Seeking to experience battle firsthand, Churchill hoped to get as close to the front as possible, while not, as he put it, “incurring unjustifiable risks.” He saw shellfire and smoke but little else. “Without actually taking part in the assault it was impossible to measure the real conditions,” he wrote. “To see them you had to feel them, and feeling them might well feel nothing more. To stand outside was to see nothing, to plunge in was to be dominated by personal experiences of an absorbing kind.”
He received his most vivid sense of the war at a “casualty clearing station” in a convent at Merville, about 40 miles east of headquarters, where men “suffering from every form of horrible injury, seared, torn, pierced, choking, dying, were being sorted according to their miseries.” Ambulance after ambulance pulled up at the door. The dead were carried out the back and buried. As Churchill passed the operating theater, he saw doctors at work trepanning a soldier, that is, cutting a hole in his skull. “Everywhere was blood and bloody rags,” Churchill wrote.
AT THE White House, with a fresh spring Friday in the offing, Wilson wrote again to Edith. She had come to dinner the night before, and he was feeling far more optimistic about the possibility of one day marrying her.
“In this clear morning air,” he wrote, “the world seems less in the way, seems less to stand between us.”
THE IRISH SEA
FUNNELS ON THE HORIZON
U-20 MOVED THROUGH A BLUE-ON-BLUE MORNING. THE fog was gone, the sky was empty of clouds, the sea was still. Schwieger trained his binoculars—his Zeiss “godseyes”—on a smudge at the horizon and was startled to see “a forest of masts and stacks,” as he later described it to Max Valentiner. “At first I thought they must belong to several ships,” he said. “Then I saw it was a great steamer coming over the horizon. It was coming our way. I dived at once, hoping to get a shot at it.”
In his log, at 1:20 P.M., Schwieger wrote, “Ahead and to starboard four funnels and two masts of a steamer with course triangular to us comes into sight (coming from SSW it steered towards Galley Head). Ship is made out to be a large passenger steamer.”
Once at periscope depth, Schwieger ordered his maximum submerged speed—9 knots—and set a course “converging with that of the steamer.” The ship was still miles off, however. When the liner was 2 miles away, it veered onto a new course that further widened the gap. Frustrated again, Schwieger wrote, “I had no hope now, even if we hurried at our best speed, of getting near enough to attack her.”
Schwieger followed anyway, just as he had done earlier with the cruiser Juno, in case the liner happened to make another course change that would bring it back onto a converging trajectory.
He called for his pilot, Lanz, to come to the periscope to take a look. Why he felt the need to do so is unclear. The ship was one of the most distinctive on the high seas, and a prize of the first order. He was near despair: this one ship, by itself, would have given him his best monthly tonnage count of the war.
The day remained startlingly clear and still. This meant that Schwieger could not keep the periscope raised for long, lest it be detected by the target’s lookouts or, worse, by a destroyer on patrol. In weather this clear and with seas this smooth there’d be little chance for escape. On two previous occasions, the wake cast by his periscope on a flat sea had forced him to abort attacks. One would-be target, a Royal Mail steamer, had turned toward him with obvious intent to ram, causing him to order a fast dive and full speed away.
Lanz entered the control room. At about the same moment, something happened that Schwieger deemed the equivalent of a miracle.
ON THE Lusitania’s bridge, Captain Turner faced a dilemma that nothing in his long experience at sea had prepared him to manage. If the morning’s wireless messages were correct, there were U-boats directly ahead of him, and behind.
On top of this, he faced a timing problem. Liverpool at this point still lay about 250 nautical miles ahead. At the entrance to the city’s harbor lay the notorious Mersey Bar, which he could pass only at high tide. If Turner accelerated and proceeded at the highest speed he could achieve with only three boiler rooms in operation, or 21 knots, he would arrive far too early. With stopping out of the question, he would be forced to circle in the Irish Sea, smoke billowing from the ship’s three operating funnels in open invitation to any submarine within a radius of twenty miles.