Elsewhere at Helles, Sgt. Denis Moriarty and his First Royal Munster Fusiliers fought off a Turkish assault that began at ten o’clock at night. “They crept right up to our trenches, they were in thousands, and they made the night hideous with yells and shouting, ‘Allah, Allah!’ We could not help mowing them down.” Some managed to reach Moriarty’s trench. “When the Turks got to close quarters the devils used hand grenades and you could only recognize our dead by their identity discs. My God, what a sight met us when day broke this morning.” By the time the Allied invading force would finally be evacuated, in January 1916, some 265,000 Allied troops and 300,000 Turks would be dead, wounded, or missing.
Men in the ships massed offshore fared little better. The armada was an impressive one—hundreds of vessels, ranging from minesweepers to giant dreadnoughts. But many were in easy range of Turkish artillery embedded in high ground, which dropped thousands of tons of high explosives onto their decks. The French battleship Suffren was struck by a shell that destroyed a gun turret and ignited a fire deep within its hull; another shell destroyed its forward funnel. Rear Adm. émile Guépratte descended from the bridge to survey the damage and bolster the morale of his sailors. “The scene,” he wrote, “was tragically macabre: the image of desolation, the flames spared nothing. As for our young men, a few minutes ago, so alert, so self-confident, all now [lay] dead on the bare deck, blackened burnt skeletons, twisted in all directions, no trace of any clothing, the fire having devoured all.”
Aboard the Lusitania, there was quiet. There were books, and cigars, and fine foods, afternoon tea, and the easy cadence of shipboard life: strolling the deck, chatting at the rails, doing crochet, and just sitting still in a deck chair in the sea breeze. Now and then a ship appeared in the distance; closer at hand, whales.
BACK IN New York, on Wednesday, May 5, Cunard at last provided the customs office with the Lusitania’s full cargo manifest. Unlike the initial one-page version filed by Captain Turner before departure, this “Supplemental Manifest” was twenty-four pages long and listed over three hundred consignments.
Here were muskrat skins, nuts, beeswax, bacon, salt brick, dental goods, cases of lard, and barrels of beef tongues; machinery from the Otis Elevator Company; and enough candy—157 barrels of it—to populate the fantasies of all the schoolchildren in Liverpool. The manifest also listed one case of “Oil Paintings,” these accompanying first-class passenger Sir Hugh Lane, a Dublin art collector. To identify this consignment merely as oil paintings was an understatement. The paintings were insured for $4 million (about $92 million today) and were rumored to have included works by Rubens, Monet, Titian, and Rembrandt.
More problematic, but entirely legal under U.S. neutrality laws, were the 50 barrels and 94 cases of aluminum powder and 50 cases of bronze powder, both highly flammable under certain conditions, as well as 1,250 cases of shrapnel-laden artillery shells made by the Bethlehem Steel Company, bound for the British army, and badly needed on the western front, where British forces were hampered by a severe shortage of artillery ammunition. (Wrote Churchill, “The army in France was firing away shells at a rate which no military administration had ever been asked to sustain.”) The shrapnel shells were essentially inert. They contained only a minimum bursting charge; their associated fuses were packed separately and stored elsewhere. The cartridges that held the powerful explosives needed to propel the shells from a gun were not among the ship’s cargo; these would be attached later, at an arsenal in Britain.
Also aboard, according to the manifest, were 4,200 cases of Remington rifle ammunition, amounting to 170 tons.
U-20
AT LAST
THROUGHOUT THE MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, heavy fog lingered over the sea off Ireland. From 4:00 A.M. on, every time Schwieger checked on the weather through his periscope all he saw was a dark opacity. He held U-20 on a southerly course and kept its speed slow, probably about 5 knots, to conserve battery power. At 8:25 A.M. Schwieger gauged visibility as good enough to bring the boat to the surface, though banks of fog persisted all around him.
His crew now decoupled the two electric engines and engaged the diesels to bring U-20 to cruising speed and recharge the batteries. Somewhere off to his left, in the murk, was the southwest coast of Ireland, here a phalanx of stone cliffs jutting into the North Atlantic. He would soon pass Valentia Island, where the British had built a powerful wireless transmitter. Schwieger’s own wireless man would by now be picking up strong signals from the Valentia tower, but could not read the codes in which they were sent.