An hour later, he and the rest were transferred to a steam side-wheeler, the Flying Fish, which then set out for Queenstown. The survivors crowded into its engine room, for the warmth. Here was Ogden Hammond, the New Jersey real-estate developer. No one had seen his wife. The heat was exquisite, and “and before very long,” reported Arthur Mitchell, the Raleigh Bicycle man, “songs were being sung, indicating not only a spirit of thankfulness but even of gaiety.”
A number of corpses were on board as well: a five-year-old boy named Dean Winston Hodges; two unidentified boys, about two and six years old; and the body of fifteen-year-old Gwendolyn Allan, one of the girls who had helped seaman Morton paint a lifeboat.
DWIGHT HARRIS helped row his collapsible boat toward a distant sailboat. The going was slow and difficult. Another lifeboat got there first and unloaded a cache of survivors and bodies, then came back for Harris and his companions and put them aboard the sailboat as well. Next all were transferred to a minesweeper called the Indian Empire, whose crew spent the next several hours searching for survivors and bodies. When the ship began its return to Queenstown after seven o’clock that evening it carried 170 survivors and numerous dead.
On board, the little boy whom Harris had rescued now found his father, mother, and brother—alive and well. His baby sister, Dora, was lost.
THEODATE POPE awoke to a vision of blazing fire. A small fire, in a stove. She had no recollection of the sinking. She saw a pair of legs in trousers and then heard a man say, “She’s conscious.” Despite the warmth from the stove, tremors rattled her body.
She was in the captain’s cabin of a ship named Julia. Another survivor aboard, Belle Naish, later told Theodate how she came to be there. Crew members had pulled Theodate aboard using boat hooks. Presuming her to be dead, they had left her on deck among other recovered bodies. Naish and Theodate had become friends during the voyage, and when Naish saw Theodate lying there she touched her body and sensed a trace of life. Naish called for help. Two men began trying to revive Theodate. One used a carving knife from the ship’s kitchen to cut off her sodden layers of clothing. The men worked on her for two hours until confident they had revived her—though she remained unconscious. A lurid bruise surrounded her right eye.
There was no sign of Theodate’s companion, Edwin Friend, or of her maid, Emily Robinson.
U-20
PARTING SHOT
LATER, A WOMAN WHO CLAIMED TO BE SCHWIEGER’S FIANCéE told a newspaper reporter that the attack on the Lusitania had left Schwieger a shattered man. (The reporter did not disclose her name.) When Schwieger visited her in Berlin after his return to base, she had no idea, at first, that it was he who had torpedoed the ship. “All we thought of was that one of the fastest and biggest English ships had been sunk, and we were all very glad,” she said. But Schwieger seemed not to share the elation. “Of course, his mother and I saw right away that something dreadful had happened to him. He was so haggard and so silent, and so—different.”
Schwieger told her the story of the attack. “Of course he couldn’t hear anything, but he could see, and the silence of it all in the U-boat was worse than if he could have heard the shrieks. And, of course, he was the only one in the U-boat who could even see. He didn’t dare let any of the others in the U-boat know what was happening.” After the attack he took the boat straight back to Germany, his fiancée said. “He wanted to get away from what he had done. He wanted to get ashore. He couldn’t torpedo another ship.”
The woman’s account, while compelling, stands at odds with Schwieger’s own War Log. If Schwieger felt any sense of remorse, he did not express it by his actions.
Just five minutes after taking his last look at the Lusitania, he spotted a large steamer ahead, coming toward him, and prepared to attack. He was supposed to keep two torpedoes in reserve for the voyage home—ideally one in the bow, one in the stern—but this was an irresistible target, a 9,000-ton tanker. Schwieger ordered full ahead, to position U-20 in front of the ship, stern-first, so that he could use one of his two stern tubes. At 4:08 P.M. he was ready. The shot was lined up perfectly: a 90-degree angle with the target’s course, at a point-blank range of 500 meters, about a third of a mile. “Conditions for our torpedo very favorable,” he wrote in his log; “a miss out of the question.”
He gave the order to fire. The submarine shivered as the torpedo left its tube. Schwieger waited for the sound of impact.
A long silence followed. As the seconds ticked past, he realized something had gone wrong.