Lusitania (39 page)

Here lay Charles Frohman, with a “most beautiful and peaceful smile” on his face.
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Paul and Gladys Crompton, along with their six children and nursemaid, Dorothy Allen, all perished in the sinking. Only the bodies of nine-month-old Peter, six-year-old John, and seventeen-year-old Stephen were recovered. Frederick Orr-Lewis identified Frances Stephens, who still wore her rope of magnificent pearls around her neck, but there was no trace of her young grandson, John.

Annie Adams searched for her husband, Henry, but to no avail; honeymooners Leslie and Stewart Mason were found in one of the morgues. “I made the trip through the morgues for several days,” Belle Naish recalled, “in search of my husband’s body. I never saw him again after I turned toward him following the last explosion. The sights I saw in the morgue are the most terrible recollections that I can ever have. They will remain with me until my dying day.”
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Only Leslie Morton had an unexpectedly pleasant experience. Searching up and down the rows for his brother, he happened to look up and see him across the room, walking slowly between piles of corpses. “It was quite a meeting!” Morton later wrote.
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Sunday, May 9, was Mothers’ Day. In great pain from her broken collarbone, Marguerite, Lady Allan waited in a local hospital for word of her daughters Anna and Gwendolyn. She held on to hope:
Spero
(“I Hope”) was the Allan family motto, carved into stone above Ravenscrag’s proud doorway.
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Such was her social importance that even the prime minister of Canada received a report that Lady Allan was “considered to be holding her own splendidly.” In these days, Queenstown was a city of rumors, and there were early reports that both Anna and Gwendolyn were safe.
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Still, they failed to appear. Finally, George Slingsby volunteered to search for them in the morgues. It was an emotional ordeal: Slingsby knew Anna and Gwendolyn quite well, but he was so traumatized by the rows of corpses that he mistakenly identified “two girls, bloated and mottled and wearing vests,” as the Allan daughters. Disheartened, he could not bring himself to tell Lady Allan; instead, a doctor informed her that her daughters were dead.
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“I am much too upset to talk,” Marguerite told a reporter. “It is a most terrible thing to look back on those scenes.” The Germans, she added, “must have intended to drown us all.”
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Finally, on May 12, Marguerite Allan left Queenstown for a hospital in Dublin; a few days after, Gwendolyn’s body washed ashore, but Anna was never found.
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Tending to the recovered bodies became a problem. The corpses of “important Americans,” wrote Wesley Frost, needed to be embalmed for shipping back to the United States. Apparently, though, no one in Queenstown knew how to do this. Finally, Frost hired a surgeon from the University College Medical School in Cork to do the work, for the astronomical fee of £80 per body.
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The first funerals took place on Monday; even with reinforcements sent from Dublin, the supply of caskets ran out, and officials set soldiers to work hastily building pine boxes. Shops closed out of respect while the long, grim cortege of coffin after coffin, borne by hearses, wagons, carts, and trucks, made its way over Queenstown’s cobbled streets as crowds stood with hats off and heads bowed and church bells tolled. A major in the Royal Irish Infantry walked at the head of the procession, followed by Protestant and Catholic clergy, representatives from Cunard and the Admiralty, local officials, and soldiers as a band played the mournful dirge of Chopin’s “Funeral March.” After a requiem service at St. Coleman’s Cathedral, the procession made its way some two miles to the Old Church Cemetery, where mass graves had been dug the previous day. One by one, the coffins were lowered; there were so many that they were stacked atop each other.
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There were other noises amidst the sobs and funeral dirges clinging to Queenstown: voices loudly condemning Cunard,
Lusitania
’s crew, the British Admiralty, and Captain Turner. Cunard took a carefully measured response. Accounts were opened at some shops in Queenstown so that survivors could buy clothing, and temporary housing was commandeered for them. Representatives took names of survivors, contacted relatives, and made arrangements for passengers to continue on to Great Britain.
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Yet when it came to practicalities, Cunard offended more than they comforted.

