Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

So not just love, itself a striking declaration—but marriage.

  Edith turned him down. She leavened her rejection with a note she composed later that night, after Wilson dropped her at her apartment. “It is long past midnight,” she wrote, early Wednesday morning, May 5. “I have been sitting in the big chair by the window, looking out into the night, ever since you went away, my whole being is awake and vibrant!”

  She told him that his expression of love and confession of loneliness had left her anguished. “How I want to help! What an unspeakable pleasure and privilege I deem it to be allowed to share these tense, terrible days of responsibility, how I thrill to my very finger tips when I remember the tremendous thing you said to me tonight, and how pitifully poor I am, to have nothing to offer you in return. Nothing—I mean—in proportion to your own great gift!”

  Here she joined the universal struggle shared by men and women throughout time, to temper rejection so as not to lose a friend forever.

  “I am a woman—and the thought that you have need of me—is sweet!” she wrote. “But, dear kindred spirit, can you not trust me and let me lead you from the thought that you have forfeited anything by your fearless honesty to the conviction that, with such frankness between us, there is nothing to fear—we will help and hearten each other.”

  She added, “You have been honest with me, and, perhaps, I was too frank with you—but if so forgive me!”

  Later that morning, with the sun up and the day under way, Edith and Helen Bones went for another walk in Rock Creek Park. They sat on some rocks to rest. Helen glared at Edith and said, “Cousin Woodrow looks really ill this morning.” Helen loved her cousin and was protective of him. She nicknamed him “Tiger,” not because of some lascivious bent, but because, as Edith later told the story, “he was so pathetic caged there in the White House, longing to come and go, as she did, that he reminded her of a splendid Bengal tiger she had once seen—never still, moving, restless, resentful of his bars that shut out the larger life God had made for him.” Now, in the park, Helen burst into tears. “Just as I thought some happiness was coming into his life!” she said. “And now you are breaking his heart.”

  In a strangely cinematic intervention, Dr. Grayson suddenly appeared from a nearby stand of trees, riding a horse—a large white horse no less. He asked Helen what had happened, and she quickly answered that she had tripped and fallen. “I don’t think he believed her,” Edith wrote, “but he pretended to and rode on.”

  His arrival was a timely thing, she added, “for I was starting to feel like a criminal, and guilty of base ingratitude.” She tried to explain to Helen that she wasn’t being an “ogre”; rather, she simply could not “consent to something I did not feel.” She told Helen that she understood she was “playing with fire where [Wilson] was concerned, for his whole nature was intense and did not willingly wait; but that I must have time really to know my own heart.”

  Edith’s rejection caused Wilson great sorrow and left him feeling almost disoriented as world events clamored for his attention. Even Britain had become a growing source of irritation. In its drive to halt the flow of war matériel to Germany, British warships had stopped American ships and seized American cargoes. Early in the war Wilson had grown concerned that Britain’s actions might so outrage the American public as to cause serious conflict between the two nations. Diplomacy eased tensions, for a time. But then on March 11, 1915, in response to Germany’s “war zone” declaration of the preceding month, the British government issued a new, and startling, “Order in Council” proclaiming its formal intent to stop every ship sailing to or from Germany, whether neutral or not, and to stop ships bound even for neutral ports, to determine whether their cargoes might ultimately end up in German hands. Britain also sharply increased the list of products it would henceforth view as contraband. The order outraged Wilson, who sent a formal protest in which he described Britain’s plan as “an almost unqualified denial of the sovereign rights of the nations now at peace.”

  The note achieved nothing. Complaints poured in from American shippers whose cargoes had been detained or confiscated, although the State Department did succeed in securing the prompt release of an automobile shipped by an American socialite. For the British the stakes were simply too high to allow compromise. As Britain’s ambassador to America, Cecil Spring Rice, had written the previous fall, “In the life and death struggle in which we are now engaged it is essential to prevent war supplies reaching the German armies and factories.”

  America’s neutrality seemed harder and harder to maintain. In a letter to a female friend, Mary Hulbert, Wilson wrote, “Together England and Germany are likely to drive us crazy, because it looks oftentimes as if they were crazy themselves, the unnecessary provocations they invent.”

