A Higher Form of Killing (24 page)

While passengers poured on to the boat deck, dazed, confused, and often panic-stricken, the officers sent by Turner to superintend the lowering of the remaining lifeboats—the explosion had blown at least one, the third on the starboard side, into the sea—struggled to maintain order. Bellboy Ben Holton recalled “there were no loud speakers or public address [system] or anything like that, it had to be done by word of mouth.” With the roar from “the steam escaping from the engine room and up the exhausts and black smoke from the funnel and the startling list to starboard, it wasn’t conducive to running a well-organised exercise.” All the while the ship’s increasing list added to the terror. For a moment she seemed to right herself “in a rocking motion” but then to list more heavily than ever, going “over and over and over” so that passengers scrambled for a footing on the tilting decks.

At two fourteen
P.M.
, just four minutes after the torpedo struck, the
Lusitania
’s electricity failed. Some of the ship’s butchers who had leaped into the lift used to bring meat up and down found themselves stuck between decks as power to the lift failed. A bellboy recalled how “we could hear their screams coming up—they knew they were trapped.” Passenger lifts also stuck, their occupants futilely clawing at the elegant metal grilles. Meanwhile, without power and light in the engine and boiler rooms trimmers and firemen groped their way through choking dust and blinding steam to try to find a way out. “A rush of water” knocked Ian McDermott, a trimmer in the number-two boiler room, off his feet leaving him “struggling for two or three minutes” before washing him “out through the bottom of the ventilation shaft.” Passengers thought the injured, bleeding black gang scrambling onto the decks through the ventilators looked like creatures from hell.

Parents searched frantically for their children, peering into baby carriages, some empty, others not, that were rolling wildly around. Major Pearl could only find one of his four children. Unknown to him, nursemaid Alice Lines, who had been below when the torpedo hit, had managed to get the two Pearl children in her care—baby Audrey, whom she had tied in a shawl around her neck, and five-year-old Stuart—out on deck. Some mothers tried to give their children to strangers in the hopes they could save them. Florence Padley was on deck when “one lady asked me to take her baby in arms . . . I told her I did not have a lifejacket, she could look after it better. I felt awful about it.” Norah Bretherton, a baby in her arms, pleaded with a man to go to her cabin and fetch her little boy but he ignored her. Managing to reach her son herself, she struggled out on deck with him, appalled that “not one of the men who rushed by offered to help me . . . It was every man for himself.”

According to his official war diary, watching through his periscope, Schwieger was convinced the ship was sinking:

Clean bow shot . . . Torpedo hits starboardside right behind the bridge. An unusually strong explosion takes place . . . The explosion of the torpedo must have been accompanied by a second one (boiler or coal or powder?) The superstructure right above the point of the impact and the bridge are torn asunder, fire breaks out and smoke envelops the high bridge . . . The ship stops immediately and heels over to starboard very quickly, immersing simultaneously at the bow. It looks as if the ship is going to capsize very shortly by the bow.

As more and more people converged on the lifeboats, many crowding the higher port side which felt safer, Captain Turner appeared on the bridge and, rescinding his earlier orders, shouted: “Don’t lower the boats. Don’t lower the boats. The ship can’t sink. She’s all right. The ship can’t sink.” However, by two twenty-two p.m.—just twelve minutes after the torpedo had hit and with water washing over the
Lusitania’s
bows—Turner finally accepted his ship was lost. He commanded the boats to be lowered to the water as soon as the ship had slowed sufficiently for this to be done safely. However, given the speed at which the ship was still moving this was near impossible. Furthermore, the steep list to starboard meant that lifeboats on that side, released from their snubbing chains, were swinging crazily out so that passengers had to leap seven or eight feet to get into them.

