Crossings (29 page)

“If any of you have medical training … nursing … first aid, any experience at all, you are needed very badly. We do not know how many men from the
Queen Victoria
are still alive…. Will the two doctors on board please come forward … we will be taking on as many men as we can.” There was a moment of silence. “We cannot radio to other ships for help, or the Germans in the area will identify our position.” As this reality sank in, a total silence fell on them all. It was entirely possible that the Germans were still nearby, and the
Deauville
might be next. It was a terrifying thought, and the fire raging on the
Queen Victoria
was a clear illustration of what could happen to them.

“The burden of helping these men falls entirely to us. We need you all … now, those of you who have medical knowledge, please step forward.” A half dozen men moved rapidly toward the captain, he nodded, spoke to them in quiet voices, and then picked up the bullhorn again. “Please, everyone, try to stay calm. We will need bandages … towels … sheets … any clean shirts you have … medicines. We are limited in what we can do, but we must do all that we can. We are going to come as close as we can to the ship, and we will pick up as many survivors as possible.” Already, as the
Deauville
continued her approach, they could see one or two lifeboats in the distance, but there was no way of knowing how many lifeboats there were, or how many men were floating in the water. “We will use the dining hall as sick bay. I thank you now for your help. We have a long night ahead.” He paused again. “May God be with us.” Liane had a strong urge to say amen, and she looked at the girls, who stood beside her, their eyes filled with terror. She bent quickly to speak to them in the hubbub that ensued.

“Girls, I'm going to take you back to our cabin, and I want you to stay there. If anything happens, I will come to find you at once. If I don't come, go out into the hall, but don't go anywhere, unless one of the men takes you.” If they were torpedoed and she couldn't get back to them, she knew that someone would take care of them. “But you must wait very quietly. You can leave the door open if you're afraid. Now, I'm going to take you back.”

“We want to stay with you.” Marie-Ange spoke in a frightened wail, speaking for herself and her already crying sister.

“You can't. I'm going to do what I can here.” She had taken a first aid class when she was in Paris, although in the sudden panic now she found herself wondering how much she had absorbed. But two more hands could do no harm, so she hurried the girls back to their cabin, where she stripped her bed of both sheets, and took the top sheets off the girls' bunks. They could make do with their blankets, and in the heat of the room, they didn't even need those. But she knew that they might if later on they too had to take to their lifeboats. She pulled the blanket off her own, and tore open the room's small closet to look at their clothes. There were several of the girls' cotton shirts and she sacrificed two from each child to use as bandages for the survivors of the
Queen Victoria
. She grabbed several bars of soap, a small roll of bandages of her own, and a bottle of pain pills she had been given by her French dentist. Other than that, she had nothing else to contribute to the rescue. She dressed quickly and kissed the girls good-bye as she left the room, reminding them to sleep in their life vests tonight, and Elisabeth called after her with a sudden thought just as she was leaving.

“Where's Mr. Burnham?”

“I don't know,” she called back and disappeared down the hall, praying that the girls would be safe. She hated to leave them but knew that they would be safer out of the confusion.

And when she reached the dining hall, she found every single adult on board gathered in the room, getting instructions from the chief officer, a wizened man with a gravelly voice, who was giving curt, well-organized orders. They were being assigned into teams of three, and as much as possible, each group was assigned someone who had some experience in first aid, so that even if the other two people had no expertise, there would be one member of the team capable of some real assistance. The two doctors on board were already organizing supplies, and one of them made a brief speech about handling burns. His explanations turned several stomachs, but there was no avoiding reality now. And it was then, as Liane handed over her sheets and supplies, that she saw Nick at the far end of the room. She held up an arm to signal him, and he approached her, just in time for the chief officer to assign them to the same team. He preferred to assign people who knew each other to work together, it would make it easier to work as a unit, he explained briefly, and then the captain reappeared to make another announcement to the crowded room.

“We think that many of the men died in the initial explosion; however, we believe that there are still many survivors. There are only four lifeboats afloat, but hundreds of men in the water. Please take your positions on deck for the stretcher teams. My men will bring the survivors on board. We need you to treat them where they are, or assist in bringing them in here. The doctors will tell you who of all of you they want working with them in here. And I want to thank those of you who've given up your rooms. We do not know yet if we'll have to use them, but it's possible we will.” He looked grimly around the room with intense eyes, nodded, and left them. It would be another hour or more before they were close enough to pick up survivors, and now the assigned teams of three went on deck to watch and wait. Nick told Liane that more than half the men on board had given up their cabins and volunteered to sleep on the deck, so that the survivors could sleep indoors, and already crew members were hanging hammocks in the cabins to accommodate as many as possible. And he didn't tell her directly, but she gathered from what he said that he was among those who had given up his cabin. He was already sleeping outdoors anyway, and she sensed that it wouldn't have made any difference if he was not. He had been among the first to volunteer and now he appeared calm as they stood on deck, and he handed her a cup of coffee laced heavily with Scotch.

“I'd rather not …” She started to refuse but he was firm.