  Still, Wilson recognized the fundamental difference that existed between how the two sides executed their campaigns against merchant traffic. The Royal Navy behaved in civil fashion and often paid for the contraband it seized; Germany, on the other hand, seemed increasingly willing to sink merchant ships without warning, even those bearing neutral markings. The torpedo attack on the Gulflight was a case in point. Within the State Department, Undersecretary Robert Lansing warned that in light of the Gulflight attack the United States was duty bound to adhere to Wilson’s February declaration vowing to hold Germany “to a strict accountability” for its actions. Wilson made no public comment, but he and Secretary of State Bryan, in background conversations with reporters, signaled that the administration would treat the incident in judicious fashion. “No formal diplomatic action will be taken by the United States Government … until all the facts have been ascertained and a determination reached,” the New York Times reported in a front-page story on Wednesday, May 5.

  In fact, Wilson found the Gulflight incident disquieting. This was an American ship; the attack had killed three men. What’s more, it had occurred without warning. While the incident didn’t strike Wilson as having the magnitude to draw the nation into war, it did demand some kind of protest. That Wednesday, he cabled his friend Colonel House, still in London, to ask his advice on what kind of response to send to Germany.

  House recommended “a sharp note” but added, “I am afraid a more serious breach may at any time occur, for they seem to have no regard for consequences.”

  LUSITANIA

  THE MANIFEST

  ABOARD THE LUSITANIA, THE CUNARD DAILY BULLETIN kept passengers abreast of war news but, like its counterparts on land, reported only broad movements of forces, as if war were a game played with tiles and dice, not flesh-and-blood men. These reports did not begin to capture the reality of the fighting then unfolding on the ground, particularly in the Dardanelles, where the Allied naval and ground offensive had stalled and British and French forces had dug trenches that mimicked those on the western front.

  The most terrifying part of battle was the exit from a trench—standing up and climbing out, knowing that the opposing force would at that moment unleash a fusillade that would continue until the offensive concluded, either with victory, meaning a few yards gained, or defeat, a few yards lost, but invariably with half one’s battalion dead, wounded, or missing. “I shall never forget the moment when we had to leave the shelter of the trenches,” wrote British private Ridley Sheldon, of combat at Helles, at the southwest tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. “It is indeed terrible, the first step you take—right into the face of the most deadly fire, and to realize that any moment you may be shot down; but if you are not hit, then you seem to gather courage. And when you see on either side of you men like yourself, it inspires you with a determination to press forward. Away we went over the parapet with fixed bayonets—one line of us like the wind. But it was absolute murder, for men fell like corn before the sickle.”

  The wounded lay in the open or in shell holes awaiting stretcher bearers who might not come for hours, or even days. Injuries ranged from minor penetrations by shrapnel to grotesque disfigurements. “I got back into the trench, and
saw what I had not seen before, for the smoke had cleared now,” wrote Capt. Albert Mure, also on Helles. A shell had just landed in his trench, in the spot where moments earlier he had been writing messages to be delivered by two orderlies. One orderly survived, the other did not. “His body and his head lay 4 or 5 feet apart. Two of my signalers were killed also, and mutilated so horribly that to describe their condition would be inexcusable.”

  Elsewhere at Helles, Sgt. Denis Moriarty and his First Royal Munster Fusiliers fought off a Turkish assault that began at ten o’clock at night. “They crept right up to our trenches, they were in thousands, and they made the night hideous with yells and shouting, ‘Allah, Allah!’ We could not help mowing them down.” Some managed to reach Moriarty’s trench. “When the Turks got to close quarters the devils used hand grenades and you could only recognize our dead by their identity discs. My God, what a sight met us when day broke this morning.” By the time the Allied invading force would finally be evacuated, in January 1916, some 265,000 Allied troops and 300,000 Turks would be dead, wounded, or missing.