Conversely, on the port side, the lifeboats were hanging in over the deck. Even when seamen and passengers succeeded in pushing them out over the rail, as they were lowered the sixty feet or so to the water, the angle rivets protruding from the ship’s hull ripped into their planking. At every bump and jolt people tumbled from them into the sea. Widow Elizabeth Duckworth saw her friend Alice Scott and her little son Arthur tossed out of a lifeboat. She decided to await her fate and began to pray. Nearby she heard three Irish girls singing “There Is a Green Hill Not Far Away” in thin, frightened voices, twisting the words of the hymn to reassure themselves that land was near
.

Fear rose with the water and several other attempts to get boats away ended in disaster. On the port side Third Officer Albert Bestic and some male passengers tried to push Boat No. 2, loaded with women and children, over the side but lacked the strength to shift the weight of over two tons so that the laden lifeboat slammed inward, crushing people against the ship’s superstructure. Another boat fell onto the tilting deck and careered down it, smashing into people before they could fling themselves out of the way. Only one port-side lifeboat got safely away without capsizing or becoming waterlogged. Nurse Alice Lines, still with baby Audrey tied in a shawl around her neck and five-year-old Stuart clinging to her skirts, had tried to climb into it. A crewman lifted the boy in but when Alice made to follow with Audrey, he told her the boat was now full. Watching it lowered to the water, Alice decided her only option was to jump. As she hit the water and went under, she had “a terrible sensation of being sucked under the ship” but then felt someone grab her long auburn hair and pull her into the lifeboat, still clutching the baby.

When the torpedo hit, Professor Holbourn kept his promise to schoolgirl Avis Dolphin. Guessing she must be at lunch in the second-class dining room, he pushed his way through the onrushing crowds of frightened people and found her there. Together they made for his cabin to find life jackets but the list was already so steep they struggled to get up the staircase. Reaching the cabin at last, Holbourn and a fellow passenger fastened a life jacket on Avis. Then carrying his own jacket he managed to find the two nurses traveling with Avis. One already had a jacket on, but the other refused Holbourn’s offer, saying, “he should have it as he had a wife and three children.” They compromised. If he could place her in a boat he would keep the life jacket.

His first thought was to get Avis and the nurses into one of the port-side boats but the mass of crushed and bleeding people lying on the deck decided him to head for the starboard side. Forcing a way through he helped Avis and the two women across the gap into a swaying lifeboat. Convinced he himself would not survive, he asked Avis “to find his wife and children and kiss them goodbye from him” when she reached Britain. Glancing at his watch he realized less than fifteen minutes had passed since the
Lusitania
had been struck. Shocked by how low the ship now was in the water, he put on a life jacket, went to the rail, and leaped. As he did so he had “the horrible shock of seeing the child’s boat swamp and capsize.” Hitting the water, he tried to struggle through the mass of churning wreckage and threshing people to reach Avis only to see her sucked under.

Also on the starboard side, Charles Lauriat had been trying to free Boat No.7 which, “well filled with people, principally women and children,” was still attached to the ship by its rope falls. However, looking up at “the tremendous smokestack” hanging out over them as the ship listed yet further he realized the futility and pleaded with the boat’s occupants to jump. Most refused. Plunging in himself and swimming as hard as he could to get away from the ship and avoid being dragged under by suction, he looked back to see the lifeboat and its occupants pulled under.

With the ship’s screw propellers and rudders rising out of the water, children were being thrown from the decks to be caught by men in the lifeboats. Young Canadian mother Charlotte Pye, who had her baby in her arms and no life jacket, kept falling to the deck because of the list when a man said, “Don’t cry. It’s quite alright.” As he tied his own life jacket on her and helped her into a boat, she recognized him as the man who had paid her five dollars for a concert program at the passenger concert—Alfred Vanderbilt. Despite owning one of the most beautiful swimming pools in America, Vanderbilt could not swim. In the
Lusitania
’s dying moments, the ship’s barber, Lott Gadd, saw him still “trying to put lifejackets on women and children. The ship was going down fast. When the sea reached them, they were washed away. I never saw Vanderbilt after that. All I saw in the water was children—children everywhere.” A Canadian passenger had heard Vanderbilt say to his valet, Ronald Denyer: “Find all the kiddies you can, boy.” As Denyer brought them to Vanderbilt, he “dashed to the boats with two little ones in his arms at a time.”

