The Band That Played On (31 page)

G. K. Chesterton, the influential commentator and observer of human foibles, took a similar line in a column in the
Illustrated London News
: “Quite apart from the question of whether anyone was to blame, the big outstanding fact remains: that there was no sort of sane proportion between the extent of the provision for luxury and levity and the extent of the provision for need and desperation. The scheme did far too much for prosperity and far too little for distress—just like the modern State.”

The German press was quick to take the opportunity to bash Germany’s main European rival. The disaster to them was an outcome of British decadence. “Sport, betting and arrogance all had a disastrous influence on the
Titanic
’s fate,” declared the liberal Berlin newspaper
Vossische Zeitung
. Another paper,
Germania
, was convinced that it was the judgment of God. “It recalls the fate of the Tower of Babel—a punishment for the presumption of the builders in trying to build a ship to defy the elements.”
¹

Some thought that we were already heading for a fall. There was a growing unease about the supposed lack of strength, courage, and self-discipline in young men. The Senate Investigation Committee said as much about the British crew and this caused London’s
Evening Standard
to leap back in defence, saying: “During most of the nineteenth century England was well-accustomed to the habit of war. The habit of war produced bravery. In these days we have no practice of this kind. Mercifully we are spared the discipline of our grandfathers. Our nerves are weaker than theirs. Yes, but do we subdue them of necessity?”

In her book
The Titanic Tragedy: God Speaks to the Nations
, Mrs. Alma White, a Pentecostal from New Jersey, attacked not only “the overbearing spirit among those to whom money and birth have given rank” but also the “rapid physical degeneration of England’s manhood.” In her view the country had ignored God and was given over to “pride and the love of display.” Among the things that seemed to her to indicate its godlessness were strikes, poverty, drunkenness, impure air, “indulgences of the flesh,” a weak established church, and women who clamored for the right to vote. “God has given the world an awful warning through the
Titanic
disaster,” she wrote. “Woe be unto them if they fail to profit by it.”

She’d visited England and concluded that its official church offered “absolutely no spiritual food” to its people. She was distressed to discover clergymen with shares in breweries and distilleries, benefiting from the problem, as she saw it, rather than offering a solution. To her the
Titanic
represented “the wealth, pride and presumption of Britain” and she had a particularly stinging rebuke for J. Bruce Ismay, who, when confronted by a passenger who suggested cutting the ship’s speed while in the ice field, had apparently answered, “We will go faster, and get out of the reach of them.” Mrs. White believed that this was the language of someone intoxicated on worldly success. “He had drunk the Babylonian cup to the dregs,” she said, “and God’s rebuke was at hand.”

Rather than seeing the disaster as a retribution for general moral decline, most Christian commentators and preachers of the time saw it either as a reminder of our insignificance when confronted with the power of nature or of our need to prioritize care for individuals over opulence, gluttony, and pride. “We’re so sure of ourselves,” said Canon White-Thompson in a sermon given in a church in Croydon, Surrey.

We do such wonderful things. We conquer time and space. We subdue the elements. The winds and the sea obey us. We put a girdle around the earth and like a flash of light send our words through space. So we think that we have mastered Nature . . . Then, Nature, the silent, the inscrutable, having submitted to all this mastery, just puts out her finger and at her touch man is reduced to a helpless pygmy and all his works are swallowed up in nothingness.

Dr. Ewing, preaching at Rye Lane Baptist Chapel in Peckham, South East London, considered that it might be a wake up call to a spiritually slothful nation. “Perhaps we had grown proud,” he said. “Perhaps we had grown intent upon our material success. Perhaps we were beginning to forget God, and he has spoken in the midnight hour and said: ‘I am near. Remember me.’”

At the Church of the Ascension in New York, Rev. Percy Strickney Grant condemned the White Star Line in a sermon: “We must not forget the race for commercial supremacy which brought on this disaster,” he said. “The White Star Line forgot the human element in its race. It placed the commercial before the human. It should not be necessary for us to wait the shriek of the Avenging Angel before we realize we are children of the Father and heed His care and the care of our fellow men.”

It didn’t escape attention that the largest percentage of those rescued was from first class (62 percent) and the smallest percentage was from third class (25 percent) and crew (23 percent). Lives were not considered to be equally valuable. Nor were they even equally valuable in death. When bodies were collected by the
Mackay-Bennett
, those identified as first class, even if their names were as yet unknown, were put in coffins, whereas second and third class were sewn into canvas bags and crew members were kept in an ice-filled hold. The bodies of poorer unidentified passengers had to be thrown back into the sea with weights strapped to their legs because of lack of space.

Almost all of the immediate news coverage, both in Britain and America, concentrated on the fate of what were then called “prominent persons.” The shock was not just that the world’s biggest liner had gone down, but that some of the world’s richest people had gone down with it. Yet the obvious question was, why shouldn’t the rich perish alongside the poor? Why should wealth entitle someone to more protection than poverty?

A further lesson to be learned from the
Titanic
was from the quiet selflessness of so many. If character is shown by the choices we make under pressure, then the character of most Britons, northern Europeans, and Americans was shown to be good. (Southern Europeans, Arabs, and Asians were generally portrayed as untrustworthy, self-interested, and quite possibly violent.) Mrs. Ada Clarke, one of the first to tell the story of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” left her husband behind because he urged her to get into a lifeboat even though she wanted to remain with him. She saw him standing on the deck as the ship sank. Ida Straus, wife of the multimillionaire philanthropist Isidor Straus, elected to stay by her husband and they both calmly faced death together, seated and holding hands. W. T. Stead apparently remained in his chair as though the next life was merely a last-minute change of destination.

