He walked across Lafayette Square past the cannon-surrounded statue of Andrew Jackson on a rearing horse, then continued up Sixteenth Street toward Dupont Circle, Edith’s neighborhood. He passed newsboys hawking fresh “Extra” editions of the city’s newspapers that already carried reports of the sinking. At Corcoran Street, Wilson made a right turn, then headed back down Fifteenth to return to the White House, where he went to his study.
At ten o’clock the worst news arrived: an estimate that the Lusitania attack had taken as many as one thousand lives. That some of the dead would prove to be Americans seemed certain. The thing Wilson had feared had come to pass.
AS U-20 traveled west, Schwieger took a final look back through his periscope.
He wrote in his War Log: “Astern in the distance, a number of lifeboats active; nothing more seen of the Lusitania. The wreck must have sunk.” He gave the location as 14 sea miles from the Old Head of Kinsale, 27 sea miles from Queenstown, in waters 90 meters deep, about 300 feet.
What he did not know was that among his many victims were the three German stowaways arrested on the first morning of the Lusitania’s voyage. The men were still locked away in the ship’s improvised brig.
LUSITANIA
ADRIFT
A LIFE JACKET DID NOT GUARANTEE SURVIVAL. MANY who entered the sea had their jackets on incorrectly and found themselves struggling to keep their heads out of the water. The struggle did not last long, and soon survivors who did manage to outfit themselves properly found themselves swimming among bodies upended in poses their owners would have found humiliating. Able-bodied seaman E. S. Heighway wrote, with a degree of exaggeration, “I saw myself hundreds of men & women dead with life belts on in the water after the ship had gone.”
For children—those who did not drown outright—the killer was hypothermia. Fifty-five degrees was not nearly as cold as the water confronted by passengers of the Titanic, but it was cold enough to lower the core temperatures of people large and small to dangerous levels. A drop in the body’s internal temperature of just 3 or 4 degrees, from the norm of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit to 95, was enough to kill over time. Passengers in the water found that their lower bodies went numb within minutes, despite the warm sun above. Those who wore coats under their life jackets were better off than those who had stripped down, for coats and other warm clothing, even though wet, provided insulation for the heart. Thin people, old people, women, and children, and especially infants, lost body heat the fastest, as did any passenger who had drunk wine or spirits with lunch. With the onset of hypothermia, those in the water began to shiver severely; as the danger rose, the shivering subsided. With a water temperature of 55 degrees, adults could be expected to experience exhaustion and loss of consciousness within one to two hours; after this the skin took on a blue-gray pallor, the body became rigid, and the heart rate slowed to almost imperceptible levels. Death soon followed.
DWIGHT HARRIS swam toward an overturned lifeboat. “The most frightful thing of all was the innumerable dead bodies floating about in the water!,” he wrote. “Men, women and children. I had to push one or two aside to reach the lifeboat!”
On the way he came across a little boy, Percy Richards, calling for his father. “I swam to him and told him not to cry, and to take hold of my collar, which he did. The bravest little chap I ever saw.”
Harris pulled the child with him to the overturned boat and pushed him onto its hull. Nearly exhausted by the effort, Harris climbed on after him. “I could hardly move, my limbs were so cold!—I must have been in the water about one-half to three quarters of an hour.”
He spotted one of the ship’s collapsible lifeboats, manned by two sailors and partially filled with passengers. He called to them. Soon the boat was near enough for Harris and the boy to climb aboard. The sailors picked up a dozen more survivors but had to leave others in the water because the collapsible was on the verge of being swamped. “The cries for help from those in the water were most awful!” Harris wrote.
No ships were in sight.
AS THE LUSITANIA descended, Margaret Mackworth was pulled along with it. The water around her seemed black, and a fear suffused her of being trapped by debris. She became frightened when something snagged her hand, but then she realized it was the life jacket she had been holding for her father. She swallowed seawater.