Lusitania Lost

by Leonard Carpenter

The stairs became hard to navigate as the list increased. Passengers were forced to jostle together and hug the banisters. Winnie clung to the railing with one arm and to Flash with the other. Once they reached the fore-and-aft corridor, it was easier to maintain footing on the thick carpet without sliding away to starboard.

  When they came to their door and unlocked it, they found the rooms empty. There was no sign that Matt or Alma had been there since morning.

  “The camera bag is still gone,” Flash said as he filled a valise with his precious slides and papers. “What are you taking?” he asked as he saw Winnie stuffing a large purse.

  “Just some things Alma will want.” She worked speedily, not troubling to conceal from him the fat wads of greenbacks she was shoving in.

  “A practical girl, that’s what I like.” Flash’s voice was solemn. “Here’s something more practical yet.” Climbing up on the bed he grabbed two, four, six life belts from the top of the wardrobe. It was too many to carry, so they left two hanging in the vestibule. “Just in case they come back,” he told Winnie.

  They left the cabin dark, the unlatched door swinging wide with the list. The passage was empty now, no sign of their friends. Worse, as they started forward they saw that water had already reached their deck, maybe through portholes in the tilting starboard rooms. Winnie heard a distant rushing sound as waves lapped to them across the carpet, and the smell of the sea became rank in the dim corridor. They turned and headed astern toward the main staircase, climbing along with difficulty in the ever-steepening angle of carpet and baseboard. Winnie realized that, besides the list, the front of the ship was tilting downward into the ocean.

  On the grand stairway more refugees straggled up ahead of them. Most clung to the balustrades on the high side of the spiral stair. Starting out, the two of them hurried past the electric elevator car as it barely crept up its sloping central track. The worried voices of passengers could be heard inside the mahogany cubicle.

  Winnie, burdened with her shoulder bag and two life belts, followed Flash around the crazy circle toward the landing on the upper deck.

  Before they reached it, the ship shuddered again and the lights went out, plunging the stairwell into darkness. Only faint daylight shone in through the deck exit above, barely enough to light their way.

  But then from below came wails of terror, followed by the urgent, muffled shouts and pleas of those trapped inside the stalled elevator car. They began to thump on the closed door and the walls.

  Winnie froze. “We must get them out.”

  She gripped the railing to hold herself back, and when Flash turned, she gave him a beseeching, wordless look. Pressing close to her, he spoke urgently over the cries and futile thumping that echoed up the stair.

  “Dearest, I’ll find an officer and tell him. That’s all that we can do. Maybe they can restore emergency power.” His words did not help the anguish she felt, the shock and utter horror.

  “Don’t worry, Matt and Alma wouldn’t be foolish enough to ride in there.”

  Unwrapping her fingers gently from the rail, he led her up the stairs and out onto the promenade.

  Chapter 44

  Abandoned

  “A torpedo trail, you say? Off the starboard bow?”

  At the first warning shouts over the telephone from the crow’s nest, Captain Turner’s peaceful afternoon was spoiled. Even as First Officer Hefford acknowledged the sighting and hung up the phone, Turner saw the two lookouts abandon their nest to shinny down the foremast ladder in a panic. The captain, already hurrying to the starboard side of the bridge house, made it only a few steps when the torpedo struck with a clanging, sickening impact.

  Before his anxious gaze a column of water shot up over the bridge. It seemed to hang there against blue sky as it passed away astern with the Lusitania’s plunging forward motion. Having stumbled from the initial shock, Turner kept going, but he faltered again as he felt the rubber-matted deck sink and tilt from the sudden inrush of water below. With the explosion, his vessel began an unnatural roll that didn’t seem as if it would end.

  Turner called to Hefford at the controls: “Are the watertight doors all closed? If not, close them!”

  Even as he gave the command, he knew it would be of little use. Whatever the electric board showed, the automatic doors between the coal bunkers and the boiler rooms would be jammed partway open by slumping coal and dust piles. No amount of effort could keep them clear while the men worked at firing the boilers. He knew, too, his order might trap some of the coalers below in flooding chambers, or force them to climb straight upward for any hope of escape.

