“I turned around to watch the great ship heel over,” said a passenger who had dived overboard and swum to a safe distance.
“The monster took a sudden plunge, and I saw a crowd still on her decks, and boats filled with helpless women and children glued to her side. I sickened with horror at the sight.
“There was a thunderous roar, as of the collapse of a great building on fire; then she disappeared, dragging with her hundreds of fellow-creatures into the vortex. Many never rose to the surface, but the sea rapidly grew thick with the figures of struggling men and women and children.”
The total number of deaths was more than a thousand.
The most fitting comment on the sinking of the Lusitania were the words of Tinkling Cloud, a full-blooded Sioux Indian:
“Now you white men can never call us red men savages again.”
Resting its case on “Many sacred principles of justice and humanity,” refusing to accept the warning published in the advertising columns of the newspapers by the German embassy either “as an excuse or palliation,” and assuming that the commanders of submarines guilty of torpedoing without warning vessels carrying non-combatants had acted “under a misapprehension of orders,” the United States concluded its note to Germany, six days after the sinking of the Lusitania, with these words of warning:
“The Imperial German government will not expect the government of the United States to omit any word or act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.”
Before any reply had been made to this, a German submarine torpedoed without warning the American freight steamer Nebraskan, on May 25, a few hours after she had left Liverpool in ballast for the United States. Fortunately no lives were lost, and although the Nebraskan’s bows had been blown wide open by the explosion, she remained afloat and was brought back to Liverpool under her own steam. The attack was tardily admitted by Germany and explained by the fact that it had been made at dusk, when the commander of the submarine had been unable to recognize the steamer’s nationality.
On the last day of May, Germany’s answer was received. The Imperial government declared that the Lusitania had not been an unarmed merchantman but an auxiliary cruiser of the British navy. That she had had masked guns mounted on her lower deck, that she had Canadian troops among her passengers, and that in violation of American law she had been laden with high explosives which were the real cause of her destruction because they were set off by the detonation of the single torpedo that had been discharged by the submarine.