Room 40’s code breakers found it a simple matter to follow U-20 through the first day or so of its voyage: Schwieger’s wireless man repeated the boat’s position fourteen times in twenty-four hours.
Room 40 did not have to look far to find the reason for this new and dangerous assault by Germany’s U-boats. As it happened, it was the German navy’s response to a ruse concocted by intelligence chief Blinker Hall himself, in the application of what he described as one of the first principles of the profession, “that of mystifying and misleading the enemy.”
LUSITANIA
A CAVALCADE OF PASSENGERS
BY SATURDAY, MAY 1, THE HEAT WAVE HAD DISSIPATED. The morning was cold, the sky pewter. The temperature made it easier for passengers arriving at Cunard’s Pier 54 to transport their belongings, for now they could simply wear their heavy coats, rather than bearing them draped over their arms along with all the other things they carried, their canes, umbrellas, valises, parcels, books, and babies, all in evidence on the sidewalk outside the terminal, as a long black line of taximeter cabs emerged from Eleventh Avenue and pulled close to the curb. Large bags traveled on the floor beside the drivers and were hauled from the cabs by squat, strong-looking men in open jackets and bully caps.
All these things were captured on film by a motion-picture camera stationed just outside the entrance to the terminal. Passengers crossed its plane of view: men in topcoats, fedoras, and snap-brim caps; women with large hats mounded with sewn-on flowers; toddlers bundled as if for the Arctic, one with a knit cap pulled low over the ears. Now and then a face appeared in startling closeup, with that look travelers have always had over time, stern, concentrating, trying to pay the cabbie, hold the cane and gloves—the empty glove fingers flexing like a cow’s udder—and still keep track of the suitcase and trunk receding into the Cunard terminal.
At the far side of the building, the Lusitania’s hull rose high above the wharf in a black wall of steel and rivets. The ship seemed as indestructible as anything that could be imagined, even for an age that imagined well and placed so much trust in immensity and invention.
The furnaces in its boiler rooms flared as firemen raised steam for departure; its funnels exhausted braids of gray smoke into the mist above.
AS ALWAYS there were passengers who had achieved fame, and their arrival created a stir among the thousands of well-wishers, kin, and spectators now gathered along the wharf to see the ship off. Cunard had built grandstands to honor the custom, and these were full as always; they afforded a view not just of the ship but of a portion of Lower Manhattan and the wharves and vessels jutting from the shore on both sides of the Hudson. Just north stood the piers of the White Star Line, which three years earlier, almost to the month, were to have received the Titanic. Among the spectators the attention given to the Lusitania and its passengers was more acute than usual, given the German warning published in the city’s papers that morning.
Here came Charles Frohman, the theater impresario, who had made Ethel Barrymore a star and had brought the play Peter Pan to America, for which he dressed Maude Adams in a woodsy tunic with a broad collar, and in so doing forever engraved a particular image of the boy in the world’s imagination. Frohman also produced the stage show Sherlock Holmes, with William Gillette as its namesake hero, with deerstalker cap and meerschaum pipe. Frohman, wearing a blue double-breasted suit, walked with a marked limp and used a cane. A friend of his also came aboard, Marguerite Lucile Jolivet, twenty-five years old, known universally by her stage and film name, Rita Jolivet. Though she had already performed in Shakespearean plays in London, including a turn as Juliet, and had appeared in several silent films made in Italy, she was still only a fledgling star, but Frohman liked her, and his interest virtually assured her a vibrant career. She was traveling now to Europe to act in several more Italian films.