THE MANY unidentified bodies in the three morgues presented Cunard officials with an awkward predicament, and one that needed to be addressed quickly. The bodies—some 140 of them—had begun to decompose, at a rate quickened by the warm spring weather. The company decided on a mass burial. Each body would have its own coffin; mothers and babies would share; but all would be interred together in three separate excavations, lettered A, B, and C, in the Old Church Cemetery on a hillside outside Queenstown.
The date was set for Monday, May 10. All the previous day and throughout the night, soldiers dug the graves and undertakers coffined the bodies, leaving the lids off as long as possible to encourage last-minute identifications. Owing to a shortage of vehicles, the coffins were transported in shifts beginning early Monday morning, but three coffins were held back for the actual funeral procession, which was to begin in the afternoon.
Trains brought mourners and the curious. Shops closed for the day and pulled their blinds and fastened their shutters. Ship captains ordered flags hung at half-mast. As the procession advanced through Queenstown, a military band played Chopin’s “Funeral March.” Clerics led the cortege, among them Father Cowley Clark of London, himself a survivor of the disaster. Soldiers and mourners followed. U.S. consul Frost walked as well. Soldiers and citizens lined the entire route, standing bareheaded as a measure of respect. The road they followed passed through hills of vivid green stippled with wildflowers and slashed here and there by the garish yellow of blooming gorse. The sky was clear and without cloud, and in the distant harbor boats dipped and nodded in a light breeze, “a picture of peace,” wrote one reporter, “that gave no hint of the recent tragedy.”