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J. P. Morgan
In her testimony, offering an unintended metaphor for what was soon to befall Europe, she said, “These pistols are terrible things. They go off by themselves.” She was acquitted, after persuading the court that the murder was a crime of passion.
“Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.”
“This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ‘turn a corner and meet your fate.’
“There is nothing like the diversion of travel for one who is mentally fagged.”
Wilson ordered her a copy from a bookseller, but in the meantime he sent over a copy from the Library of Congress. “I hope it will give you a little pleasure,”
“Such a pledge of friendship,” she wrote, “blots out the shadows that have chased me today, and makes April Twenty Eighth a red letter day on my calendar.”
“The liner Lusitania, with several hundred prominent Americans on board, is steaming toward England despite anonymous warnings to individual passengers and a formally signed warning published in the advertising columns of American newspapers—warnings, which, in view of late developments in the sea war zone, it is beginning to be feared, may prove far from empty.”
Theodate described herself once as being afflicted with “over consciousness.”
In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, “Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day.”
In 1892 a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a popular short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in which she attacked Mitchell’s rest cure.
“I find that my material world is losing its power to please or harm me—it is not vital to me anymore,” she wrote in her diary.
It was like knowing that a particular killer was loose on the streets of London, armed with a particular weapon, and certain to strike in a particular neighborhood within the next few days, the only unknown being exactly when.
He demanded that the naval high command “take necessary measures to guarantee that our submarines will in all circumstances avoid attacking neutral ships.”
“In this clear morning air,” he wrote, “the world seems less in the way, seems less to stand between us.”
The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.”
It testified to the importance the Admiralty placed on protecting its big warships and heeding the hard lesson taught by the Aboukir disaster, to never go to the aid of submarine victims.
Colonel House told the group, “We shall be at war with Germany within a month.”
Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.
Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness
given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?
admitting the truth,” Lansing wrote, “he blundered
The Return of the Mayflower.
today, when you are in the middle of the Atlantic you are very much alone, and far from rescue if something cataclysmic were to occur.
