The procession bearing the three coffins arrived at the cemetery about three o’clock and stopped at the edge of the graves. The many other coffins, each an elongated diamond of elm, had been laid neatly within, arranged in two tiers, the body numbers and locations carefully mapped so that if the photographs and lists of personal effects cataloged by Cunard led to subsequent identifications, the families would at least know the exact whereabouts of their loved ones.
As the three coffins were lowered into the graves, the crowd sang “Abide with Me.” Gunfire followed, from a ceremonial guard, and a squad of buglers played “The Last Post,” the British military’s equivalent of taps. Soldiers converged and began filling the graves. A photograph shows a line of small boys standing on the hillock of excavated soil, watching with avid interest as the soldiers below fill the crevices between coffins.
It was lovely, and dignified, and deeply moving, but this mass burial imposed a psychic cost on kin who learned, belatedly, that their own loved ones were interred within. Cunard’s final count found that of these anonymous dead, about half were later identified using personal effects and photographs. For some families the idea of their kin resting alone in that far-off terrain was too hard to bear. The family of Elizabeth A. Seccombe, a thirty-eight-year-old woman from Petersborough, New Hampshire, pleaded with Consul Frost for help in retrieving her and bringing her home. She was the daughter of a Cunard captain who had died some years earlier. Her body was No. 164, buried on May 14 in grave B, sixth row, upper tier.
Frost did what he could. He argued that Seccombe’s location in the grave made her coffin particularly easy to locate. Though very much a miser when it came to U.S. funds, he went so far as to offer ￡100 to cover costs.
The British government was willing, but the local council said no, and its decision held sway. In part, the council was influenced by local superstition—“religious prejudice,” Frost called it—but mainly it did not want to set a precedent. At least twenty other families had sought to disinter their loved ones and had been refused. The council’s stance, Frost wrote, “is incomprehensible to me.”
The greatest burden by far was borne by the relatives of the many passengers and crew whose bodies were never found. Of the 791 passengers designated by Cunard as missing, only 173 bodies, or about 22 percent, were eventually recovered, leaving 618 souls unaccounted for. The percentage for the crew was even more dismal, owing no doubt to the many deaths in the luggage room when the torpedo exploded.