THE LOOKOUT’S WARNING CRY.
Perhaps Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the line, who was on board—and survived when women drowned—also knows. Perhaps he will tell by whose orders those danger warnings were scoffed at and ignored.
Perhaps; perhaps!
The lookout uttered a sharp cry!
Too late!
One grinding crash and the Titanic had received its death blow. Man’s proudest craft crumbled like an eggshell.
Ripped from stem to engine room by the great mass of ice she struck amidships, the Titanic’s side was laid open as if by a gigantic can opener. She quickly listed to starboard and a shower of ice fell on to the forecastle deck.
Shortly before she sank she broke in two abaft the engine room, and as she disappeared beneath the water the expulsion of air or her boilers caused two explosions, which were plainly heard by the survivors adrift.
A moment more and the Titanic had gone to her doom with the fated hundreds grouped on the after deck. To the survivors they were visible to the last, and their cries and moans were pitiable.
The one alleviating circumstance in the otherwise unmitigable tragedy is the fact that the men stood aside and insisted that the women and the children should first have places in the boats.
There were men whose word of command swayed boards of directors, governed institutions, disposed of millions. They were accustomed merely to pronounce a wish to have it gratified.
Thousands “posted at their bidding;” the complexion of the market altered hue when they nodded; they bought what they wanted, and for one of the humblest fishing smacks or a dory they could have given the price that was paid to build and launch the ship that has become the most imposing mausoleum that ever housed the bones of men since the Pyramids rose from the desert sands.
But these men stood aside—one can see them—and gave place not merely to the delicate and the refined, but to the scared Czech woman from the steerage, with her baby at her breast; the Croatian with a toddler by her side, coming through the very gate of Death and out of the mouth of Hell to the imagined Eden of America.