Edith wrote later, “This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ‘turn a corner and meet your fate.’ ” She noted, however, that the golf clothes Wilson had been wearing “were not smart.”
Soon afterward Helen invited Edith to a dinner at the White House, set for March 23. Wilson sent his Pierce-Arrow to pick her up and to collect Dr. Grayson as well. Edith wore a purple orchid and sat at Wilson’s right. “He is perfectly charming,” she wrote later, “and one of the easiest and most delightful hosts I have ever known.”
After dinner, the group went upstairs to the second-floor Oval Room for coffee and a fire, “and all sorts of interesting conversation.” Wilson read three poems by English authors, prompting Edith to observe that “as a reader he is unequalled.”
The evening had a profound effect on Wilson. He was entranced. Edith, sixteen years his junior, was an attractive and compelling woman. White House usher Irwin “Ike” Hoover called her an “impressive widow.” That evening, Wilson’s spirits soared.
He had little time to dwell in this new hopeful state, however. Five days later, on March 28, 1915, a British merchant ship, the Falaba, encountered a U-boat commanded by Georg-Günther Freiherr von Forstner, one of Germany’s submarine aces. The ship was small, less than five thousand tons, and carried cargo and passengers bound for Africa. A sharp-eyed lookout first saw the submarine when it was three miles off and alerted the Falaba’s captain, Frederick Davies, who turned his ship full away and ordered maximum speed, just over thirteen knots.
Forstner gave chase. He ordered his gun crew to fire a warning shot.
The Falaba kept running. Now Forstner, using flags, signaled, “Stop or I fire.”
The Falaba stopped. The U-boat approached, and Forstner, shouting through a megaphone, notified Captain Davies that he planned to sink the vessel. He ordered Davies and all aboard—242 souls—to abandon ship. He gave them five minutes.
Forstner maneuvered to within one hundred yards. The last lifeboat was still being lowered when he fired a torpedo. The Falaba sank in eight minutes, killing 104 people including Captain Davies. A passenger by the name of Leon C. Thrasher was believed among the lost, though his body was not recovered. Thrasher was a citizen of the United States.
The incident, condemned as the latest example of German frightfulness, was exactly the kind of thing Wilson had feared, for it held the potential to raise a cry for war. “I do not like this case,” he told his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan. “It is full of disturbing possibilities.”
Wilson’s first instinct was to issue an immediate denunciation of the attack, in sharp language, but subsequent discussion with his cabinet and with Secretary Bryan caused him to hold off. Bryan, a staunch pacifist, proposed that the death of an American who knowingly traveled aboard a British ship through a declared war zone might not even merit protest. To him it seemed the equivalent of an American taking a stroll across the battlefield in France.
In a note to Bryan on Wednesday, April 28, the day after a cabinet meeting at which the Falaba incident was discussed, Wilson wrote, “Perhaps it is not necessary to make formal representations in the matter at all.”
LEON THRASHER, the American passenger, was still missing, his body presumably adrift in the Irish Sea. It was one more beat in a cadence that seemed to be growing faster and louder.
LUSITANIA
SUCKING TUBES AND THACKERAY
THROUGHOUT THE WEEK BEFORE DEPARTURE, PASSENGERS who lived in New York started packing in earnest, while the many who came from elsewhere began arriving in the city by train, ferry, and automobile. They found a city steaming with heat—91 degrees on Tuesday, April 27, with four days yet to go until “Straw Hat Day,” Saturday, May 1, when a man could at last break out his summer hats. Men followed this rule. A Times reporter did an impromptu visual survey of Broadway and spotted only two straw hats. “Thousands of sweltering, uncomfortable men plodded along with their winter headgear at all angles on their uncomfortable heads or carried in their hot, moist hands.”