Lusitania (3 page)

PREFACE

A beam from the lighthouse high atop the Old Head of Kinsale cut through the May twilight, its arc revealing, then concealing the grisly scene. Pillows, torn clothing, lifebelts, bits of ornately carved woodwork, dolls, purses, letters—all surged forward with each wave, littering the rocky Irish coast with the tragedy’s debris. A lifeless arm appeared now and then, as if waving from the surf; babies with blue lips and tiny fingers curled in death floated peacefully; men in tweed suits, broken bones jutting through sickly gray skin, careened in the water; ladies, still clad in elegant afternoon ensembles now covered in soot and oil, twisted and turned as the current pummeled them toward land. The scene was ghastly, almost unbearable.

A few miles northeast, and a century later, a winged bronze angel peacefully gazes out over Casement Square in Cobh, the collection of streets and hills formerly known as Queenstown. Arms outstretched, head bowed, and feet planted atop a sword, she looks down on two sculpted sailors adorning the beautifully restrained monument. A simple inscription commemorates the terrible event: “To the Memory of All Who Perished by the Sinking of the
Lusitania
.”

On the afternoon of May 7, 1915, a German U-boat fired a torpedo into the side of British ocean liner
Lusitania
; 1,198 passengers and crew perished. “Enlist!” evocative posters soon urged: the tragedy became a call to arms in the Allied battle against a cruel and callous nation of bloodthirsty “Huns” who killed women and children without mercy. There had been no shortage of shocking moments in the ongoing Great War, as the new twentieth century struggled to make sense of machine guns and mustard gas. The sinking of an unarmed passenger liner, though, signaled that not even civilians were immune from the effects of total warfare.

Just three years earlier,
Titanic
had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic after her fatal encounter with an iceberg. Wrapped in an aura of romantic myth and self-sacrifice,
Titanic
has long overshadowed
Lusitania
. Time has transformed a rather ordinary passenger liner into the height of luxury, an example of man’s triumph over nature. Legend surrounds the two hours and forty minutes it took her to sink, when gentlemen stoically went to their deaths dressed in evening clothes, and ladies heroically refused to leave their husbands. Slipping beneath the frigid water, she took with her the last vestiges of a golden era of tradition and dignity.
Titanic
was a lesson in supreme arrogance, a Greek tragedy writ large, and a morality play that seemed to presage all the horrors of the coming war.

Lusitania,
in contrast, took a mere eighteen minutes to sink; there was little time for heroics or self-analysis among panicked passengers and a largely inept crew. She fell victim to an ongoing conflict in which millions had already perished; within days of her sinking she again fell victim, this time to a propaganda war. Germany had warned passengers not to travel aboard British liners, which were regularly used to transport contraband and munitions; these facts gave Berlin its justification and allowed it to trumpet the sinking as a great achievement by the Imperial Navy. Elsewhere, revulsion turned to outrage by those favorably inclined toward Great Britain and her allies. The sinking, declared one contemporary, “marked the apex of horror” and revealed Germany’s “diabolical barbarity.” It had not been a disaster: it had been “butchery,” the “slaughter of hundreds of women and children.”
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Yet word of the newest military campaigns, the latest atrocities against civilians, and the progress of the conflict itself soon overtook the sinking. Unease over being drawn into the Great War and decidedly mixed loyalties tempered the American reaction.
Lusitania
’s sinking did not, as is often said, draw America into the conflict: almost two years passed before the United States finally declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany.

Titanic
continued to live on in the public imagination;
Lusitania
faded from memory. She became a footnote in the history of the Great War, recalled for her end and, in time, for a host of controversies surrounding her final voyage. For the last half century, critics have unraveled conspiracies about her cargo; about the role of the British Admiralty and its First Lord, Winston Churchill, in her fate; and about a second, massive explosion that rattled through the liner after the torpedo’s impact.
Titanic
has become a story of passengers and people;
Lusitania
has become a tale of intrigue, with whispers of illicit munitions and nefarious schemes designed to draw America into the war. This is not putting too fine a point on it: pick up nearly any book on
Lusitania
and almost inevitably one encounters plots, espionage, missing wireless messages, and political machinations woven into elaborate, Machiavellian tapestries.

This is all the more unfortunate in that
Lusitania
’s final story does not lack for high drama. When she went into service in 1907,
Lusitania
was the world’s largest and most luxurious ocean liner, pride of the Cunard Line and proof that Britannia indeed still ruled the waves. By 1915, other liners had surpassed her in size and in ostentatious comforts, but
Lusitania
remained very much a grand lady of the Atlantic, plying her trade and attracting a glittering array of privileged passengers. In retrospect, her final voyage links two divergent threads. If
Titanic
seemingly ended the Gilded Age in America, so, too, did the First World War mark the death of the Edwardian Era in Europe. Looking back, it had seemed—at least for the privileged—a kind of long, golden Indian summer before the horrors of war burst forth, a time of genteel manners and leisurely pace, elegant gowns and glittering tiaras, bewhiskered monarchs and mechanical wonders. Even during the war,
Lusitania
lingered on as a tangible Edwardian survivor. Yet just hours before reaching Liverpool, she fell victim to one of the modern age’s engineering wonders.

The human stories, all too often ignored in most works on
Lusitania,
provide a focus every bit as dramatic as persistent tales of conspiratorial intrigue and government malfeasance. At its heart, it is the story of a great liner in the Golden Age of Travel, a floating palace embodying the elegance and genteel traditions of an era doomed to oblivion. Passengers on her final voyage exemplified the shifting tide of society: millionaires and merchants; automobile manufacturers and race car drivers; suffragettes and shady social climbers; Red Cross volunteers and a witness to the shootout at the O.K. Corral; actors, singers, and writers; and even a pair of dedicated men who dared to live openly as a couple at a time when homosexuality was punishable with hard labor and lengthy prison sentences. All were randomly thrown together as they crossed the Atlantic; all shared the terrible trauma of her rapid, chaotic sinking. Many survivors were haunted to the end of their days by the agonizing sights and sounds they had witnessed on her decks and in the water.

