Edith’s resistance, meanwhile, had begun to waver, but amid a crush of conflicting anxieties. The fact Wilson was president of the United States placed a barrier in her thoughts that she found hard to overcome. His power, his ever-present detail of Secret Service men, his visibility in the public eye, and corollary restraints on his private behavior all complicated matters, as did the simple fact that any woman inclined to marry Wilson was likely to have her motives questioned, given his high office. “There was the fear,” she wrote, “that some might think I loved him for that; then the terrible thought of the publicity inevitably entailed; and the feeling that I had no training for the responsibilities such a life held.” On the other hand, she felt deep affection for the man. “Oh, so many things swarmed in my thoughts,” she wrote; “and yet each time I was with him I felt the charm of his presence.” She was enthralled, too, by the trust he placed in her and his willingness to discuss with her “all the problems which confronted him and the fears, even then, that the fires of war raging in Europe might leap the Atlantic and involve our own country.”
They could not see each other too often, lest they draw “unwelcome publicity,” she wrote; and when they did see each other, it had to be at the White House, or during a drive with a chaperone always at hand, whether Helen Bones, or Dr. Grayson, or Wilson’s daughter Margaret. A car full of Secret Service men invariably followed. The only wholly private means of communication was by mail, and so their letters continued, his ever passionate and filled with declamations of love, hers welcoming and warm but at the same time curiously distant.
IN BERLIN, Germany’s Chancellor Bethmann was growing increasingly perturbed. The war in the trenches was not going well, and he feared that Germany’s U-boats might make things much worse. A month earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm had issued an order that permitted U-boat commanders to keep their vessels submerged when attacking merchant ships in order to avoid the danger inherent in surfacing and approaching suspected enemy freighters to first confirm their identity. The effect was to give commanders still more freedom. Combined with improved spring weather at sea, this had led to a startling increase in attacks on neutrals, like that against the American tanker Gulflight.
On Thursday, May 6, Bethmann wrote a letter to Germany’s top naval official, in which he complained that over the preceding week U-boats had sunk “more and more” neutral ships. “This fact is eminently bound not only to alter our good relations with the neutral states but also to create the gravest complications and, finally, to throw those states into the enemy’s camp.” The empire’s situation was “tense” enough as it was, he wrote, and warned, “I cannot accept the responsibility of seeing our relations with the neutral states further worsened, to which the pursuit of the submarine war in its present form will certainly lead.”
He demanded that the naval high command “take necessary measures to guarantee that our submarines will in all circumstances avoid attacking neutral ships.”
THAT EVENING, the Washington Times reported that four more ships had been sunk, including two neutral steamers and an English schooner. Two of the ships had been attacked by submarines; the other two were destroyed by a sea mine and shellfire from a German warship.
THE LUSITANIA was now two days out from Liverpool. At midnight that Thursday, May 6, the powerful German transmitter at Norddeich broadcast a message to all U-boats that the Lusitania would begin its return trip to New York on May 15.
This message was intercepted and relayed to Room 40.