His view from the bridge was of water surging over the forecastle below. He told Johnston, “Save yourself.” The time was about 2:25 P.M.—fifteen minutes since impact.
Johnston left the bridge and found one of the ship’s thirty-five life buoys. Water had reached the starboard bridge wing. Johnston entered the sea and was washed across the deck. “I simply had to go wherever the tide took me,” he said.
Turner remained on the bridge.
U-20
SCHWIEGER’S VIEW
“I TOOK MY POSITION AT THE PERISCOPE AGAIN,” SCHWIEGER told his friend Max Valentiner. “The ship was sinking with unbelievable rapidity. There was a terrific panic on her deck. Overcrowded lifeboats, fairly torn from their positions, dropped into the water. Desperate people ran helplessly up and down the decks. Men and women jumped into the water and tried to swim to empty, overturned lifeboats. It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. It was impossible for me to give any help. I could have saved only a handful. And then the cruiser that had passed us was not very far away and must have picked up the distress signals. She would shortly appear, I thought. The scene was too horrible to watch, and I gave orders to dive to twenty meters, and away.”
In his final log entry on the attack, at 2:25 P.M., Schwieger wrote: “It would have been impossible for me, anyhow, to fire a second torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.”
Schwieger directed his U-boat out to sea. His crew was jubilant: they had destroyed the Lusitania, the ship that symbolized British maritime prowess.
LUSITANIA
THE LITTLE ARMY
CERTAIN NOW THAT THE SHIP WOULD SINK, CHARLES Lauriat went back to his cabin at the forward end of B Deck to rescue what he could of his belongings. As he moved along the corridor toward his room, he found vivid evidence of just how much the ship had listed. The floor was canted to a degree that made it impossible to walk without also stepping on the wall. The awkward bulk of his life jacket further impeded his progress. He passed open staterooms whose portholes had once provided views of sky and horizon but now looked down onto water made dark by the shadow of the leaning hull. The only light in the corridor was a shifting, silvery glow raised by sunlight glinting off the sea from beyond the ship’s shadow. Lauriat was startled to see that many of the portholes were open.
His room was a black box. He found his matches and used these to locate his passport and other items he hoped to rescue. He grabbed his leather briefcase with the Dickens Christmas Carol inside but left the Thackeray drawings in his shoe case. He hurried back onto the deck, which now was close to the water.
A lifeboat containing women and children was floating just off his deck, on the starboard side, but had not yet been released from the ropes that tied it to the davits on the boat deck above. This was Boat No. 7. Someone needed to act, and soon, Lauriat realized, before the ship dragged the lifeboat under. He climbed into the boat and placed his briefcase on the bottom, then set about trying to free the stern. The bow remained tethered. Another man, a steward, was struggling to cut it loose with a pocketknife. “The steamer was all the time rapidly settling,” Lauriat recalled, “and to look at the tremendous smokestack hanging out over us only added to the terror of the people in the boat.”
Being this close to the hull brought home just how big the Lusitania truly was. Arthur Mitchell, the Raleigh Bicycle agent who had wanted to hold lifeboat drills for passengers, was in Boat No. 15, four astern of Lauriat’s. He said, “Never could one realize the size of the ship so well as at this moment, her great deck towering above us, and her enormous funnels clear against the sky belching forth smoke which almost blinded the people in the boats around her.”
The ship was still moving but sinking fast, the deck visibly descending. Lauriat stood on a seat in the lifeboat, intending to go forward to help with the bow. The curved arm of a descending davit struck him from behind and knocked him down. He got up, this time mindful of the davit, and moved forward by stepping from seat to seat, forcing his way through the mass of passengers.
The boat seemed to be full of oars—“an infinite number,” he wrote. He stepped on one. It rolled. He fell.