9: Some Impressions
<< 8: The Lessons Taught by the Loss of the Titanic || TOC
No one can pass through an event like the wreck of the Titanic without
recording mentally many impressions, deep and vivid, of what has been
seen and felt. In so far as such impressions are of benefit to mankind
they should not be allowed to pass unnoticed, and this chapter is an
attempt to picture how people thought and felt from the time they
first heard of the disaster to the landing in New York, when there was
opportunity to judge of events somewhat from a distance. While it is
to some extent a personal record, the mental impressions of other
survivors have been compared and found to be in many cases closely in
agreement. Naturally it is very imperfect, and pretends to be no more
than a sketch of the way people act under the influence of strong
emotions produced by imminent danger.
In the first place, the principal fact that stands out is the almost
entire absence of any expressions of fear or alarm on the part of
passengers, and the conformity to the normal on the part of almost
everyone. I think it is no exaggeration to say that those who read of
the disaster quietly at home, and pictured to themselves the scene as
the Titanic was sinking, had more of the sense of horror than those
who stood on the deck and watched her go down inch by inch. The fact
is that the sense of fear came to the passengers very slowly—a result
of the absence of any signs of danger and the peaceful night—and as
it became evident gradually that there was serious damage to the ship,
the fear that came with the knowledge was largely destroyed as it
came. There was no sudden overwhelming sense of danger that passed
through thought so quickly that it was difficult to catch up and
grapple with it—no need for the warning to "be not afraid of sudden
fear," such as might have been present had we collided head-on with a
crash and a shock that flung everyone out of his bunk to the floor.
Everyone had time to give each condition of danger attention as it
came along, and the result of their judgment was as if they had said:
"Well, here is this thing to be faced, and we must see it through as
quietly as we can." Quietness and self-control were undoubtedly the
two qualities most expressed. There were times when danger loomed more
nearly and there was temporarily some excitement,—for example when
the first rocket went up,—but after the first realization of what it
meant, the crowd took hold of the situation and soon gained the same
quiet control that was evident at first. As the sense of fear ebbed
and flowed, it was so obviously a thing within one's own power to
control, that, quite unconsciously realizing the absolute necessity of
keeping cool, every one for his own safety put away the thought of
danger as far as was possible. Then, too, the curious sense of the
whole thing being a dream was very prominent: that all were looking on
at the scene from a near-by vantage point in a position of perfect
safety, and that those who walked the decks or tied one another's
lifebelts on were the actors in a scene of which we were but
spectators: that the dream would end soon and we should wake up to
find the scene had vanished. Many people have had a similar experience
in times of danger, but it was very noticeable standing on the
Titanic's deck. I remember observing it particularly while tying on a
lifebelt for a man on the deck. It is fortunate that it should be so:
to be able to survey such a scene dispassionately is a wonderful aid
inn the destruction of the fear that go with it. One thing that helped
considerably to establish this orderly condition of affairs was the
quietness of the surroundings. It may seem weariness to refer again to
this, but I am convinced it had much to do with keeping everyone calm.
The ship was motionless; there was not a breath of wind; the sky was
clear; the sea like a mill-pond—the general "atmosphere" was
peaceful, and all on board responded unconsciously to it. But what
controlled the situation principally was the quality of obedience and
respect for authority which is a dominant characteristic of the
Teutonic race. Passengers did as they were told by the officers in
charge: women went to the decks below, men remained where they were
told and waited in silence for the next order, knowing instinctively
that this was the only way to bring about the best result for all on
board. The officers, in their turn, carried out the work assigned to
them by their superior officers as quickly and orderly as
circumstances permitted, the senior ones being in control of the
manning, filling and lowering of the lifeboats, while the junior
officers were lowered in individual boats to take command of the fleet
adrift on the sea. Similarly, the engineers below, the band, the
gymnasium instructor, were all performing their tasks as they came
along: orderly, quietly, without question or stopping to consider what
was their chance of safety. This correlation on the part of
passengers, officers and crew was simply obedience to duty, and it was
innate rather than the product of reasoned judgment.
I hope it will not seem to detract in any way from the heroism of
those who faced the last plunge of the Titanic so courageously when
all the boats had gone,—if it does, it is the difficulty of
expressing an idea in adequate words,—to say that their quiet heroism
was largely unconscious, temperamental, not a definite choice between
two ways of acting. All that was visible on deck before the boats left
tended to this conclusion and the testimony of those who went down
with the ship and were afterwards rescued is of the same kind.
Certainly it seems to express much more general nobility of character
in a race of people—consisting of different nationalities—to find
heroism an unconscious quality of the race than to have it arising as
an effort of will, to have to bring it out consciously.
