The interior grew warm and close. Fear settled over the men like silt in a tide. “You can bet there was no laughing and singing on board now,” Zentner said. “Each man thought of his home in Germany and how he would never see it again.”
These were the hard moments of command. Schwieger was not permitted to show fear, though he undoubtedly felt it. In such close quarters, to act with anything other than confidence and reassurance would have amplified the fear already at play.
Schwieger ordered, “Reverse engines.”
The engines responded. The boat strained. Steel rasped against the hull. Meanwhile, the propeller sounds above grew more distinct.
Zentner watched the dials and indicators in the control room. “The gauges were the whole world to us now,” he said. “I had never gazed at anything so eagerly before.”
The boat began slowly backing, amid the shriek of steel outside. And then, it was free.
Schwieger ordered ascent to cruising depth, 22 meters, or 72 feet, and full speed ahead. There was relief, until the men realized the propeller sounds above were not fading. The destroyers seemed to know the boat’s exact location. Schwieger ordered a zigzag course, wide to right and left, but the destroyers always followed.
Schwieger traveled blind. He could not attempt to use his periscope because the destroyers would spot it immediately and begin shooting or attempt to ram the boat, or both. Schwieger ordered the helmsmen at the dive planes to maintain as deep a depth as the charts for these seas allowed. The pursuit continued “hour after hour,” Zentner said, with U-20 following “a wild, weird course, going as fast as we could.”
The best hope now was night. As darkness fell on the seas above, the propeller sounds began to fall away until they faded to nothing. Schwieger brought the boat back to periscope depth and took a fast look around, 360 degrees, to make sure no threat was near. This was a strenuous maneuver. The fittings on the periscope, where it jutted through the exterior of the conning tower above, had to be tight to keep water out and to withstand the pressures of a deep dive. Turning the apparatus required strength. The snugness of the fit was never perfect, however: a certain amount of oil-laced water inevitably dripped onto Schwieger’s cap and face.
Once confident that the destroyers were gone, Schwieger ordered U-20 to the surface.
And there the final mystery was solved. In backing from the net, the boat had snagged a cable attached to one of the buoys. The buoy had followed on the sea above like a fisherman’s bobber, revealing to the destroyers’ lookouts every change of course, until darkness at last made the buoy invisible.
Schwieger was lucky. In coming months, the British would begin hanging pods of explosives off their submarine nets.
THROUGHOUT FRIDAY, April 30, as U-20 passed from the Heligoland Bight, Schwieger’s wireless man continued to send messages reporting the submarine’s position, apparently in an effort to determine the maximum range for sending and receiving signals. The last successful exchange was with the Ancona at a distance of 235 sea miles.
By seven that evening the U-boat was well into the North Sea, traversing the Dogger Bank, a seven-thousand-square-mile fishing ground off England. The winds picked up, as did the seas. Visibility diminished.
The submarine passed several fishing boats that flew Dutch flags. Schwieger left them alone. He signed his log, thereby marking the official end of the first day of the cruise.
LUSITANIA
MENAGERIE
THAT FRIDAY, CHARLES LAURIAT LEFT HIS SISTER’S apartment and traveled crosstown to 645 Fifth Avenue to pick up the final component of the collection of items he was bringing to London. He went to the home of a client named William Field, who, despite his address, described himself as a “gentleman farmer.”
A few months earlier, Lauriat had sold Field a rare volume of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published in December 1843. This copy had belonged to Dickens himself and was the one he entered into evidence in a series of legal actions he brought in early 1844 against “literary pirates” who had republished the story without his permission. On the inside of the book’s front and back covers, and elsewhere within, were notes about the lawsuits that had been jotted by Dickens himself. It was an irreplaceable work.
Lauriat wanted to borrow it. Earlier in the year he had corresponded with a London solicitor who had written an account of Dickens’s piracy litigation. The solicitor had asked Lauriat to bring the book with him on his next visit to London so that he could copy the various notations within. Its new owner, Field, “agreed rather unwillingly to do this,” Lauriat wrote, and only after Lauriat promised to guarantee its safety.