The name was Hertz, for Douglas Hertz, a young man who was returning to England to join the South Lancashire Regiment, after living for a time in St. Louis. The sinking crowned a troubled period for Hertz. In 1913, he had lost his wife in a train wreck on their honeymoon; that same year, his mother had died in a house fire.
Belle saw no sign of her husband.
AFTER HELPING to launch a starboard boat, No. 13, Seaman Leslie Morton went to help with a second, also on the starboard side. He and another sailor, under the direction of a petty officer, struggled to help passengers get across the gap between the ship and the boat. The final angle of list, by Morton’s estimate, was 30 degrees. Sixty passengers made it. Asked later how this feat had been achieved, Morton answered, “If you had to jump six or seven feet, or certainly drown, it is surprising what ‘a hell of a long way’ even older people can jump.”
Morton worked the stern falls, as the petty officer directed the operation. The ship was still moving at 4 or 5 knots. The men lowered the lifeboat until its keel was just above the surface, and then, in accord with procedures for just this kind of circumstance, they let the lines play out so that when the boat touched water it would slip backward.
It drifted back one boat’s length. The falls and the forward motion of the ship caused the boat to ride against the ship’s hull. Morton was just about to climb down the stern ropes to clear the lifeboat when a group of less experienced men—Morton thought they might be stewards or waiters—began lowering the next boat back and lost control of its descent. The boat dropped 30 feet onto Morton’s boat and the passengers within.
There was no time “to waste in either horror or sympathy,” Morton wrote. He looked for his brother, amid mounting confusion, “many people losing their hold on the deck and slipping down and over the side, and a gradual crescendo of noise building up as the hundreds and hundreds of people began to realize that, not only was she going down very fast but in all probability too fast for them all to get away.”
He found his brother at another lifeboat and helped him to lower it. The brothers then slid down and released the falls and used boat hooks to try shoving the lifeboat away from the hull. The passengers wouldn’t let go of the ship. They held tight to various ropes and to the deck rails, “in some mistaken belief,” Morton wrote, “that they would be safer hanging on to the big ship rather than entrusting their lives in the small lifeboat.” The Lusitania’s deck came steadily downward.
Something snagged the gunnel of the lifeboat and began tipping it toward the ship’s hull. “The time for heroics was obviously past,” Morton wrote, “and my brother yelled at the top of his voice, ‘I’m going over the side, Gertie.’ ”
The brothers waved at each other, then both dove into the sea. Neither wore a life jacket.
Morton wrote, “As I hit the water, and it is strange what one thinks about in times of stress, I suddenly remembered that my brother had never been able to swim.”
Morton came to the surface and looked for his brother, “but seeing the turmoil of bodies, women and children, deck chairs, lifebelts, lifeboats, and every describable thing around me, coupled with no less than 35,000 tons of Lusitania breathing very heavily down my neck and altogether too close for my liking,” he began to swim. Hard.
He glanced back. Two images became impressed in his memory. One was of a collapsible lifeboat slipping from the ship, still sheathed in its protective cover; the other, of Captain Turner in full dress uniform still on the bridge as the Lusitania began its final dive.
LAURIAT SWAM clear of the ship—or thought he had. He turned to watch its final moments. The bow was submerged, and slipping deeper into the sea; the stern was high in the air. The list to starboard had become so pronounced that passengers could stand upright only by propping themselves against the starboard rail, where they accumulated three or four deep in a long line that extended up toward the stern. Another witness called this assemblage “a little army.” If anyone still harbored a hope that the Lusitania would not sink, that hope now failed.
Passengers back toward the stern, and therefore higher, watched as those ahead in line lost their grip on the rail. Those wearing life jackets floated, as if levitated from the deck; the many without jackets attempted to swim or sank from view.
Third Officer Bestic, still aboard, felt the ship make a “peculiar lurching movement” and looked down the deck. “An all-swallowing wave, not unlike a surf comber on a beach, was rushing up the boat deck, enveloping passengers, boats, and everything that lay in its path,” he wrote. A mass wail rose from those it engulfed. “All the despair, terror and anguish of hundreds of souls passing into eternity composed that awful cry.”