It is unfortunate that some sections of the press should seek to
chronicle mainly the individual acts of heroism: the collective
behaviour of a crowd is of so much more importance to the world and so
much more a test—if a test be wanted—of how a race of people
behaves. The attempt to record the acts of individuals leads
apparently to such false reports as that of Major Butt holding at bay
with a revolver a crowd of passengers and shooting them down as they
tried to rush the boats, or of Captain Smith shouting, "Be British,"
through a megaphone, and subsequently committing suicide along with
First Officer Murdock. It is only a morbid sense of things that would
describe such incidents as heroic. Everyone knows that Major Butt was
a brave man, but his record of heroism would not be enhanced if he, a
trained army officer, were compelled under orders from the captain to
shoot down unarmed passengers. It might in other conditions have been
necessary, but it would not be heroic. Similarly there could be
nothing heroic in Captain Smith or Murdock putting an end to their
lives. It is conceivable men might be so overwhelmed by the sense of
disaster that they knew not how they were acting; but to be really
heroic would have been to stop with the ship—as of course they
did—with the hope of being picked up along with passengers and crew
and returning to face an enquiry and to give evidence that would be of
supreme value to the whole world for the prevention of similar
disasters. It was not possible; but if heroism consists in doing the
greatest good to the greatest number, it would have been heroic for
both officers to expect to be saved. We do not know what they
thought, but I, for one, like to imagine that they did so. Second
Officer Lightoller worked steadily at the boats until the last
possible moment, went down with the ship, was saved in what seemed a
miraculous manner, and returned to give valuable evidence before the
commissions of two countries.
The second thing that stands out prominently in the emotions produced
by the disaster is that in moments of urgent need men and women turn
for help to something entirely outside themselves. I remember reading
some years ago a story of an atheist who was the guest at dinner of a
regimental mess in India. The colonel listened to his remarks on
atheism in silence, and invited him for a drive the following morning.
He took his guest up a rough mountain road in a light carriage drawn
by two ponies, and when some distance from the plain below, turned the
carriage round and allowed the ponies to run away—as it
seemed—downhill. In the terror of approaching disaster, the atheist
was lifted out of his reasoned convictions and prayed aloud for help,
when the colonel reined in his ponies, and with the remark that the
whole drive had been planned with the intention of proving to his
guest that there was a power outside his own reason, descended quietly
to level ground.
The story may or may not be true, and in any case is not introduced as
an attack on atheism, but it illustrates in a striking way the frailty
of dependence on a man's own power and resource in imminent danger. To
those men standing on the top deck with the boats all lowered, and
still more so when the boats had all left, there came the realization
that human resources were exhausted and human avenues of escape
closed. With it came the appeal to whatever consciousness each had of
a Power that had created the universe. After all, some Power had made
the brilliant stars above, countless millions of miles away, moving in
definite order, formed on a definite plan and obeying a definite law:
had made each one of the passengers with ability to think and act;
with the best proof, after all, of being created—the knowledge of
their own existence; and now, if at any time, was the time to appeal
to that Power. When the boats had left and it was seen the ship was
going down rapidly, men stood in groups on the deck engaged in prayer,
and later, as some of them lay on the overturned collapsible
boat, they repeated together over and over again the Lord's
Prayer—irrespective of religious beliefs, some, perhaps, without
religious beliefs, united in a common appeal for deliverance from
their surroundings. And this was not because it was a habit, because
they had learned this prayer "at their mother's knee": men do not do
such things through habit. It must have been because each one saw
removed the thousand and one ways in which he had relied on human,
material things to help him—including even dependence on the
overturned boat with its bubble of air inside, which any moment a
rising swell might remove as it tilted the boat too far sideways, and
sink the boat below the surface—saw laid bare his utter dependence on
something that had made him and given him power to think—whether he
named it God or Divine Power or First Cause or Creator, or named it
not at all but recognized it unconsciously—saw these things and
expressed them in the form of words he was best acquainted with in
common with his fellow-men. He did so, not through a sense of duty to
his particular religion, not because he had learned the words, but
because he recognized that it was the most practical thing to do—the
thing best fitted to help him. Men do practical things in times like
that: they would not waste a moment on mere words if those words were
not an expression of the most intensely real conviction of which they
were capable. Again, like the feeling of heroism, this appeal is
innate and intuitive, and it certainly has its foundation on a
knowledge—largely concealed, no doubt—of immortality. I think this
must be obvious: there could be no other explanation of such a general
sinking of all the emotions of the human mind expressed in a thousand
different ways by a thousand different people in favour of this single
appeal.
The behaviour of people during the hours in the lifeboats, the landing
on the Carpathia, the life there and the landing in New York, can all
be summarized by saying that people did not act at all as they were
expected to act—or rather as most people expected they would act, and
in some cases have erroneously said they did act. Events were there to
be faced, and not to crush people down. Situations arose which
demanded courage, resource, and in the cases of those who had lost
friends most dear to them, enormous self-control; but very wonderfully
they responded. There was the same quiet demeanour and poise, the same
inborn dominion over circumstances, the same conformity to a normal
standard which characterized the crowd of passengers on the deck of
the Titanic—and for the same reasons.
