KEPT TOGETHER BY GREEN LIGHT.
None are alive to tell the tale of that short period. Toward 2 o’clock on Monday morning a green light aboard one of the lifeboats kept the fleet of craft carrying the survivors together. Through the hours until dawn the men in charge of the boats hovered about that green light. Occasionally bodies of men slipped by the lifeboats. A few men, more dead than alive, were pulled aboard the boats, that were now overcrowded.
The weather became bitterly cold and the survivors suffered physical pain as well as mental anguish. Benumbed by the extent of the catastrophe most of the women sat motionless in their places. The Carpathia appeared soon after dawn. Not until the big Cunarder was close by did the realization of what had happened reach the women survivors.
Many of them became temporarily insane. It was necessary to use force to place them in swings in which they were hoisted to the Carpathia’s decks. The officers of the Carpathia knowing the Titanic had gone down, were prepared for an emergency. Passengers on the Cunarder gave their cabins to the Titanic sufferers. The captain surrendered his room for hospital purposes. Stewardesses were compelled to cut the clothing from some of the women who had jumped into the water and been picked up by the lifeboats.
Among the survivors picked up by the Carpathia were several babies. These little ones were tossed overboard by their parents and rescued by the boats. The identity of these orphans may never be determined. When the list of persons aboard the Carpathia was checked up it was found that among the survivors were thirty women who had been widowed by the disaster.
Nearly all these women, bereft of their life partners, were reassured by the hope that those who had been left behind had been picked up by another vessel until they reached New York. For some reason the impression prevailed on the Carpathia that the Californian had picked up a number of survivors floating in the sea upheld by life-preservers.
EVERY HUSBAND SAVED SAVES HIS WIFE.
As against the thirty widows stands the record of every married man who was saved. Each of these men saved his wife also. No wife was left on the Titanic by a husband who had reached a lifeboat.
Narratives of the various survivors, assembled in a consecutive narrative, makes one of the most thrilling tales of modern life. It is a narrative filled with heroism unparalleled—bravery and heroism performed by American business men. They were men of millions who had everything to live for and yet, in that crisis at sea, they worked coolly, steadfastly to save women and children. Then they went down with the White Star liner Titanic, the greatest ship afloat.
When the Carpathia came into port carrying the more than 700 survivors of the disaster, the curtain, which had hidden the story of the tragedy since the first word of it was flashed to a startled world, was drawn aside. Here is the real tale of the sinking of the Titanic.