A Duty to the Dead

Our boat crew began to row now with vigorous strokes, pulling us as far from Britannic as possible, their backs arched over the oars and the muscles in their shoulders straining with the effort.

There was nothing more I could do. I sat back, nursing my arm. I’d damaged it picking up the boat hook with both hands, trying to reach Eileen and pull her to us. The ends of the bone felt as if they were grinding together now. But what else could I have done? In the closely packed lifeboat, there had been no time or space to shift places. I tried to touch the area around the break, but it hurt so much I stopped. It was too late to worry now.

Besides, the little lifeboat was rolling in a fashion that Britannic never had done, even in storms. I was feeling increasingly uneasy. Or was it the agony in my arm? It was overwhelming, and seemed to have reached a crescendo. I closed my eyes, trying my best to cope.

Think of anything but your arm, I commanded myself. Anything-

England? No, don’t think of home. Something else…

My great-grandmother had danced at a ball in Belgium on the eve of Waterloo, while Napoleon was racing north across the French border. She had watched my great-grandfather slip from the ballroom to ride to meet his regiment, then smiled to hide her fear from the others present, and turned to dance with a new partner. Later she’d had her portrait painted in the ball gown she wore that night. I tried to picture her floating across the polished floor in the arms of another man while the one she loved was facing the greatest battle of his career. Would I be painted in my torn, bloodstained uniform, after surviving Britannic? My mother would have a fit-

There was a single blast of the ship’s whistle, and I opened my eyes in time to see that her bridge was almost on a level with the water. Britannic was going. That beautiful ship-

Tears began to run down my face, salty on my lips. I shook my head to clear it, and unable to turn away, watched the great liner die. On all sides of me other people were crying as well, their eyes fixed on the ship, not ready to absorb what this meant-or what lay ahead of us.

We could hear the boilers exploding as the cold water reached them and the splash of gear and equipment sliding down the decks to crash into the sea. The ship itself was creaking, as if she were alive, protesting.

The engineers, last to leave, were madly scrambling out of funnel four, after holding their positions until the end.

Lucy, across the boat, exclaimed, “Oh, my God. Just like Titanic.”

Barbara, beside me, said dryly, “No, dear, Lusitania. There aren’t any icebergs in the Mediterranean.”

“Was it a mine?” someone else asked.

I was shading my eyes against the sun’s glare as one of the officers assigned to our boat cleared his throat and answered the question.

“Must have been. None of the lookouts saw any sign of a U-boat or reported a torpedo’s wake. But if it was a submarine, thank God it didn’t attack again.”

“Bloody U-boat wouldn’t have picked us up, even so.” It was the rating at the helm.

We had moved smartly in a dash to put ourselves beyond reach of the great ship’s death throes, afraid of being pulled under with her, but she filled our world still.

Then someone said, “There’s the end of her!” in a hollow voice, as if they couldn’t believe their eyes.

Britannic seemed to roll uncertainly, then bow first she raced down through the water, as if she had a rendezvous below and was late. The roar of her passing was like something human, a cry like nothing I’d ever heard. The sight and sound were heart wrenching, and as I looked out at the turbulence where the great ocean liner had once been, I knew I’d remember those last appalling moments until the day I died.

The sea seemed lonely now. Wide and endless and unfriendly. We were in the middle of nowhere. Kea was off on the horizon, and this was a busy sea lane, but the water was so desperately empty. Even crippled, Britannic had been comforting, a place we knew, large and able to hold its own against the vastness of the sea. Or so we’d wanted to believe.

“Did everyone get off?” Lucy asked anxiously. “Oh, my God, what if we’d had more than three thousand wounded onboard?” She began to tremble.

We were all shaken, uncertain, trying not to think about that. We’d had enough lifeboats, and we knew the procedures by heart, but it was a daunting prospect in the face of our present situation.

Attempting to shift the subject, I said, “Did anyone respond to the Captain’s distress call?”

“There was no mention of other boats in the area, as far as I know,” Margaret replied. “They must have learned about the mine laying…”

In the bottom of the boat, Eileen moaned a little, and Barbara asked, “Is there a medical kit onboard? She needs something now for the pain.”

There was a swift scramble to find the kit, and I let myself go for a few minutes, drifting on a tide of sickness and pain. Even so I could hear Barbara talking as she worked on Eileen’s limbs, worried that the girl would bleed to death.

I tried to recapture the image of that ballroom in Belgium, and my great-grandmother whirling past long candlelit windows in a daring waltz, smiling up at a young lieutenant while out of the corner of her eye, she watched another officer slipping out the door and hurrying away. But behind my lids now was only the red glare of the sun.

As I opened my eyes again, other lifeboats had drawn within hailing distance of ours. One of them called to us and asked if everyone was all right. I thought it was Lieutenant Browning-prayed it was.

The officer in our boat bellowed, “We’ll do.”

Someone else called across the water, “How many boats did we lose?”

“Four.” The number seemed to hang in the air like signal flags on a lanyard.

“Try to stay together, then. We’ve a better chance.”

I was nearly sure it was Captain Bartlett speaking now, but water tended to distort voices. Would he be blamed for what happened, like the captain of Titanic? You couldn’t see a mine in time, could you? They were purposely low in the water, bobbing, hiding in the froth, a cruel and unseen killer.

We roused ourselves and began taking stock. Three others in our boat were wounded, in addition to Eileen. The only doctor among us had sustained a blow to the head, the knob rising like a small hill, and he was slow to respond to questions about how he felt. Two of the nurses had rather serious cuts. Barbara was already ripping apart her skirts for makeshift bandaging, and others followed suit.

“Salt air is a healer,” Lucy was saying, trying for cheer. “But I doubt it was meant this way, medically.”

Barbara said succinctly, “Bloody Germans!”

I said, noticing that somewhere I had lost my cap and the heat was beating down, “We need to shield our heads and faces from the sun. Try to rig something if you can. We’ll burn in no time.”

My apron was around my arm, but I borrowed a pocketknife from the man at the helm, and with a little help managed to hack a strip from my skirt that I could wind, turbanlike, around my head.

“You look like an Arab,” one of the other women told me, and there was a general nervous laugh. But I noted that others were following my example. I managed to cut another strip and handed it to Barbara to shield Eileen’s face from the sun, rigging it over the bucket used for bailing. The glare from the water was very different, this close to it, and I found I was squinting horribly until I’d created my own shade.

We fell silent for a time, overwhelmed by events. There seemed to be no one else in the world but ourselves, a cluster of small boats at the mercy of the sea.

Thank God it was not raining or stormy.

I felt myself drifting away again on the thought, the wash of the sea against the sides of the boat and the warmth of the sun surprisingly soothing for a little while. My great-grandmother seemed to have abandoned me, leaving me to my own devices, and for a time I tried to pretend we were on the ship that had brought us back from India, lying on deck with our backs to the mast, watching moonlight streaming across the dark sea. It had been too hot to sleep below, and the passengers had come up to find a breath of air, counting stars until that palled.

POSH…I hadn’t thought of that in ages. It stood for Port side Out, Starboard side Home. The best cabins, the cooler ones, were on the port side of a vessel traveling out to India, and on the starboard side coming home. And still there were nights when not a breath of air stirred, and if the ship hadn’t been moving, we’d all have surely died of heat exhaustion.

The image of a dark ship on a dark sea faded, abandoning me too. I came back to the present, unable to