Lusitania (11 page)

The couple’s four sons all enlisted and went off to join the fight in Europe; George, though troubled at the “seriousness of the situation,” confessed himself “proud of the patriotic spirit they displayed, and told them it was their duty to serve Canada and the Empire.” In the spring of 1915, Ryerson himself left for Europe, sailing on
Lusitania
to survey Red Cross work on the continent. A few weeks later, word came that, on April 23, the couple’s eldest son, George, had been killed in action at Ypres, and his younger brother, Arthur, had been seriously wounded in the abdomen by a piece of shrapnel.
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“I cabled my wife to come over to help and comfort my son,” Ryerson recalled, “because I thought this work would divert her mind from the loss of her first born and beloved son. There was such a singular understanding and attachment between these two dear people that I doubt if she would ever have recovered from the blow.” As Ryerson had recently crossed safely on
Lusitania,
his wife decided that this would be the most reliable way to reach her critically injured son.
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Mary boarded the ship with her daughter, Laura, who had been educated in Lausanne; both had reason to be uneasy about the voyage itself. Three years earlier, George’s cousin Arthur Ryerson had drowned when
Titanic
sank. It seemed an unfortunate omen as mother and daughter traveled aboard this liner bound for a potentially dangerous war zone.

Others traveled aboard
Lusitania
to embark on humanitarian missions. In November 1914, future American president Herbert Hoover organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium and called on his fellow countrymen to go to Europe and assist in the war effort. He made a special plea to the young, asking them to volunteer for hospitals and other organizations, knowing that they would receive little or no compensation but appealing to the idea that they would help save lives.
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Beautiful millionaire Mary Hammond had heard the call. She exemplified the spirit of selflessness that many of the privileged attempted, often unsuccessfully, to emulate. And privileged she certainly was: she was born in 1885, into a family whose ancestors had counted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as personal friends. More immediate forebears had founded the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, and developed steam and railway travel in New Jersey and New York.
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After attending Bryn Mawr, Mary had married Ogden Hammond in 1907, a real estate developer and insurance broker sixteen years her senior.
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Life was pleasant, as the Hammonds divided their time between a house in New York—where Ogden worked as president of the Broadway Improvement Company, directed the Standard Plunger Elevator Company, and served as vice president of the Hoboken Land and Improvement Company—and a sprawling summer estate at Bernardsville. There were children—Mary in 1908, Millicent in 1910, and Ogden Jr. in 1912—along with parties, dinners, and political fundraisers that helped Hammond win a seat in the New Jersey State Assembly.
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But with the war in Europe, Mary felt impelled to fund and establish a Red Cross hospital in France. Her determination worried Ogden; it wasn’t his wife’s charitable intent, but rather her insistence that they travel aboard
Lusitania
. Nothing, though—not even a personal warning from the German ambassador to her aunt—could convince Mary to change her plans.

The call of war relief also brought immensely wealthy Allen and Catherine Loney to
Lusitania,
traveling with their nearly sixteen-year-old daughter, Virginia, on their way to Europe. Like Mary Hammond, Catherine had also made a will before sailing to protect her considerable assets—Lorillard tobacco money, stocks, and real estate that generated a considerable fortune each year in interest alone. Members of an international set, the Loneys seemed perpetually to race between “the hunting field or the regatta, the polo ground, the salmon river, or the grouse moor,” as friend, noted author Henry James, said.
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Although American, their sympathies were entirely British: from their country estate in Northampton, they hunted, mingled with aristocrats, and sent forth a succession of exquisite horses to compete at Epsom and in the Derby. With the outbreak of war, Allen Loney decided he owed something to his English friends, and he became a driver in the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps operating in France and Belgium. He was, said Henry James, “one of the most ardent and active of our volunteers, friendly and devoted in every way.”
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Twenty-five-year-old Dorothy Conner was a volunteer nurse from Oregon. After attending school in Germany, Dorothy had graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in history and moved with her mother to Oregon to operate a fruit orchard. When the war erupted, Dorothy abandoned her social life and earned her Red Cross nursing certificate. Her brother-in-law Harold Reckitt had established a military hospital at Ris-Orangis in Belgium, and now, heeding Herbert Hoover’s call, she decided to volunteer her services at the facility.
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Naively, she brought a fox stole, lace and silk evening gowns, and a multitude of jewelry.
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Dorothy traveled with another brother-in-law, Howard Fisher. After receiving his medical degree from Jefferson College in Philadelphia and serving as a missionary in India, Fisher married Sara Conner and settled in Washington, D.C., where his brother Walter had served as secretary of the interior under President William Howard Taft.
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Pro-British feelings and outrage over “German brutality” led Fisher to volunteer for work at his brother-in-law’s hospital in France, where he hoped “to take part in Germany’s defeat.”
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Dorothy and Fisher booked passage on
Lusitania,
as he said, because they were told it “would be the safest vessel to choose.”
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Once at sea, he noted some tense conversations among the passengers about the possibility of
Lusitania
being torpedoed. Still, he mused, “I felt sure that in case of being torpedoed, we would have ample time to take to the boats.”
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Thirty-one-year-old Lindon Bates Jr. was off to join the Commission for Belgian Relief, which his father had chaired. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1883, Bates had attended Harrow in England and graduated from Yale with a degree in engineering. Like his engineer father, he’d worked on a number of projects around America and traveled the world as a consultant; he’d taken advantage of this to write a number of entertaining travelogues. Passionate about politics, he was elected to the New York State Legislature in 1904 and reelected in 1909, though his bids for Congress in 1912 and 1914 ended in defeat. Now he’d left his position as vice president in the Bates Engineering Company in New York to volunteer his services in the Allied effort.
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Debonair, twenty-nine-year-old Harvard-educated Dr. James Houghton was also on his way to Belgium to assist in relief efforts. While waiting for the
Lusitania
to leave New York City, Houghton was “delighted” to find fellow Harvard graduate Richard Freeman aboard the ship, and the two stood on deck, chatting about their plans. Houghton recalled “congratulating” Freeman “upon having such a fine trip ahead of him.”
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The real star of
Lusitania
’s war relief efforts, though, was the lovely Marie Depage, a forty-three-year-old nurse originally from Brussels. Born in 1872 as Marie Picard, she was distantly related to the Belgian royal family. After her 1893 marriage to Dr. Antoine Depage and the birth of three sons, Pierre, Lucien, and Henri, she’d studied anatomy and joined in his medical work. In 1907, when Pierre created the first Belgian school for nurses, she became treasurer, with English nurse Edith Cavell acting as trainer. The move was not without controversy: the Catholic Church protested that for centuries its nuns had served as nurses and were now being displaced. In 1912, with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, Marie and Antoine led Belgian Red Cross relief workers to Turkey.
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King Albert of Belgium made Antoine his personal surgeon, and in 1914 named him head of the Belgian Red Cross; at Queen Elisabeth’s request, he organized a Red Cross hospital at La Panne, where Marie put her nursing skills to use.
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“Why do you bother?” a wounded German soldier once asked her. “I’m your enemy.”