The first two or three days ashore were undoubtedly rather trying to
some of the survivors. It seemed as if coming into the world
again—the four days shut off from any news seemed a long time—and
finding what a shock the disaster had produced, the flags half-mast,
the staring head-lines, the sense of gloom noticeable everywhere, made
things worse than they had been on the Carpathia. The difference in
"atmosphere" was very marked, and people gave way to some extent under
it and felt the reaction. Gratitude for their deliverance and a desire
to "make the best of things" must have helped soon, however, to
restore them to normal conditions. It is not at all surprising that
some survivors felt quieter on the Carpathia with its lack of news
from the outside world, if the following extract from a leading New
York evening paper was some of the material of which the "atmosphere"
on shore was composed:—"Stunned by the terrific impact, the dazed
passengers rushed from their staterooms into the main saloon amid the
crash of splintering steel, rending of plates and shattering of
girders, while the boom of falling pinnacles of ice upon the broken
deck of the great vessel added to the horror.... In a wild
ungovernable mob they poured out of the saloons to witness one of the
most appalling scenes possible to conceive.... For a hundred feet the
bow was a shapeless mass of bent, broken and splintered steel and
iron."
And so on, horror piled on horror, and not a word of it true, or
remotely approaching the truth.
This paper was selling in the streets of New York while the Carpathia
was coming into dock, while relatives of those on board were at the
docks to meet them and anxiously buying any paper that might contain
news. No one on the Carpathia could have supplied such information;
there was no one else in the world at that moment who knew any details
of the Titanic disaster, and the only possible conclusion is that the
whole thing was a deliberate fabrication to sell the paper.
This is a repetition of the same defect in human nature noticed in the
provision of safety appliances on board ship—the lack of
consideration for the other man. The remedy is the same—the law: it
should be a criminal offence for anyone to disseminate deliberate
falsehoods that cause fear and grief. The moral responsibility of the
press is very great, and its duty of supplying the public with only
clean, correct news is correspondingly heavy. If the general public is
not yet prepared to go so far as to stop the publication of such news
by refusing to buy those papers that publish it, then the law should
be enlarged to include such cases. Libel is an offence, and this is
very much worse than any libel could ever be.
It is only right to add that the majority of the New York papers were
careful only to report such news as had been obtained legitimately
from survivors or from Carpathia passengers. It was sometimes
exaggerated and sometimes not true at all, but from the point of
reporting what was heard, most of it was quite correct.
One more thing must be referred to—the prevalence of superstitious
beliefs concerning the Titanic. I suppose no ship ever left port with
so much miserable nonsense showered on her. In the first place, there
is no doubt many people refused to sail on her because it was her
maiden voyage, and this apparently is a common superstition: even the
clerk of the White Star Office where I purchased my ticket admitted it
was a reason that prevented people from sailing. A number of people
have written to the press to say they had thought of sailing on her,
or had decided to sail on her, but because of "omens" cancelled the
passage. Many referred to the sister ship, the Olympic, pointed to the
"ill luck" that they say has dogged her—her collision with the Hawke,
and a second mishap necessitating repairs and a wait in harbour, where
passengers deserted her; they prophesied even greater disaster for the
Titanic, saying they would not dream of travelling on the boat. Even
some aboard were very nervous, in an undefined way. One lady said she
had never wished to take this boat, but her friends had insisted and
bought her ticket and she had not had a happy moment since. A friend
told me of the voyage of the Olympic from Southampton after the wait
in harbour, and said there was a sense of gloom pervading the whole
ship: the stewards and stewardesses even going so far as to say it was
a "death-ship." This crew, by the way, was largely transferred to the
Titanic.
The incident with the New York at Southampton, the appearance of the
stoker at Queenstown in the funnel, combine with all this to make a
mass of nonsense in which apparently sensible people believe, or which
at any rate they discuss. Correspondence is published with an official
of the White Star Line from some one imploring them not to name the
new ship "Gigantic," because it seems like "tempting fate" when the
Titanic has been sunk. It would seem almost as if we were back in the
Middle Ages when witches were burned because they kept black cats.
There seems no more reason why a black stoker should be an ill omen
for the Titanic than a black cat should be for an old woman.
The only reason for referring to these foolish details is that a
surprisingly large number of people think there may be "something in
it." The effect is this: that if a ship's company and a number of
passengers get imbued with that undefined dread of the unknown—the
relics no doubt of the savage's fear of what he does not
understand—it has an unpleasant effect on the harmonious working of
the ship: the officers and crew feel the depressing influence, and it
may even spread so far as to prevent them being as alert and keen as
they otherwise would; may even result in some duty not being as well
done as usual. Just as the unconscious demand for speed and haste to
get across the Atlantic may have tempted captains to take a risk they
might otherwise not have done, so these gloomy forebodings may have
more effect sometimes than we imagine. Only a little thing is required
sometimes to weigh down the balance for and against a certain course
of action.
At the end of this chapter of mental impressions it must be recorded
that one impression remains constant with us all to-day—that of the
deepest gratitude that we came safely through the wreck of the
Titanic; and its corollary—that our legacy from the wreck, our debt
to those who were lost with her, is to see, as far as in us lies, that
such things are impossible ever again. Meanwhile we can say of them,
as Shelley, himself the victim of a similar disaster, says of his
friend Keats in "Adonais":—
"Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—He hath awakened
from the dream of life—He lives, he wakes—'Tis Death is dead, not
he; Mourn not for Adonais."
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