ON THE BRIDGE, Turner received a new message from the Admiralty that confused things further: “Submarines 5 miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at 10 A.M.”
The Lusitania had already passed Cape Clear. If correct, this message indicated the threat might also be past—the submarines, plural again, were behind and heading out to sea. Captain Turner congratulated himself on apparently missing these in the fog. He knew that even if their commanders now spotted the smoke from the ship’s funnels and turned around, they would have no hope of catching up.
While this offered some comfort, there was still the matter of the earlier report of submarines active in the St. George’s Channel, south of the Coningbeg Light Vessel, dead ahead.
AT HIS PERISCOPE, Schwieger made a fast 360-degree sweep of the sea, then rotated the apparatus until he found the ship that had just passed overhead. It was a prize indeed, and not just in terms of tonnage. Long and narrow, with a razor bow, it sliced easily through the flat sea. Its funnels blew thick black smoke that showed its engine crew were working hard to achieve maximum speed. Schwieger did not need his war pilot, Lanz, to help identify this ship. It was a large armored cruiser, British, of about 6,000 tons.
He let it go. He had no choice. At his top submerged speed of 9 knots, Schwieger had no chance of catching the cruiser. Even his surface maximum of 15 knots would not have helped, for the cruiser was speeding away at what he estimated to be 18 knots. And had Schwieger for some reason been foolhardy enough to try surfacing, the warship’s guns would have sunk his boat within minutes.
Schwieger followed anyway, at periscope depth, in case the cruiser happened to change its course in a manner that would allow him to overtake it and launch an attack. But the ship ran at top speed, zigzagging, and soon was far in the distance. Schwieger later told his friend Valentiner how at this point, exasperated, he unleashed a torrent of profanity. “After the early days of the war,” Valentiner explained, “you rarely had a chance to loose a torpedo at any warship as big as a cruiser, and many a U-boat never caught sight of one during the entire war.” The British navy, like its German counterpart, kept its big warships locked safely away “and did not send them roaming around to act as good targets for U-boats.”
The ship was in fact the HMS Juno, an old cruiser now serving as a coastal patrol vessel. It was based in Queenstown and was speeding back to port precisely because of the latest submarine alerts issued by the Admiralty. As it traveled, its crew took a routine measure of water temperature and found it to be 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
“After I was through swearing,” Schwieger told Valentiner, “I noticed that the fog was lifting. Presently I could see blue sky.”
Schwieger recorded the encounter at 12:15 P.M. Half an hour later, he surfaced and returned to his westward course, to continue his voyage home. Conservation of fuel was now a priority. He could not delay—the journey back to Emden would take another week.
By now the weather had cleared to a degree that was almost startling. “Unusually good visibility,” Schwieger noted; “very beautiful weather.”
On the horizon, something new caught his eye.
LONDON; WASHINGTON
THE KING’S QUESTION
IN LONDON, ON FRIDAY, COLONEL HOUSE, STILL ACTING in his role as President Wilson’s unofficial emissary, met with Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary, and the two traveled to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for a walk among the garden’s beds of spring flowers, its alleys, or “vistas,” of cedars, and its most celebrated structure, the Palm House, an immense conservatory built of glass and iron said to have influenced the design of London’s Crystal Palace. The two men discussed the submarine war. “We spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk,” House wrote, “and I told him if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into war.”
Oddly enough, the subject came up again a couple of hours later, when Colonel House paid a call on King George V at Buckingham Palace.
The king turned to House at one point, and asked, “Suppose they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers aboard?”
EARLY THAT MORNING, Churchill, having concluded his naval negotiations with his French and Italian counterparts, left Paris on his journey to the headquarters of Britain’s forces in France, at St. Omer, where Sir John French was planning an offensive against German forces at Aubers despite a severe shortage of artillery shells.