“No, you’re not,” she assured him. “To me, you’re just a wounded man who needs help.”
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By 1915, resources were dwindling, and at Queen Elisabeth’s request, Marie embarked on an American tour to solicit funds. She spent several months crossing the country, ultimately collecting over $100,000 for war relief. She was, said an official, “a lovely, attractive lady” who “endeared herself to everybody.”
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Author Charlotte Kellogg, who had met her in San Francisco, found Marie “fresh and charming.” She was tireless as she “told, so simply and poignantly, her country’s story,” and appealed for donations.
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Pierre, Marie’s eldest son, had already joined the fighting; while in America, she received word that her second son, seventeen-year-old Lucien, was about to enter the army. Hoping to see him before he left, she decided to return to Belgium. Originally, she wanted to travel aboard a neutral liner,
Lapland
. But this meant two extra days at sea—crucial days that might prevent her reunion. Not willing to risk the timing, she changed her passage to
Lusitania
.
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Howard Fisher later recalled her “sad, anxious face” throughout the voyage, wondering, “Had she some prophetic vision of the coming disaster?”
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Yet when James Houghton questioned her about a legal will in case something happened, Marie merely smiled: she’d prepared nothing, and called herself a “happy fatalist.”
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Marie Depage might dismiss the concerns, but few passengers now aboard
Lusitania
failed to sense an air of tension; spoken, whispered, barely acknowledged, betrayed in an anxious look or a jocular comment—a kind of palpable, nervous energy seemed present as
Lusitania
steamed east. One earlier American passenger had recalled that traveling on the ship after 1914 “gave us our first intimation of warfare.”
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They could find some rather unsubtle propaganda: Cunard officials placed brochures in all of the public rooms, helpfully explaining how Germany had started the war.
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Famed correspondent Richard Harding Davis had been most struck by the darkness that fell over the vessel at night as lights and windows were blacked out: “You can imagine,” he wrote, “the effect of this Ritz Carlton idea of a ship wrapped in darkness.”
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Darkness might prevent a submarine from spotting a potential victim; more reassuring was the popular belief that
Lusitania
actually had guns mounted on her decks.
Lusitania
and her sister had been designed to accommodate heavy artillery should the need arise: twelve 6-inch guns placed at intervals along the forecastle and shelter decks, capable of firing 6-inch shells some 3,000 yards and 4.75-inch shells nearly double that distance. Coupled with their great speed, this armament, a contemporary journal noted, would make the two ships “most effective additions to any fighting squadron.”
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In June 1913, the
New York Tribune
reported that “high powered naval rifles” had been installed aboard
Lusitania
.
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At the same time, Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, told Parliament that “substantial progress” had been made in arming the nation’s top liners; he later added that the conversions made the vessels “indistinguishable in status and control from men-of-war.”
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The following year, a few months before the war began, Churchill again openly boasted about the large number of British merchant vessels that were being fitted with sizable guns.
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