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.
HARDER TO GO THAN TO STAY.
To many of those who went it was harder to go than to stay there on the vessel gaping with its mortal wounds and ready to go down. It meant that tossing on the waters they must wait in suspense, hour after hour even after the lights of the ship were engulfed in appalling darkness, hoping against hope for the miracle of a rescue dearer to them than their own lives.
It was the tradition of Anglo-Saxon heroism that was fulfilled in the frozen seas during the black hours of that Sunday night. The heroism was that of the women who went, as well as of the men who remained.
The most adequate story of the terrible disaster is told by a trained newspaper man, who was on the Carpathia. He says: