ABOARD THE LUSITANIA, THE CUNARD DAILY BULLETIN kept passengers abreast of war news but, like its counterparts on land, reported only broad movements of forces, as if war were a game played with tiles and dice, not flesh-and-blood men. These reports did not begin to capture the reality of the fighting then unfolding on the ground, particularly in the Dardanelles, where the Allied naval and ground offensive had stalled and British and French forces had dug trenches that mimicked those on the western front.
The most terrifying part of battle was the exit from a trench—standing up and climbing out, knowing that the opposing force would at that moment unleash a fusillade that would continue until the offensive concluded, either with victory, meaning a few yards gained, or defeat, a few yards lost, but invariably with half one’s battalion dead, wounded, or missing. “I shall never forget the moment when we had to leave the shelter of the trenches,” wrote British private Ridley Sheldon, of combat at Helles, at the southwest tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. “It is indeed terrible, the first step you take—right into the face of the most deadly fire, and to realize that any moment you may be shot down; but if you are not hit, then you seem to gather courage. And when you see on either side of you men like yourself, it inspires you with a determination to press forward. Away we went over the parapet with fixed bayonets—one line of us like the wind. But it was absolute murder, for men fell like corn before the sickle.”
The wounded lay in the open or in shell holes awaiting stretcher bearers who might not come for hours, or even days. Injuries ranged from minor penetrations by shrapnel to grotesque disfigurements. “I got back into the trench, and saw what I had not seen before, for the smoke had cleared now,” wrote Capt. Albert Mure, also on Helles. A shell had just landed in his trench, in the spot where moments earlier he had been writing messages to be delivered by two orderlies. One orderly survived, the other did not. “His body and his head lay 4 or 5 feet apart. Two of my signalers were killed also, and mutilated so horribly that to describe their condition would be inexcusable.”
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.