“Never mind. Drink it up. You'll need it before the night is out.” It was already one o'clock in the morning and they had a long night ahead. He looked at her worriedly then. “Have you ever smelled burning flesh, Liane?” She shook her head and took a sip of the brew he had handed her. “Brace yourself. It's going to be rough.” No one knew how many had survived the blaze. There was no way to tell. And even the men radioing weakly from one of the lifeboats couldn't tell them much. They had drifted far from the ship, and what they saw in the water around them were mostly bodies of the dead, they said. The
Deauville
had radioed back only once to let them know that they had heard their SOS. They didn't want to say more on the radio, for fear that the Germans were listening too. They gave no information about their position but as they approached, they flashed a single beam in Morse code to let the men in the lifeboat know that they were there, and a weak signal returned. “Thank God” the signal said, and Nick translated it for Liane as they waited tensely. They were not allowed to smoke while on deck, and the whiskey that had been passed around only seemed to heighten their senses. It seemed hours before they finally reached a huge mass of charred wood from the ship with a dozen or so men clinging to it, but they had been literally fried alive. There was another group of bodies after that, and then suddenly a shout from below as crew members from the
Deauville
carefully placed two men in a rubber raft that was hoisted carefully on board to the first waiting team. The two bodies were charred beyond belief and were rushed in to the doctors in the dining room. It had been turned into a surgery with lights ablaze behind the blackpainted windows. The lights violated the blackout regulations on the ship, but it could not be helped in the emergency. Liane had stared at the two bodies in disbelief and fought not to retch as she watched, and instinctively she had clutched Nick's arm. He said nothing to her but she suddenly felt his hand in hers, and then a moment later she felt no revulsion and no fear as she and Nick and a Canadian journalist assisted three men onto the deck, two of them burned hideously, and the third had been lucky to get burns only on the face and hands, and both his legs were broken. Liane supported the third man's head as Nick and the Canadian put him on the stretcher and another team moved to help the other two.

“It was unbelievable … they got us fore and aft….” The young man's eyes were wild and glazed, his face a mass of charred flesh, and Liane had to fight back tears as she listened to him and murmured softly.

“It's all right now … you're all right …”It was what she would have said to the girls if they'd been hurt, and she found herself holding him tenderly as the doctors worked over him. The next thing she knew, she was watching them in surgery and Nick was outside. And when one doctor was through, he asked her to stay as he applied salves to burns and tended wounds and amputated one hand. It was a night they knew they would never forget.

And at six o'clock the next morning, the doctors sat down for an instant and looked at someone's notes. There were 204 survivors of the
Queen Victoria
on board, and there was no further sign of life outside. Hundreds of charred bodies had floated past, and a lifeboat of walking wounded had come on board half an hour before with only minimal wounds. They had been taken to one of the vacated cabins that had been prepared. There were twelve and fourteen men to a cabin now, in hammocks hung side by side, on beds, and on sleeping rolls on floors. The dining room still looked like an infirmary, and everywhere was the smell of burned flesh. They had been covered with tar and oil as they came on board. Washing the wounds had been the worst of it, and that fell to Liane as the doctors observed her gentle hands, but now as she sat beside them, she knew that she could not do one more. Her entire body ached, her neck, her arms, her head, her back, and yet if they had brought one more in, she would have stood up again, as they all would. The passengers of the
Deauville
wandered slowly inside now. They had done what they could and done it well, and many of the survivors of the
Queen Victoria
would live because of what they'd done.

For many of the men who had formed teams on the deck, it was their first real taste of war. For the doctors, the work was not yet done, and already there had been volunteers to work in shifts who would nurse the survivors until they reached New York, but the worst was over. And silently, on deck, they watched the
Queen Victoria
sink at eight o'clock, belching horribly as she went, plumes of steam shooting into the sky, and the captain and crew scanned the sea for two hours afterward. There was not a single soul left, only the dead floating horribly amidst the gentle waves. Already nine of the survivors of the night before had died, reducing the survivors aboard to 195, all of them housed in the cabins the passengers had given up. The passengers would sleep now with the crew, in hammocks or on sleeping rolls, their luggage shoved under beds or out in the halls. The only exception in the midst of the chaos was to have been Liane and the girls, but she had insisted that their cabin be used too. And at 4:00
A.M.
she had hastened briefly downstairs with one of the crew, to carry the girls to the quarters of the first mate. He would sleep in the captain's cabin for the remainder of the trip, and the two girls were to sleep in the first mate's narrow single bed.

“Et vous, madame?”
The crew member had looked at her with awe, she had worked all night like Florence Nightingale, but she shrugged quickly.

“I can sleep on the floor.” And then she had hurried back to the doctors in the dining room, the hands to hold, the wounds to clean, the limbs to set. The sounds of sheets being torn into bandages, of groaning men, became as monotonous as the sounds of the sea, hour after hour. But as the
Queen Victoria
sank, there was no sound on the deck. And moments later the captain spoke to them all on his bullhorn.

“Je vous remercie tous
… I thank you all…. You have performed the impossible tonight … and if it seems that so few have lived, remember that nearly two hundred more would have died, without your help.” They had learned that thirty-nine hundred men had died on the ship.

The passengers and crew worked in shifts, attempting to keep the survivors they had fought so hard to hold on to alive and stave off infections that would cost them limbs and lives. There were men so fever ridden that they were delirious but only two more had died, and many of the problems were under control. The doctors were ready to drop as the trip wore on, as was Liane, but they were still less than halfway there. They had lost more than a day in assisting the men from the Canadian ship, and their zigzag course cost them still more time, but the captain was even more cautious about encountering the Germans now as they made their way to the States.

It was only on the second day after the rescue that Liane was persuaded to go to the first mate's cabin, and there she fell into bed. The girls were somewhere on the ship, crew members had taken them in charge and she knew that they had spent much of their time on the bridge. But she could barely think of that now as she lay down on the narrow bed, and it felt as though she hadn't slept in years as she fell into a deep black pit and slept. And when she woke, the blackout was in force again and the ship was dark. She heard a soft scuffling sound somewhere in the room and sat up in the unfamiliar bed, wondering where she was, and then she heard a familiar voice.

“Are you okay?” It was Nick, and as he approached the bed she could just make out his face, from the moonlight that snuck in through the corners of the windows around the black paint. “You've been asleep for sixteen hours.”

“My God.” She shook her head trying to wake up. She was still wearing the same filthy clothes she had worn for two days, but he looked even worse. “How are the men?”