In this book, we have largely focused on the lives and experiences of those traveling First Class (or Saloon Class, as Cunard called it) on
Lusitania
’s last voyage, with a sprinkling of Second Class passengers added to the narrative: we have not included those traveling Third Class. This decision stems not from class prejudices but rather from practicalities. Quite simply, the lives of the wealthy and well connected are better documented than those passengers who traveled in Steerage. In assembling our cast of characters, we looked for those who were well known before the tragedy, who occupied positions of prominence, or whose lives in some manner exemplified the era and provided an unsuspected bridge to themes still prevalent in the twenty-first century. By focusing tightly on this select group, we have tried to illuminate their lives and times, painting in portraits to depict
Lusitania
’s last voyage and hopefully help the ongoing effort to put a much needed and deserved human face to the tragedy.

PROLOGUE

SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1915

A rainy twilight fell over New York City on April 30, 1915. Spring was late that year: indeed, an unexpected blizzard had nearly paralyzed the city three weeks earlier. Rushing crowds filled the slippery sidewalks, dodging puddles and splashing water cast off by passing motorcars. Bells on trolleys clanged, horns honked, and horses pulling elegant carriages snorted and stomped along the wet pavement in a cacophony of sound that formed the city’s own unique symphony of life.

New York City seemed caught in a surreal, parallel universe. Nearly a year earlier, the halcyon days of the Edwardian Era had given way to a new, terrifyingly modern age as the Great War spread across Europe. In muddy fields from East Prussia to Belgium, soldiers exchanged bullets from miserable trenches in a conflict whose scale eclipsed anything ever before witnessed. Despite intense pressure, isolationist, comfortably insular America was still untouched by the distant war. President Woodrow Wilson had insisted that “every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality.” Too many people, he declared, would “excite passion” and try to divide the country into opposing camps.
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Yet official policy could not override widespread worry: how long could America really remain neutral?

Here, in this prosperous, bustling metropolis, a different kind of war was being waged, a conflict between the dying Gilded Age and a new world of clinking cocktails and raucous jazz. Starting in the 1870s, a race of millionaires, speculators, and lavish hostesses invaded New York’s proud old Knickerbocker society, all vying to stun the city with lavish spectacle and voluptuous wealth. The Gilded Age had burst with vibrant color on this sedate and drab world, replacing the “desiccated chocolate” brownstones of respectable society with new palaces of “white and colored marble,” as H. G. Wells marveled.
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The exploits of
The
Mrs. Astor’s famed 400 families of social merit had captivated and amused America for thirty years. They built their ornate palaces on Fifth Avenue and summered in hundred-room Newport “cottages” that, insisted a member, would have made “a Doge of Venice or a Lorenzo de Medici” envious.
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Society reveled in extravagant parties, sleek yachts, and ever more brazen displays of excess. At a time when an average laborer made roughly $500 a year, one hostess spent $420,000 concealing black pearls in the oysters served to her guests; another piled her dining table high with sand and handed out little silver shovels from Tiffany, bidding guests to dig for party favors of emeralds, diamonds, and rubies.
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They gave elaborate dinners for their favorite dogs; dressed as their own servants for balls; unleashed monkeys clad in tuxedos to leap upon startled guests; and had meals served while they sat atop horses in decorous hotel ballrooms.
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Such antics had once entertained and bemused: now, they repelled. The age of the imposing
The
Mrs. Astor had imperceptibly slipped into oblivion. Mansions still marched down Fifth Avenue in a parade of ostentatious Renaissance, Italianate, and French facades, but office blocks like the towering Singer, Woolworth, and Metropolitan Life buildings now dominated. Since the controversial exhibitions at the New York City Armory in 1913, the avant-garde had replaced the sentimental in art. The handsome carriages that had once crowded Fifth Avenue had ceded their places to rumbling trolleys and weaving motorcars. Extravagant balls at Sherry’s and fashionable dinners at Delmonico’s had given way to noisy vaudeville revues, whose flirtatious chorus girls became celebrities. Operatic airs and refined waltzes disappeared, replaced by the popular songs of Irving Berlin, the tinkle of ragtime on a piano, and the exotic, sensuously dangerous coming of the Jazz Age.

Bevies of eager young couples, doing their best to emulate the popular Vernon and Irene Castle, fox-trotted, tangoed, and one-stepped across the city’s nightspots.
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People crowded the burgeoning motion picture houses, watching Mack Sennett’s comedies, the antics of Charlie Chaplin, and the thrilling installments of
The Perils of Pauline
. The undoubted hit of the year was D. W. Griffith’s epic
The Birth of a Nation,
a true spectacle that played to a packed house at Broadway’s Liberty Cinema.
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Lights flashed and glasses clinked as couples danced that Friday evening into Saturday. There was incessant motion across town as well: throughout the night and into dawn, Pier 54 was a hive of activity. Wagons, vans, and trucks clogged the streets along Manhattan’s West Side, stopping in the shadow of the darkened liner. Just three years earlier, this same pier had been the scene of heartrending pathos, as the Cunard liner
Carpathia
arrived bearing the lucky passengers rescued from the sinking of
Titanic
. Now, hour after hour, men deposited cargo, including 250 hefty canvas bags, filled with transatlantic mail.
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Coal barges drew alongside the hull and spilled their loads through hatchway doors amid grimy black clouds. It took an enormous amount of coal to power the ship: at her top speed, she could consume up to a thousand tons a day.
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