  Men in the ships massed offshore fared little better. The armada was an impressive one—hundreds of vessels, ranging from minesweepers to giant dreadnoughts. But many were in easy range of Turkish artillery embedded in high ground, which dropped thousands of tons of high explosives onto their decks. The French battleship Suffren was struck by a shell that destroyed a gun turret and ignited a fire deep within its hull; another shell destroyed its forward funnel. Rear Adm. Émile Guépratte descended from the bridge to survey the damage and bolster the morale of his sailors. “The scene,” he wrote, “was tragically macabre: the image of desolation, the flames spared nothing. As for our young men, a few minutes ago, so alert, so self-confident, all now [lay] dead on the bare deck, blackened burnt skeletons, twisted in all directions, no trace of any clothing, the fire having devoured all.”

  Aboard the Lusitania, there was quiet. There were books, and cigars, and fine foods, afternoon tea, and the easy cadence of shipboard life: strolling the deck, chatting at the rails, doing crochet, and just sitting still in a deck chair in the sea breeze. Now and then a ship appeared in the distance; closer at hand, whales.

  BACK IN New York, on Wednesday, May 5, Cunard at last provided the customs office with the Lusitania’s full cargo manifest. Unlike the initial one-page version filed by Captain Turner before departure, this “Supplemental Manifest” was twenty-four pages long and listed over three hundred consignments.

  Here were muskrat skins, nuts, beeswax, bacon, salt brick, dental goods, cases of lard, and barrels of beef tongues; machinery from the Otis Elevator Company; and enough candy—157 barrels of it—to populate the fantasies of all the schoolchildren in Liverpool. The manifest also listed one case of “Oil Paintings,” these accompanying first-class passenger Sir Hugh Lane, a Dublin art collector. To identify this consignment merely as oil paintings was an understatement. The paintings were insured for $4 million (about $92 million today) and were rumored to have included works by Rubens, Monet, Titian, and Rembrandt.

  More problematic, but entirely legal under U.S. neutrality laws, were the 50 barrels and 94 cases of aluminum powder and 50 cases of bronze powder, both highly flammable under certain conditions, as well as 1,250 cases of shrapnel-laden artillery shells made by the Bethlehem Steel Company, bound for the British army, and badly needed on the western front, where British forces were hampered by a severe shortage of artillery ammunition. (Wrote Churchill, “The army in France was firing away shells at a rate which no military administration had ever been asked to sustain.”) The shrapnel shells were essentially inert. They contained only a minimum bursting charge; their associated fuses were packed separately and stored elsewhere. The cartridges that held the powerful explosives needed to propel the shells from a gun were not among the ship’s cargo; these would be attached later, at an arsenal in Britain.

  Also aboard, according to the manifest, were 4,200 cases of Remington rifle ammunition, amounting to 170 tons.

  U-20

  AT LAST

  THROUGHOUT THE MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, heavy fog lingered over the sea off Ireland. From 4:00 A.M. on, every time Schwieger checked on the weather through his periscope all he saw was a dark opacity. He held U-20 on a southerly course and kept its speed slow, probably about 5 knots, to conserve battery power. At 8:25 A.M. Schwieger gauged visibility as good enough to bring the boat to the surface, though banks of fog persisted all around him.

  His crew now decoupled the two electric engines and engaged the diesels to bring U-20 to cruising speed and recharge the batteries. Somewhere off to his left, in the murk, was the southwest coast of Ireland, here a phalanx of stone cliffs jutting into the North Atlantic. He would soon pass Valentia Island, where the British had built a powerful wireless transmitter. Schwieger’s own wireless man would by now be picking up strong signals from the Valentia tower, but could not read the codes in which they were sent.

  U-20 moved through curtains of fog. By 12:50 P.M. Schwieger believed himself to be abreast of the Fastnet Rock, though he could not see it. The rock was one of Britain’s most prominent maritime landmarks, a road sign to the Western Approaches. Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century knew it as “Ireland’s Teardrop” because it was the last bit of Ireland they saw before their ships entered the North Atlantic en route to America. Here Schwieger ordered a left turn, to begin sailing along Ireland’s south coast toward Liverpool. This was the upper edge of a great funnel of ocean called the Celtic Sea, where inbound ships converged from north, west, and south. It was the perfect hunting ground for a U-boat, but Schwieger saw nothing.

  He wrote, “During the whole afternoon no steamer sighted in spite of the clearing weather, although we found ourselves within one of the main shipping lanes.”

