Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  Then came the orders to Schwieger and commanders of the other five U-boats instructing them to depart and to destroy anything that resembled a troop transport.

  Room 40 kept close watch on U-20. The boat’s frequent use of wireless provided rich detail about its course and speed. At 2:00 P.M. on Friday, April 30, the submarine reported its location. Two hours later, it did so again, and it continued making reports every hour until midnight, and every two hours thereafter until eight o’clock the next morning, Saturday, May 1.

  THE DISCOVERY of the new U-boat foray came against a backdrop of mounting threat.

  The Admiralty received dozens of messages reporting submarine sightings, most false, but still unsettling. An Irish policeman claimed to have spotted three U-boats traveling together up the River Shannon, an unlikely scenario. Off England’s east coast a steamer picked up an unexploded torpedo floating in the sea, with markings that identified it as belonging to U-22, a sister to Schwieger’s submarine. Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning—you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!”

  ON SATURDAY, May 1, citing the new sortie by U-20 and the other U-boats, the Admiralty postponed the departures of two warships that were scheduled to hold gunnery practice in the open sea.

  At some point that day, through Captain Hall, the Admiralty learned of the German Embassy’s advertisement published in New York that morning that seemed to warn passengers against traveling on the Lusitania. By day’s end the news was known to every Briton or American who happened to read a newspaper. The ship’s date of departure and its expected arrival in Liverpool a week later were now in the foreground of public awareness.

  But Room 40 and those officials privy to the Mystery knew much more: that the German wireless station at Norddeich was broadcasting the Lusitania’s schedule and that the six newly dispatched U-boats were now en route. Room 40 also knew that one of those boats was U-20, a prolific killer of ships and men, and that it was making its way toward a patrol zone in waters visited by every Cunard freighter and liner bound for Liverpool, and soon to be traversed by the Lusitania itself.

  Although this accumulation of facts—a fresh swarm of submarines, a grand liner under way in the face of a public warning—would seem a stimulus for sleepless nights among the top men of the Admiralty, neither the new surge in U-boat activity nor the imminent arrival of U-20 was communicated to Captain Turner. Nor was any effort made to escort the Lusitania or divert it from its course, as the Admiralty had done for the ship the preceding March and for the Transylvania and Ausonia in January.

  Like everyone else at Cunard, Captain Turner had no idea Room 40 even existed.

  THE ADMIRALTY’S focus was elsewhere, on a different ship that it deemed far more valuable.

  WASHINGTON

  LOST

  IN WASHINGTON, EDITH GALT CAME INCREASINGLY TO OCCUPY President Wilson’s thoughts and imagination. Throughout April she was a regular dinner guest at the White House, although for the sake of propriety she and Wilson always dined with others present. At one point they discussed a book that Wilson particularly liked, called Round My House: Notes of Rural Life in France in Peace and War, by Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Wilson ordered her a copy from a bookseller, but in the meantime he sent over a copy from the Library of Congress. “I hope it will give you a little pleasure,” he wrote, on Wednesday, April 28. “I covet nothing more than to give you pleasure,—you have given me so much!”

  He added, “If it rains this evening, would it be any fun for you to come around [and] have a little reading—and, if it does not rain, are you game for another ride?” By “ride,” he meant one of the drives that he so liked to take in the White House Pierce-Arrow.

  She declined the invitation, gently, having promised to spend the evening with her mother, but thanked him for his personal note and told him how it helped “fill my goblet of happiness.” Her handwriting made a sharp contrast to Wilson’s. Where his leaned forward and proceeded in perfectly horizontal phalanxes on the page, hers leaned backward and veered and bunched, in a cross between block printing and cursive, with random curls here and there, as if she wrote all her letters in a carriage rolling over cobblestones. She thanked him for the way he had closed his note, “Your sincere and grateful friend, Woodrow Wilson.” It had been particularly welcome on that Wednesday evening, after a day of gloom caused by depression, to which she appeared prone. “Such a pledge of friendship,” she wrote, “blots out the shadows that have chased me today, and makes April Twenty Eighth a red letter day on my calendar.”

  The newly ordered book arrived at the White House soon afterward, and on Friday, April 30, Wilson sent it along to Edith’s house near Dupont Circle, with a brief note. “It’s a great privilege to be permitted to share any part of your thought and confidence. It puts me in spirits again and makes me feel as if my private life had been recreated. But, better than that, it makes me hope that I may be of some use to you, to lighten the days with whole-hearted sympathy and complete understanding. That will be a happiness indeed.” He also sent flowers.