  “Lieutenant, what is the degree of list?” he asked, feeling the ship’s lopsided tilt growing worse.

  Lewis had given up taking his four-point bearing. He went to the commutator device mounted on the tilting rear bulkhead and read the needle. “Seven degrees starboard, Captain. Two degrees forward as well, sir.”

  “Right. Let me know when it reaches ten starboard.” He’d already ordered all portholes to be closed that morning, but had it been done? Too late to check now, and calm was essential in a crisis. Glancing out through the windscreen, Turner could confirm that the ship was well down by the bows, with waves already breaking over the starboard bulwark. Natural enough, with a forward torpedo hit—but how could it be happening so quickly?

  To see which compartments had been damaged, he took himself over to the Pearson’s Fire and Flood Indicator board. Its alarm bell was ringing monotonously, and should be silenced to let a man think. But as he went, there came another massive concussion underfoot. The bridge shuddered with a second rumbling explosion, louder and more prolonged than the first. Before him, as he grabbed the counter for balance, the lights on the Pearson’s board went crazy. The forward compartments, the hold, powder magazine, coal bunkers and boiler rooms, all were compromised. Then the indicator lamps themselves flickered, threatening a power failure.

  “Ten degrees list, Captain, and still going,” Lewis reported, steadfastly watching the pendulums that showed the average angles.

  “All right, then,” Turner said. “Notify me if it goes past fifteen. Meanwhile, have the ship’s carpenter assess the damage forward and report back to me. Helmsman, rudder hard a-port! If we run her in toward shore, maybe we can beach her.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” the helmsman said, taking in the gravity of the command. As he swung the wheel and the mate rang up on the telephone, Turner headed to the door—a steep downhill shuffle—and out onto the starboard bridge wing.

  No submarine in sight now, and no more torpedo tracks. But looking astern, he saw that the ship was in a panic. Under a pall of smoke rising aft from the ventilators, passengers milled along the boat deck. They lurched and slipped on wet tilted planking, with some already lying inert on the deck or staggering with bloodied heads and shirtfronts, likely from falls. White-faced people clustered at the lifeboats, a few even trying to climb in as officers restrained them. One starboard boat was gone, lost in the explosion, and most hung far out from the tilting deck at the limit of their anti-sway chains. At each moment, more humanity crowded out from below.

  Surveying the scene, the pitiful passengers clawing and swarming desperately about the decks, the thought came to Turner: A bunch of bloody monkeys. He felt a sudden sick remorse for his own callous phrase.

  So Captain Dow may have been right after all to resign his Lusitania command. Passengers and war explosives don’t mix. Just throw a torpedo into the pot, and this is what you get, bloody chaos! So much for the all-knowing protection he’d been promised. Well, he was not beaten, not yet.

  Then as he watched, the ship began to right itself. Beneath his soles he felt the deck straightening, the strain on his old ankles easing. But it could never come near an even keel, and the change didn’t reassure Turner. He knew it only meant that the flooding had penetrated deeper in, to the transverse coal bunker bene
ath him or possibly the port-side. A temporary relief at best, when the list that could sink them lay forward. His ship was going down by the bows.

  Looking out on the foredeck, where waves washed right in over the dagger-pointed prow, he suddenly realized that they were still making eighteen knots headway. The engines had never stopped, for he hadn’t ordered them to do so. The U-boat that had attacked them was left behind by now, and their need to run away was over in any case.

  Time to face it, they must abandon ship. This forward motion was lending greater force to the flooding, and worse, making it impossible to launch the lifeboats.

  Going to the starboard telephone station, he rang inside to the bridge and commanded, “Engine room, Full Speed Astern.” That should stop them soon enough.

  “Aye, sir,” came the answer. Through the open bridge door, he saw Hefford lay down the phone, ring back and forth on the telegraph repeater to make the alert bells chime, and finally set the lever full astern. If anyone was standing by the engines, as they must be, his order would be obeyed. He turned his gaze aft.

