Wilful Murder by Diana Preston

Author:Diana Preston [Preston, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I, World
ISBN: 9781446423462
Google: 4PzWcF1tensC
Amazon: B004H4WO22
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-24T13:00:00+00:00

17 - WAVE UPON WAVE

As the ship’s list increased, so did the despair of those still trapped on board. Fireman O’Connell, running along the deck, saw two women crying and instinctively put his arms around them. The older woman insisted on going into one of the salons, and sat down helplessly in a wicker chair, water lapping at her feet and the detritus of the once elegant room floating past her.

Many women refused to be parted from their men. Harold and Lucy Taylor were standing at the rail, near a lifeboat loaded with women. ‘“I won’t go, I won’t!” Lucy was screaming. Her husband extricated himself from her desperate embrace, kissed her, and dropped her into the boat.’ As the boat pulled away she could see him waving to her and she ‘waved back as he went down with the boat’. Jack Welsh insisted that his new love Gerda Nielson climb into a lifeboat. When he saw her flung from it he dived in to try to save her. In the last moments some women were just bundled willy-nilly over the rail into the boats — one passenger watched as a determined man ‘shoved this woman over — all I saw was her feet’. Another who had fallen on her back on the wet decks and thought her spine was broken was in danger of being trampled to death. A crewman seized her and pushed her into a boat. The dazed woman heard a steward shouting, ‘Passengers be calm, the boat will not sink!’

Many threw propriety to the winds and stripped off, believing their chances of survival would be better if they were wearing fewer clothes. One Mr Stroud, an American veteran of ‘the Mexican war’, ripped the clothes off his wife so that ‘all she had on was her stockings and her life belt’. Mrs Stroud was already numb with shock. She was one of the many mothers unable to find their children in the general confusion. Harold Boulton realised that the ship was fast sinking and told the Lassetters that ‘the only thing to do is to jump’. He instructed a shaken Mrs Lassetter to remove her skirt and to clasp hands with her son and himself. The three then jumped some ninety feet into the water below. One man wearing only his underwear dived from the rail.

With the ship’s bronze screws and her rudders now clearly visible above the water, others tried to slide down wires and ropes including the log line which was trailed astern to record the ship’s run. After the first six feet of rope the line was made of wire; the sharp metal line flayed the skin from people’s hands and feet as the speed of their descent increased. Many survivors were scarred for life. Red Cross volunteer Lorna Pavey, who just minutes earlier had been quietly eating a grapefruit in the second-class dining-room, slid bloodily and painfully down one wire. Her ‘skirt seemed to make a balloon in the water when she dropped’.

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