Some people slid down wires and ropes, including the log line which trailed astern to record the ship’s run but which, being made of wire after the first six feet of rope, flayed people’s hands and feet. Some stripped off their clothes, believing their chances of survival in the water would be better. An American veteran of the Mexican war tore the clothes from his wife so that “all she had on was her stockings and her lifejacket.” Theodate Pope and her companion Edwin Friend decided to jump and together with her maid Emily Robinson chose what seemed a good spot on the port side. Friend found life jackets for them all and jumped first. Miss Pope, with a patrician instruction to her maid—‘“Come, Robinson”—followed. Major Warren Pearl, who had found all his party except for nurse Alice Lines with Audrey and Stuart, felt the ship make a sudden plunge and saw foaming water rushing over the forecastle. He just had time to grab some pieces of wood to serve as supports for his family when the sea sucked them all off the ship. Charles Frohman, at the rail with some friends, remained calmly philosophical. One recalled how just before “a mighty green cliff of water came rushing up, bearing its tide of dead and debris” and washed them into the sea, he paraphrased a line from
Peter Pan
, the play he had been responsible for bringing to the London and New York stages: “Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure life gives us.”

Up in the wheelhouse Quartermaster Johnston saw that “the starboard wing of the bridge was level with the sea and it was coming over the rail.” Some minutes ago he had reported that the list to starboard had reached 25 degrees but had received no response from his captain. Now Turner shouted, “Quartermaster, save yourself.” Just as the ship began her dive beneath the waves and Johnston was washed into the sea he glimpsed Turner climbing the ladder to the top bridge.

Captain Schwieger’s war diary describes the
Lusitania
’s last moments:

2.10
P.M.
Great confusion on board; boats are cleared away and some are lowered into the water. Apparently considerable panic; several boats, fully laden, are hurriedly lowered, bow or stern first and are swamped at once. Because of the list fewer boats can be cleared away on the port side . . . The ship blows off steam; the name Lusitania is visible in gold letters on the bows . . .

2.25
P.M.
Since it seems as if the steamer can only remain afloat a short while longer, dive to 24 meters and head out to sea. Also it would have been impossible for me to fire a second torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.

As the
Lusitania
went under, several people including clergyman’s wife Margaret Gwyer were sucked into her cavernous funnels, only to be shot out again a few moments later like human cannonballs. Some were dragged under by the funnel stays or mauled by the ship’s falling wireless aerials, both sharp as cheese wire. Professor Holbourn kicking out to free himself from a mess of tangled ropes glanced back to witness the
Lusitania
’s final moments. So did Oliver Bernard who had slid off the ship in her last moments into the sea with one of the radio operators and later wrote of the “picturesque grandeur even tho’ we knew that many hundreds of helpless souls, caught like rats in a gilded trap, were in her.”

Some lifeboats still dangled uselessly from their davits. A man hanging on to a rope over the stern screamed as a still revolving propeller sliced his leg off. The stern itself “was crowded with people who seemed to make for the last piece of the wreck left above water.” The sea was full of the waving hands and arms of people making “agonizing efforts to keep afloat.” Charles Lauriat heard “a long lingering moan” as if “they who were lost . . . [were] . . . calling from the very depths.” In the final moments as the ship’s bow hit the seabed some 340 feet below, it seemed to some that she nearly righted herself. Then “a mighty crescendo of screams and cries of fear . . . died away to a whisper” as the ship turned slowly onto her starboard side and disappeared. At two twenty-eight
P.M.
, eighteen minutes after the
U-20
’s torpedo had punched into her hull, the thirty-thousand-ton
Lusitania
was gone. As the
U-20
turned away, Schwieger took a final look through his periscope. His war diary records: “Astern, in the distance, a number of lifeboats are drifting; the
Lusitania
is no more to be seen.”