  Within seconds new detonations sounded, and ghostly-white gouts of steam shot up topside all the way astern. Amid renewed shouts and panic from the decks, Turner realized his mistake.

  Engineering Inspector Laslett had warned him before departure that the low-power steam system was failing, wearing out with age. It wouldn’t stand a sudden change, and it was due to be overhauled in port next week. But he had forgotten, and this sudden pressure reversal had been too great.

  What an old fool he was! The main steam lines had failed, probably crippling the engines. If he’d merely signaled Full Stop, they might yet have slowed the ship down in time to lower boats.

  Well, perhaps they still could. Shuffling up the sloping deck, dragging himself along by the bridge rail, he went back inside to face his officers.

  There were no reproaches awaiting him there, but no good news either. He heard first from the steersman: “The helm is not responding, sir. The wheel seems to be jammed at half-port. I cannot make her turn toward land.”

  “No surprise, man. We’re listing to starboard, so your steering engines are fighting the whole weight of the rudder, lifting tons of metal. Just hold her as you can.”

  “Steam pressure is down, Captain,” Lieutenant Hefford reported, “from 190 pounds to 50. The engine room says one steam main is broken. The turbines are still turning, locked in forward motion.”

  “Try to get them reversed, or stopped at least. We have to lose way.”

  “Sir, the list is increasing again,” was Third Officer Lewis’s report. “Seventeen degrees starboard, five forward.”

  “My God.” Turner for once found himself unable to put a good face on things.

  As if that weren’t enough, the young officer Bisset appeared in the doorway from astern, soaking wet and covered with soot. “Captain, sir, the Marconi room reports their electricity has failed. They’re sending out S.O.S. on battery power, giving our position.”

  He waited in the sharply-angled doorway. “Any orders, sir?”

  “Orders, yes.”

  S.O.S.–Save Our Ship. Turner imagined the plight of those below, now in darkness, his officers and stokers trapped in the coal-black depths. Little enough hope of saving them, much less the ship.

  “Lower all lifeboats to the rail,” he told Bisset, or Bestic, whomever. “But do not launch them yet, until the ship has stopped. Relay this order to all stations: Prepare to abandon ship.”

  Chapter 45

  Holocaust

  Where the torpedo struck below decks, fire was instantly smothered by sea. The explosion flared blazing-yellow along a swath of tearing, buckling steel. Against this bright horizon, the spy Kroger’s body was silhouetted as he hurtled back toward the watchers.

  Alma, dazed by the blast, came to awareness in the top of a shattered crate. She lay crumpled against its cargo, the mini-submarine. She didn’t feel injured as she tried to move, just numb and sore—both at once, and all over. Dirk Kroger’s bulky body lay on top of her, pressing her bare skirted legs against the cold metal of the sub. The Dutchman wasn’t moving.

  Beside them in the dimness, amid a tilting chaos of explosive flares, splintered wood and surging water, Matt appeared, wet and disheveled. He immediately began trying to lift the moaning, semi-conscious spy off her.

  “Alma, are you hurt?” he said as he rolled the inert body clear. “Careful, don’t try to move too quickly.”

  “I’m all right,” Alma said, struggling to get her bruised legs under her. “He’s alive?”

  “Yes, but badly injured. He must have absorbed the blast and shielded us from it.”

  As Matt took Kroger’s pistol out of his pocket and flung it away, Alma could see that his hand was smeared with blood.

  “Dirk,” he asked, shaking the spy, “can you move?”

  No reply, just a groan.

  “What can we do?” Struggling up to her knees, Alma looked around the deepening chaos. She felt the ship tilting and saw foamy seawater rising, with chemical fires or ammo still flaring and gouting underneath the surface. Suddenly again she felt faint. “It’s all over, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  Matt, as he toiled to free Alma, saw the hopelessness of their position. But he couldn’t accept it.