Wesley Frost complained that “the search for floating bodies has been wretchedly managed.” Neither Admiralty representatives nor Cunard made any effort to search after Friday midnight. A full twenty-four hours elapsed before Cunard dispatched a tug late Saturday night; it returned within a few hours, never having reached the scene of the disaster. Infuriated, Frost finally told a Cunard agent that continued failure to act would result in serious “diplomatic intervention.” Finally, late Monday—some seventy-four hours after the tragedy—a more thorough search began. Cunard and the Admiralty, Frost noted, “each appear willing to shift responsibility to the other.”
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When Michael Byrne asked “the Cunard Company about compensation for my personal effects, they said to file a claim with the Admiralty and at the termination of war, they would collect it for me. In answer, I said I bought my ticket from the Cunard Company, and not from the Admiralty.”
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This dismissive attitude was made more infuriating as, over the next few weeks, officials in Queenstown sold off
Lusitania
’s six lifeboats, and Cunard billed them, demanding immediate compensation.
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After landing in Queenstown, Cunard officials had quickly shuffled a stunned Captain Turner off to a secluded room above the main bank. He tried to remain hidden, though one enterprising journalist managed to corner him on the street and ask what had happened. “It is the fortune of war!” was all the captain said before rushing away.
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One local official described him as “a broken man,” clad in a “badly-fitting old suit,” dazed and traumatized by his experiences.
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The sense of anger was palpable. Captain Turner got an early taste of it when he dared venture out of his temporary lodgings and into the town. One survivor, seeing him shopping, accosted the beleaguered captain. “You should be worrying about a hat, when so many of us have lost everything we own!” she shouted. “Why, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
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Majority opinion, reported the
New York Tribune,
was “avowedly hostile to Captain Turner, the Cunard Company, and the authorities.” Many people declared that Turner “had no business” sailing his ship so close to the shore, and at such a slow speed. He and his crew had “insisted that there was no danger” and prevented the lifeboats from being quickly and safely launched. Nor had the Admiralty provided “an adequate escort.”
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In those first days, frustrated and mourning survivors did not shy away from voicing such bleakly disturbing views of the disaster. “The standard of human efficiency is far below what we are entitled to expect!” David Thomas thundered at Queenstown. What had happened aboard
Lusitania,
he said, was “outrageous, simply outrageous.”
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His daughter agreed, thinking that “the accident could very possibly have been avoided and that in any event, the loss of life had been pretty well doubled by lack of organization on board.” Margaret Mackworth railed against “the intolerable British stupidity, which had made the catastrophe so much worse than it need have been.”
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Privately, Vice Admiral Coke complained to Wesley Frost that “Turner should have kept further out,” though the American consul also thought that “the Admiralty had by no means done their full duty by him.”
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“It was outrageous that the
Lusitania
pushed ahead right into the path of danger,” one survivor said in Queenstown.
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“I cannot condemn too strongly the sacrifice of human life,” Carl Foss declared, “mainly through the reduced speed at which
Lusitania
was going at the time.”
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“We lived in a fool’s paradise of disbelief that anything like torpedoes could vitally injure our ship,” George Kessler mused.
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He believed that
Lusitania
’s slow speed contributed to “our risk of being torpedoed,” and he could not understand “why there were no destroyers or patrol boats about.”
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Noting that he spoke with “considerable bitterness,” a reporter quoted Howard Fisher as saying that neither “discipline or precautions were up to the standard.” He did not understand “how the Cunard Company or the Admiralty can hold themselves free from blame for this tragedy. The authorities allowed a great ship, loaded with valuable cargo, to proceed through known dangerous waters without a single torpedo boat as a convoy.”
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Michael Byrne thought that passengers had been “led to the slaughter,” adding, “the slightest precautions were not taken. Either the Cunard Company or the British Admiralty should be held strictly to account.”
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Ogden Hammond railed against Staff Captain Anderson and his orders “not to be alarmed,” which he believed had led many aboard the ship to their deaths.
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Annie Adams, while “not wishing to do anything that might minimize this hideous crime of the Germans,” decided that it was her “duty to my fellow beings to emphasize the lack of provisions for safety and the negligence on the part of the men responsible for our safety in this crisis.” Something, she insisted, “must be done to make a repetition of this unnecessary loss of life impossible.”
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Another survivor was “dumbfounded” on reaching Queenstown and finding boats of the Irish Coastal Patrol “secure and snug in the harbor, with their crews lolling about the decks, while German submarines were blowing up English ships a few hours away.”
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Oliver Bernard’s blood boiled when, walking through Queenstown, he spotted “officers in gold braid” from
Lusitania
. They had, he said, “let all those poor things drown like rats.” His “contempt for the seamanship displayed on that memorable voyage” led him to ponder “deliberate treachery on the part of all who were responsible for the safety of the passengers, to say nothing of the crew.” Yet he was also certain that “whatever happened to
Lusitania,
however the war might end,” British officials, “admirals, generals and the like,” would continue to insist that they were “never in the wrong about anything.”
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*   *   *

Yet while decrying the sinking, few of the American survivors thought that their country should take action. “We were warned by the German Government,” Fisher commented, “and I, for one, do not want any official action by my country.”
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George Kessler thought that the United States must act “in a prompt and manly manner as becomes the dignity of our country,” insisting that something had to be done to protect American honor. But he was also philosophical: “What can America do?” he asked. “Nothing will bring back these people to life. It was cold-blooded, deliberate murder, and nothing else—the greatest murder the world has ever known. How will going to war mend that?”
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As the days passed, distraught, disillusioned survivors finally left the little town, making their ways across the globe. The tragedy continued to hang over Queenstown as remaining survivors haunted hospitals, awaited ships searching for bodies, and repeated harrowing tours of morgues.

“There is no hope of finding him alive now,” Hugh Lane’s sister wrote to a friend. “It is not even certain his dear body can be found.”
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Lane was never recovered, nor were Edgar Gorer, Henry Sonneborn, and Leo Schwabacher. The Vanderbilt family dispatched a lawyer to Queenstown, and offered $1,000 for recovery of Alfred’s body, a sum, said Wesley Frost, “potent to the minds of the fishers.”
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Searchers pulled Marie Depage’s corpse from the sea; on May 12, sailors loaded her coffin, draped in a Belgian flag, aboard a ship to return her to her homeland.
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A week after the disaster, Angela Papadopoulos learned that her husband’s body had been found. There was no sign of Trixie Witherbee’s mother, Mary Brown, and not until June did Trixie learn that the body of a young boy had washed ashore. By this time, his face was unrecognizable, but from a description of the clothing she believed that it was her son, Alfred. An almost unbearably painful ordeal followed, when the father of a
Lusitania
victim claimed that the body was actually that of his son. In the end, Alfred Witherbee prevailed, and the body was buried under his son’s name in the cemetery at Queenstown.
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