At first that was all he would say, but bit by bit the reporters chipped out admissions. At 8:00 the Olympic’s message “neglected to say that all the crew had been saved.” At 8:15: “Probably a number of lives had been lost.” At 8:45: “We very much fear there has been a great loss of life.” By 9:00 he couldn’t keep up the front any longer: it was a “horrible loss of life” … they could replace the ship but “never the human lives.”