  Visibility improved. Soon Schwieger was able to see the Irish coast, but only for a few moments. Over the next three hours, U-20 cruised on the surface and encountered no ships of any kind. The evening haze began to gather once again.

  Just before five o’clock, while off the coast of County Cork, Schwieger spotted what at first seemed to be a large square-rigged sailing ship. In the haze, it cut a lovely figure, its three masts billowing with canvas. Unlike other U-boat commanders, who sank such ships with reluctance, Schwieger was unmoved. He saw a target. U-20 turned toward the ship, and Schwieger’s men loaded and aimed its deck gun.

  As Schwieger got closer, he saw that once again the light and haze had deceived him. The ship did have three masts, but it was only a small schooner. He signaled the vessel to stop. Although he had fired on ships many times without warning, here he returned, briefly, to cruiser rules. “As no danger existed for our boat in approaching,” he wrote, “we made for the stern of the sailer.”

  He ordered the schooner’s captain and four-man crew to abandon ship and bring its registry and cargo manifest over to U-20. The schooner proved to be the Earl of Lathom, out of Liverpool, carrying rocks from Limerick. It weighed all of 99 tons.

  As the schooner’s crew began rowing away, Schwieger ordered his men at the gun to begin firing at the schooner’s waterline. Despite its small size and decidedly nonbuoyant cargo, the vessel proved a stubborn target. Shot after shot boomed across the sea and exploded against its hull. Schwieger’s gun crew needed twelve shells to sink it.

  SEVERAL HOURS later, as dusk and fog gathered, Schwieger found another target. A steamship emerged from the fog, very near—too close to allow Schwieger to prepare an attack. He turned U-20 away, to gain sea room, but kept the boat on the surface. The steamship stopped, apparently expecting an examination under cruiser rules.

  Outwardly, the vessel weighed about 3,000 tons and seemed to be Norwegian, but Schwieger and his pilot, Lanz, sensed something amiss. The markings were unusually high on the hull, and Schwieger suspected they might have been painted onto tarpaulins.

  Schwieger maneuvered for a torpedo attack. He ordered a bronze torpedo, set to run at a depth of 8 feet. Whe
n U-20 was about 330 yards away from the steamer, Schwieger gave the order to fire.

  He missed.

  The bubbles rising to the surface from the torpedo’s compressed-air engine revealed its path. As the torpedo track moved toward the target, the ship began a sudden acceleration and veered away. As best Schwieger could tell, the torpedo went past or under the stern.

  Now it was Schwieger’s turn to flee. He feared the ship might be armed. “After the shot I turned around hard and ran away in order to avoid the danger of being fired upon,” he wrote. “For this reason I did not consider a second attack. Steamer disappeared quickly in the fog.”

  In his log entry at 8:10 that night, he contemplated what had occurred. The torpedo had seemed to lose speed as it approached the target, he wrote. “I had considered a miss out of the question, even after the torpedo had been fired, considering our favorable position and the fact that [the] steamer could not make much headway.” Remarkably the ship had then managed to accelerate from a dead stop to make its escape.

  Over the next hour the dense fog returned and once again forced Schwieger to submerge. This was the end of his sixth day at sea, and all he had sunk was a 99-ton sailboat.

  SIGHTING

  FROM: HEAD OF KINSALE

  TO: ADMIRALTY

  MAY 5, 1915

  SENT 7:55 P.M.

  RECEIVED 8:52 P.M.

  SMALL BOAT CONTAINING FIVE MEN SOUTH EAST ONE MILE HOISTED OAR WITH A GARMENT ATTACHED. STEAM DRIFTER D 145 TOOK CREW ON BOARD MAKING KINSALE. COAST GUARD KINSALE INFORMED.

  ROOM 40

  SCHWIEGER REVEALED

  FIRST CAME A REPORT OF GUNFIRE IN THE FOG, SENT ON the evening of Wednesday, May 5, from a station perched on the Old Head of Kinsale, a promontory that jutted into the Celtic Sea near Queenstown, Ireland. The Old Head was well known to mariners, who often used it to fix their locations.