NEWS OF THE SINKING OF THE CANDIDATE TOOK TIME to reach the Admiralty. A trawler, the Lord Allendale, stumbled across the ship’s three lifeboats at about three o’clock Thursday afternoon. The men had been adrift in the fog for five hours. The trawler was not equipped with wireless and so could not report the sinking or the rescue until it returned to its base at Milford Haven, on the English coast, far from where the Candidate had sunk. The commander of naval forces at Milford Haven notified the Admiralty of the attack in a telegram sent shortly after midnight.
A telegram from the Queenstown Naval Center came in that day as well, with another report of a submarine sighted off Daunt Rock, this one at 9:45 that morning. The U-boat had remained “in sight for five minutes” before submerging. This was relayed to Director of Intelligence Hall as well as to First Sea Lord Fisher. A copy also was circulated to Churchill’s office, though he was still in France.
The HMS Orion continued on its way north, zigzagging in open sea 150 miles west of Ireland.
IN WASHINGTON, President Wilson struggled anew with depression. Edith Galt’s rejection had cast him into a state akin to grief, to the extent that he found it difficult to concentrate on world events, though these continued to press. The Gulflight was still major news. An inquest by an English coroner had confirmed that the ship’s captain, Alfred Gunter, had died of “heart failure, accelerated by shock, caused by the torpedoing of the ship.” The Gulflight’s second officer testified that the submarine captain had to have realized the ship was American, for the day had been clear and the tanker was flying a large American flag. There was also news of fresh U-boat predations. The Washington Times reported on Wednesday evening that a German submarine, “running amok,” had sunk eleven unarmed fishing trawlers in the North Sea, off England.
That night, however, Wilson’s attention was focused solely on Edith. He resolved that despite his new grief he would not—could not—let her exit his life. He composed a long letter, really a prose poem of despair, in which he, the man so many Americans thought of as distant and professorial, wrote, “There are some things I must try to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.”
He was willing to accept friendship, he told her—for now. “If you cannot give me all that I want—what my heart finds it hard now to breathe without—it is because I am not worthy. I know instinctively you could give it if I were—and if you understood,—understood the boy’s heart that is in me and the simplicity of my need, which you could fill so that all my days would be radiant.”
He made it clear that she would come to love him. “Do not misunderstand,” he added, in one of three impassioned postscripts. “What I have now at your generous hands is infinitely precious to me. It would kill me to part with it,—I could not and I hope you could not. And I will be patient, patient without end, to see what, if anything, the future may have [in] store for me.”
Not so patient, as it happened, for the next morning, Thursday, May 6, before sending off this letter, he added a codicil that was five pages long.
He had read her letter again, he told her, and now appraised it in a more hopeful light. “I can hardly see to write for the tears as I lift my eyes from it,—the tears of joy and sweet yearning.”
For the time being, he chose to position himself as her knight. “I seem to have been put into the world to serve, not to take, and serve I will to the utmost, and demand nothing in return.”
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.