  In seeking to brighten her days, he brightened his own. Here in Edith, in the midst of world chaos, he found a purpose to which he could devote himself that took him, if only temporarily, out of his apprehension about the widening war and the fate of the larger world. She was, to him, “a heaven—haven—sanctuary.” More than this, her presence helped him clarify his thoughts about the nation’s trials. On their evening rides in the White House Pierce-Arrow, he spoke to her of the war and his concerns as he probably would have spoken to his late wife, Ellen, thereby helping him order his own thoughts. “From the first,” Edith wrote, “he knew he could rely on my prudence, and what he said went no further.”

  Edith, meanwhile, had begun to look at her own life through a new lens. Wilson’s interest, and the dash and charm of the world into which he had brought her, had caused her own days to seem emptier and less worthy. Though her own education had been haphazard, she longed for life on a higher plane, for good talk about art, books, and the tectonic upheavals of world events. A friend of hers, Nathaniel Wilson, no relation to the president, once told her that he sensed she might one day influence great events—“perhaps the weal or woe of a country.” But she had to be open to it, he warned. “In order to fit yourself for this thing that I feel will come to you, you must work, read, study, think!”

  Edith saw her drives with President Wilson as “life giving.” She felt an immediate bond. They traded recollections of the old South, the hard days that followed the Civil War. She had never met a man like Wilson—intensely bright, but also warm and solicitous of her feelings. It was all very unexpected.

  What Edith did not yet appreciate was that Wilson was now a man in love, and as White House usher Ike Hoover observed, Wilson was “no mean man in love-making when once the germ has found its resting place.”

  The president’s valet, Arthur Brooks, put it succinctly: “He’s a goner.”

  AS DISTRACTED as he was by the charms of Mrs. Galt, Wilson also grew increasingly concerned about the drift of world events. The western front had become a reciprocating engine of blood and gore, each side advancing then retreating across a no-man’s-land laced with barbed wire, gouged with shell holes, and mounded with dead men. On Saturday, May 1, the Germans began a series of assaults in the Ypres Salient, in
what would become known as the Second Battle of Ypres, and once again used poison gas. Neither side had gained any ground since the “first” battle the previous fall, despite combined casualty counts in the tens of thousands. On this day, however, the German offensive succeeded in pushing the British back almost to the town of Ypres. A Canadian physician caring for the wounded at a nearby aid station in Boezinge, in West Flanders, Belgium, would later write the most famous poem to arise from the war: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row.…” By the end of the month, the British would regain their lost ground and advance another thousand yards, at a cost of sixteen thousand dead and wounded, or sixteen men per yard gained. The Germans lost five thousand.

  One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. “We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let’s hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.

  Elsewhere, a wholly new front was about to open. Hoping to break the impasse in Europe, Churchill orchestrated a massive naval bombardment and amphibious landing against Turkey in the Dardanelles. The idea was to force the strait and break through to the Sea of Marmara, and from there to link arms with the Russian navy in the Black Sea, and through a massive show of naval force off Constantinople compel Turkey to surrender. An offensive up the Danube River to Austria-Hungary was to follow. It looked easy. The planners even imagined they might be able to complete the drive to the Black Sea with ships alone. An old saying applied: Man plans, God laughs. The result was disaster—lost ships, thousands of men dead, and another immobile front, this one on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

  Meanwhile, in the Caucasus, a Russian advance against Turkish forces steadily gained ground. The Turks blamed their losses on local populations of Armenians, whom they suspected of assisting the Russians, and began a systematic slaughter of Armenian civilians. By May 1, the Turks had killed over fifty thousand Armenian men, women, and children in Van Province, in eastern Turkey. The head of the Armenian church sent a plea for help directly to Wilson; he demurred.

  America, secure in its fortress of neutrality, watched the war at a remove and found it all unfathomable. Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. “It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War,” he wrote. “We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of the millions suffering all manner of privation, of the wide-spread waste and destruction.” The nation had become inured to it all, he wrote. “The slaughter of a thousand men between the trenches in northern France or of another thousand on a foundering cruiser has become commonplace. We read the headlines in the newspapers and let it go at that. The details have lost their interest.”

  But the tendrils of conflict seemed to reach more and more insistently toward America’s shores. On April 30, five weeks after the sinking of the Falaba and the loss of American passenger Leon Thrasher, first details arrived in Washington about another attack, in which a German aircraft had bombed a U.S. merchant ship, the Cushing, as it traversed the North Sea. Three bombs fell, but only one struck. No one was hurt and the damage was minor. Just the day before, in another private memorandum, Lansing had written, “A neutral in time of international war must always show forbearance, but never in the course of history have the patience and forbearance of neutrals been put to so severe a test as today.”

