical miles ahead. At the entrance to the city’s harbor lay the notorious Mersey Bar, which he could pass only at high tide. If Turner accelerated and proceeded at the highest speed he could achieve with only three boiler rooms in operation, or 21 knots, he would arrive far too early. With stopping out of the question, he would be forced to circle in the Irish Sea, smoke billowing from the ship’s three operating funnels in open invitation to any submarine within a radius of twenty miles.

There was another dimension to the problem. The time was now just past noon. No matter what speed Turner traveled, he would end up having to pass through the St. George’s Channel at night, with fog an ever-present danger. As it was, the fog that had enclosed the ship all morning had left Turner with a less precise
sense of his location than he would have liked. Compounding this imprecision was the fact that he was farther from the coast than usual—about 20 miles, when in fine weather he might come as close as 1 mile.

He called his two most senior officers to the bridge, Staff Captain Anderson and First Officer John Preston Piper, to ask their advice, and at length reached a decision. First, he would pinpoint his location. The Irish coast was by now visible, but the ship’s distance from shore was difficult to reckon precisely. Being a sailor of the old school, Turner liked to use a procedure known as a four-point bearing. This would require him to run parallel to the coast at a steady speed for roughly thirty minutes while First Office Piper took four bearings off a single shore landmark, in this case the lighthouse atop the Old Head.

Once Turner knew his precise position, he planned to maintain a speed of 18 knots so that he would arrive at the Mersey Bar early the next morning, at just the right time to enter the harbor without pause. Though slower than the 21 knots his three operating boiler rooms would allow, it was still faster than any other merchant ship then in service and certainly faster than any submarine. Turner planned as well to alter his course later in the day to bring the
Lusitania
closer to shore, so that he would pass near the Coningbeg Light Vessel before entering the narrowest portion of the St. George’s Channel. He understood that this contravened the Admiralty’s advisory that captains pass lightships and other navigational markers at “mid-channel.” But the Admiralty had reported submarines 20 miles south of the lightship, a location that any mariner traversing that 45-mile-wide stretch would have described as midchannel. To follow the Admiralty’s advisory would have meant sailing directly toward the waiting submarines.

At about 1:30
P
.
M
. Captain Turner ordered the officer at the helm to make a turn to starboard, to bring the ship in line with the coast, so that Piper could take the first of the four bearings. This turn and several previous course changes persuaded some passengers that Turner was directing the ship on a zigzag course to evade submarines, though in fact he was not. Paradoxically, owing to the
shape of the coastline, the turn would have seemed to passengers like a turn toward open sea.

Measles-wracked Robert Kay peered through his porthole in quarantine. The Bronx boy, now spotted and enflamed, watched the world pass, his only diversion. The day outside was full of sunshine and sparkle, the Irish coast a vivid green.
But as he watched, the ship began its turn to starboard, and to his great disappointment the land began to recede.

T
HAT MORNING
“Champagne King” George Kessler followed through on his decision to talk to Captain Turner about including passengers in the ship’s drills. The two men smoked as they talked.

Kessler wrote, “
I suggested that the passengers should be given tickets with a number denoting the number of the boat they should make for in case anything untoward happened, and that it seemed to me this detail would minimize the difficulties in the event of trouble.”

Turner told him that the idea had come up in the wake of the
Titanic
disaster but that Cunard had rejected it as “impractical.” He added that he did not have the authority to institute the practice on his own without first getting approval from the Admiralty’s Board of Trade.

The conversation shifted to “the torpedo scare which neither of us regarded as of any moment,” Kessler recalled. Turner may have downplayed his own concerns to put Kessler at ease.

J
UST AS
Pilot Lanz arrived at U-20’s periscope, Schwieger saw the giant steamer change course again, this time to starboard. “She was coming directly at us,” Schwieger told Valentiner. “She could not have steered a more perfect course if she had deliberately tried to give us a dead shot.”

The time was 1:35
P
.
M
. The ship’s new heading suggested it was bound for Queenstown. Schwieger set a course that would put U-20 in front of the ship, at a 90-degree angle. He ordered full
ahead, and for the next twenty-five minutes sped forward on an intersecting course, as the ship grew steadily larger in his viewfinder. “A short fast run, and we waited,” he told Valentiner.

Although this patrol had affirmed Schwieger’s distrust of torpedoes, he had no choice but to use one. His deck gun would have been useless against such a large vessel, and dangerous, for after the first couple of shells the big ship likely would have turned and run, or even attempted to ram his boat. Schwieger selected a G6 torpedo.

Within the submarine the tension mounted. All the ship had to do was make another turn, away from U-20, and the chase would be over. Queenstown was near. There was also the possibility the ship’s lookouts would spot Schwieger’s periscope and that its captain would summon a pride of destroyers.

Strangely, the ship had no escorts whatsoever. Even stranger, in Schwieger’s view, was that the vessel was in these waters at all, especially after his two successful attacks the day before.
That the ship “was not sent through the North Channel is inexplicable,” he wrote in his log.

Schwieger ordered the torpedo set to run at a depth of 3 meters, about 10 feet. He had not yet had time to let Lanz take a look at the target. The big ship continued its approach, its giant hull black against the otherwise gleaming seascape.