  Water surged in through the now-invisible hull breach, foaming and fountaining below them in the faint electric light that still burned from the top of the hold. Cold salty droplets sprayed up into their faces from the inflow. Worse, a nearby cavernous roaring told him that the sea must be filling the huge empty coal bunker just astern. Bad luck if the torpedo strike had penetrated both compartments, and God knew wherever else.

  As he tried to help Alma to her feet, the ship steeply tilted, bringing the seething maelstrom up toward them all the faster. The lightest crates floated and tumbled in the flood, while other cargo ignited with churning flashes underwater. Likely it was the thousands of rifle cartridges cooking off after the main blast…harmlessly, or so he hoped.

  “There has to be a way out,” he told Alma as she clung shell-shocked against him. “Come on, darling, let’s get going! We need to live to tell this story. It may be too late for Dirk.”

  Suddenly, sickeningly, the submarine crate and its rounded contents moved beneath them, sliding down into the hungry abyss. As Lusitania’s list grew more severe, all the cargo shifted toward her wounded side, the hundreds of tons of metal and ammunition crushing and displacing any lighter goods. Above them the tethered ambulances strained and slid forward in their harnesses, striving to tear free and roll down the unstable slope.

  Then just beside them, the largest and heaviest crate started to splinter. It was the bizarre metal monster, the weapon labeled Tank, nuzzling free and rearing up on massive treads. The steel prow, sharply pointed like a steam locomotive, crushed and parted the planking of the beast’s flimsy cage. Twin gun barrels broke out through the brittle top, emerging in their heavy casemates as the tracked wheels trundled forth onto the wreckage. The nearest chain of metal treads splintered deep into Matt and Alma’s crate. The behemoth threatened to smash it down into the flood, and them along with it.

  But even as Matt clung to buckling wood and tried to pull Alma clear, a new menace caught his eye. Lightning flashes from the seething water flared up brighter than ever, blinding enough to paint the entire hold with stark shadows like a flash picture. Cargo cases were igniting underwater, letting off bursts of frothing white smoke.

  “It’s the aluminum dust,” a voice gasped from beside Matt, where the reviving spy Kroger struggled up to a sitting position. “In seawater it can touch off the other explosives. Find cover!”

  As he groaned out his warning, the wounded man rolled and dragged himself over to the open hatch of the mini-sub, to dive in through it out of sight. Matt, hardly thinking but alert to the danger, lifted
Alma up bodily, led her forward and lowered her down after the spy.

  As he turned to grab his camera bag, he glanced again at the underwater detonations. Outlined by their brilliance as they tumbled about in the flood were dozens of light, buoyant boxes—the cheese crates that Kroger had identified as gun cotton, high explosive and more dangerous when wet. Moving fast and shoving the camera bag ahead of him, Matt dove in after Alma through the open hatchway.

  Landing on top of her, or Kroger or both in the near-total darkness, he reached up to close the circular hatch—just as its cover was blown shut by the shattering force of the second, larger explosion.

  * * *

  The rolling, hammering impact of the second blast was muted by the submarine’s hull, but the shock of it bruised Alma where her back touched hard metal. The glare lit up the thick glass portholes in the turret above her, fore and aft and to either side. But their light was quickly dimmed to the faintest outlines as seawater surged over them, lifting the tiny craft. As first she thought the frail shell would be crushed, but now it felt as if it was going to roll over.

  “Alma, are you OK?” Matt had been reaching up, tightening the latches around the hatch lid. He must have succeeded, because the cold salty drops stopped streaming down into her face.

  “I don’t know—I guess so. This motion is making me ill.”

  Now in pitch dark she struggled to sit upright, rolling and bumping with the sub, which must be sliding free amid the wreckage. She felt Matt reach past her to delve into his satchel. When he found and switched on the battery lamp, its waning beam was enough to light the submarine’s interior. Matt’s haggard face brightened as he saw her—though she must be a fright, with wet hair across her face and seawater smarting in her eyes.

  “What can we do?” she appealed to him. “Do we have to stay in here?”

  “Well, we’ve made it so far,” he said, touching her damp head. He leaned forward to kiss her cheek in an obvious effort at reassurance. “Out of the frying pan into the…kettle.”