  He saw grave meaning in the attack on the Cushing. “German naval policy is one of wanton and indiscriminate destruction of vessels regardless of nationality,” he wrote to Secretary Bryan, on Saturday, May 1. But Wilson and Bryan, though troubled by the incident, resolved to treat it with more circumspection, as indicated in a report by the New York Times: “It was not thought in official quarters that any serious issue would be raised, because it is accepted that the bombs were not dropped deliberately, but under the impression that a hostile vessel was being attacked.” This was a generous appraisal: at the time, the Cushing was flying an American flag, and its owners had painted the ship’s name on its hull in six-foot letters.

  Another piece of news, more troubling in nature, had not yet reached the Times or the White House. That Saturday—the day of the Lusitania’s departure—a German U-boat torpedoed an American oil tanker, the Gulflight, near the Isles of Scilly off England’s Cornish coast, killing two men and causing the death by heart attack of its captain. The ship remained afloat, if barely, and was being towed to St. Mary’s Island, the largest of the Scillies, 45 miles west of Cornwall.

  In Washington the dawn brought only a lovely spring Saturday, with temperatures destined to rise into the seventies and send men to their haberdashers for their first straw “lids” of the season. The crowns of hats were expected to be shorter this year, the brims broader; gentlemen of course were expected to wear summer gloves made of silk, to keep their hands, as one ad put it, “cool and clean.” The day promised to be one in which Wilson could indulge his dream, his hope, of love and an end to loneliness.

  LUSITANIA

  UNDER WAY

  THE SHIP WAS SCHEDULED TO DEPART AT 10:00 A.M., but now came a delay. In wartime, Britain’s Admiralty held the power to requisition for military service any ship under British flag. At very much the last minute, the Admiralty commandeered a passenger ship docked at New York, the Cameronia, which provided service to Liverpool and Glasgow. The Cameronia’s captain received his orders just as his ship was about to depart. Now some forty passengers and their belongings, and five female crew, were to be transferred to the Lusitania. Exactly how these passengers all felt about it, given the morning’s news about the German warning, cannot be known, though at least one account holds that the passengers were pleased, for the Lusitania represented the pinnacle of seaborne luxury and would, they believed, get them to Liverpool much faster than the smaller and slower Cameronia.

  Aboard the Lusitania, one passenger, Richard Preston Prichard, took advantage of this delay to unpack one of his two cameras and bring it up on deck so that he could take photographs of the city and harbor. This camera was a Kodak No. 1, which collapsed into a form compact enough to fit into a coat pocket.

  Prichard was twenty-nine years old, and stood five feet ten inches tall. His mother and brother called him Preston, possibly to avoid the unfortunate rhythm inherent in saying Richard Prichard. They offered this description of him: “Dark brown hair, with high forehead, blue eyes, and prominent features. Very Deep dimple in chin.” The underlining was theirs, and indeed the cleft in Prichard’s chin was a salient landmark. In another man it might have been disfiguring, but for him it was one feature in an indisputably handsome face, otherwise graced by full lips, dark eyebrows, pale skin, and rich dark hair combed up in a wave from his forehead, all anchored by those blue eyes, so striking in a man with dark hair and brows—“a most interesting face,” one passenger said, “with marked features which any one once seeing could scarcely forget.”

  Prichard was a medical student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he had enrolled after trying his hand at various jobs, including lumberjack and farmer. He had moved to Canada after the death of his father, to earn money to send back to his mother in England. He was traveling in second class, room D-90, an interior cabin opposite the Lusitania’s barbershop, and shared the room with three other men, all strangers to one another. He had an upper berth and carried with him three “grips,” or suitcases. He often wore a tie clip with a gold ring inlaid with tiny red and white “lava heads,” decorative faces carved
from the kind of lava rock often used for cameos and brooches. He had packed two suits for the crossing, one dark blue, the other a more casual suit in green.

  On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray—“rather dull,” as Sumner put it—and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography.

  Sumner liked Prichard immediately. He saw him as “such another fellow as myself.” Both were traveling solo, and they were destined to encounter each other often during the voyage. Sumner liked Prichard’s ability to take great delight in life but without intruding on others. He “seemed very pleasant and enjoyed himself in a very quiet manner,” Sumner wrote, “—you will understand what I mean, [he] didn’t go about in a rowdy fashion like lots of fellows do having a time.” A fellow second-class passenger, Henry Needham, said of Prichard, “He was a great favorite on board, he arranged the whist drives & seemed to do most of the work.” A whist drive was a social event during which passengers grouped themselves in pairs and played game after game of whist until one team won.

  Now Prichard was on his way back to England for a visit, and according to one of his cabin mates, Arthur Gadsden, he was very excited to be doing so—“counting the time” until his arrival, Gadsden said.

  THE TRANSFER of the Cameronia’s passengers took two hours. Although later this delay would prove significant to a degree far greater than its brevity might suggest, for now it was merely maddening. Captain Turner prided himself on his skill at deftly managing the Lusitania’s arrivals and departures, which meant casting off precisely on schedule.