Schwieger’s firing crew armed the torpedo and flooded its tube.

T
HE
L
USITANIA
was now about sixteen hours from Liverpool, or, put another way, three meals out—one lunch, one dinner, and, on Saturday, a last breakfast in Liverpool Harbor. Now came the lunch. First-class passengers had only one seating, in the dining saloon at the center of the ship under the great dome; second-class had two, at 12:30 and 1:30. Over lunch there was talk of the talent show the night before, and of the latest war news, published in the ship’s daily
Cunard Bulletin
, and, of course, of the fact that the ship was now well into the “war zone.”

Charles Lauriat went to lunch with Lothrop Withington, as always,
and they sat at their usual table in the first-class saloon. Lauriat noted that portholes on either side of the room were open. He was certain of this, he said later, because the unusual warmth of the day had conjured an annoyance that had plagued the two men throughout the voyage. Owing to the warm weather, the stewards had opened portholes throughout the dining room and turned on a large electric fan positioned directly over Lauriat’s table, thereby creating a draft that was strong enough to be irritating. The same thing had happened several times previously during the voyage, and each time, as now, Lauriat felt compelled to ask the steward to turn the fan off.

Otherwise, the lunch was a pleasant one. The two men looked forward to the ship’s arrival. “We had a jolly time together,” Lauriat wrote, “and made plans for seeing each other in London, as his rooms were near our London office.”

It was clear now that the unexpectedly slow pace of the
Lusitania
would cost Lauriat a day’s work in London, but soon enough he’d be handing off the Dickens
Christmas Carol
and meeting with Thackeray’s daughter, Lady Ritchie, to plan the notes she would write for each of the 118 drawings still locked in the shoe case in his cabin. Next he would meet with the framers and binders who would transform those drawings into items worth far more than the paltry $4,500 he had paid for them.

E
LSEWHERE IN
the dining room, Theodate Pope and her companion, Edwin Friend, were finishing up their lunch. “
A young Englishman at our table had been served with his ice cream and was waiting for the steward to bring him a spoon to eat it with,” Theodate recalled. “He looked ruefully at it and said he would hate to have a torpedo get him before he ate it. We all laughed and then commented on how slowly we were running. We thought the engines had stopped.”

The ship, however, was still moving at a brisk 18 knots. This perception of slowness was likely caused by the fact that the sea
was so smooth, which reduced the level of vibration transmitted through the hull.

Dwight Harris, with his engagement ring hanging snug under his shirt, joined his usual luncheon companions but did not share the cheerful anticipation that colored the talk around him. He was ill at ease, uncannily so. He wrote, “
While at table I had a most intense nervous feeling come over me, and I got up and left without finishing my lunch!”

He went to his stateroom, A-9, to get his coat and hat, and his Medici book, and went back out on deck to read.

M
EDICAL STUDENT
Preston Prichard and his roommate, Arthur Gadsden, were very much aware of the ship’s entry into the danger zone. They had become friends during the voyage and talked often, owing to the fact that both had the upper berths in their room. On Friday, Prichard and Gadsden spent part of the morning “
talking about Submarines & wondering if we should see one at all, never having the least fear but what we should get away from them,” Gadsden wrote.

Shortly after noon, Prichard walked to the smoking lounge to join the other men who had gathered there to see the results of the mileage pool and then set off to the second-class dining saloon for lunch. As usual he sat opposite Grace French.

Today there seemed to be a certain charge between Prichard and Miss French. He wore his green suit—not his best blue—but handsome was handsome, and after six days in the sun and weather Prichard was very handsome indeed. He mentioned to Grace that he had seen a young woman aboard who could be her double, and that he had even gone up to this other woman to start a conversation before realizing his mistake. This was not merely a flirty line meant to ignite conversation. One or two of the other men at the table had encountered the same woman and had done likewise. Prichard “
volunteered to point her out for me after lunch,” Grace recalled. “I agreed and went down for my hat and coat.”

One of the ship’s stewards noted that Prichard left the dining room around 1:20
P
.
M
.

As Miss French was making her way back up the stairs to meet Prichard, she ran into two shipboard friends, who asked where she was going. “
I replied that Mr. Prichard was going to present me to my double and passed on. I then joined him and we walked around laughing at the idea. I said to him, I wonder if I could recognize this girl myself.”

They joked as they hunted. The time passed happily, and then it was 2:09
P
.
M
. The sun shone, the sea glittered.

S
CHWIEGER ESTIMATED
his target’s speed at 22 knots—25 miles an hour—and gauged its range at 700 meters, just under half a mile. If his calculations were correct, the torpedo would strike the ship at an ideal angle of 90 degrees.

At 2:10
P
.
M
. Schwieger gave the order to fire. The torpedo burst from the submarine in what Schwieger called a “clean bow shot” and soon reached a speed of about 44 miles an hour. At that rate, it would reach the target’s hull in thirty-five seconds.

With the sea so smooth, the possibility of the torpedo’s track being discovered was high. Each passing second reduced the likelihood that the ship would be able to turn hard enough and fast enough to evade it, but still, for Schwieger and his men, those thirty-five seconds constituted a long interval.