It was the hundreds of similar stories of stoicism, charity, and self-sacrifice that heartened people, encouraging them to think that they weren’t such a bad lot after all. Despite never having to display their best selves in the heat of war, a randomly selected cross section had managed to face life’s most intense moment and emerge from it with glory. “We are rearing a self-reliant race—a race of men and women well equipped for the battle of life,” roared an editorial in the
South London Observer
on April 24. “The heroism on the ill-fated
Titanic
shows conclusively that we have not degenerated since the days of Nelson. It was the same old British pluck which in the past often carried the Union Jack to victory.”

Henry Van Dyke, professor of English literature at Princeton, believed that the very procedure of putting women and children first was an instinctive application of a Christian principle. If earning power, physical strength, or social standing had prevailed, it would have been men first, women second, and children last of all. He asked where this rule originated. “It comes from God, through the faith of Jesus of Nazareth,” he argued in the
New York Times
. “It is the ideal of self-sacrifice. It is the rule that ‘the strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are weak.’ It is the divine revelation which is summed up in the words: Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends. It needs a tragic catastrophe like the wreck of the
Titanic
to bring out the absolute contradiction between this ideal and all the counsels of materialism and selfish expediency.”

Even those who didn’t see specifically Christian values emerge were at least pleased that Western civilization’s codes of behavior had survived amid the chaos. Van Dyke continued:

There was no disorder, no rioting, the rule of the sea prevailed over the first law of nature. With the band playing and the lights of the sinking ship still burning, the doomed company awaited the end. They died like heroes, they died like men. It is a tragic and dreadful story, but it tells us how civilisation conquers the primal, savage instincts and brings into being and dominance the higher and nobler qualities of man’s nature. There is not in history a more splendid and inspiring example of self-control, of sacrifice, of courage and of manliness.

This was why the band emerged as such heroes. Not only had they behaved dutifully and without apparent concern for their own safety, but they also offered the hope that not all of the younger male generation were venial, lazy, proud, irreligious, inconsiderate, self-indulgent, weak-willed, and timorous. The example of the band suggested that the doom mongers may have got it wrong because, unlike soldiers, they hadn’t trained to face danger and had come straight to the deck from the heart of early-twentieth-century splendor and luxury. If eight random men could display such strength of character in unison on the spur of the moment, the chances were that any other eight men randomly selected would react in the same way.

There was an element of truth to this, but it overlooked the vital role played by Wallace Hartley as bandmaster. Although it’s not known whether the band played voluntarily or under orders, the men were under Hartley’s command and his influence set the tone. He left behind no written confession of faith, but all the indications are that the faith of his childhood had continued into adulthood.

His moral character and his personal assurance that death was not the end must have stirred his bandsmen, all of whom had at least grown up in the church. The choice of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” was almost certainly due to Hartley’s familiarity with the hymn and love for its message, something he had already confirmed to friends. Would the band have behaved in the same way under a dissolute and immoral leader or would someone not raised on the music of the church have chosen a hymn to restore calm amidst tragedy?

In the absence of detailed information on each bandsman’s life, it’s hard to pass judgment on the development of their moral character. In speaking of them as heroic, it’s tempting to think that in childhood each of them was unafraid of pain and displayed unique signs of self-control and willingness to sacrifice, but the chances are that some were quite naturally brave and others just as naturally fearful. As has been wryly observed: “A hero is just a coward who got cornered.” Yet together as a band under Hartley’s leadership, they transcended their personal limitations.

The music itself played a major role in boosting their nerve. It’s long been known that music can alter moods. In the seventeenth century the Restoration playwright William Congreve wrote the lines: “Music has charm to soothe the savage breast. To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.” If the quote attributed to Wallace Hartley is anything to go by, he would have concurred with this sentiment: “I’ve always felt that, when men are called to face death suddenly, music is far more effective in cheering them on than all the firearms in creation.”

George Orrell, bandmaster on the
Carpathia
in 1912, told Herman Finck, Musical Director of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and author of “In the Shadows,” which the band allegedly played on deck, that the musicians on any ship at the time were accustomed to the idea that they would be asked to play at any time that passengers were distressed.

“The ship’s band in any emergency is expected to play to calm the passengers,” he said.

After the
Titanic
struck the iceberg the band began to play bright music, dance music, comic songs—anything that would prevent the passengers from becoming panic-stricken. The ship was so badly holed that it was soon obvious that disaster was ahead. Then various awe-stricken passengers began to think of the death that faced them and asked the bandmaster to play hymns. The one which appealed to all was, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

Orrell got his information not from news reports but directly from the rescued passengers he spoke to on the
Carpathia
.

The effect of the music on passengers awaiting rescue appears to have been one of reassurance. When everything else on the
Titanic
was being turned upside down, the music remained the same. In the midst of mindjarring abnormality, it was the one thing that retained its familiarity. For those out on the water it provided a bizarre soundtrack to a sight that so many would only be able to describe as “like watching a moving picture.” It also appears to have inspired singing in the lifeboats. Passengers spoke of “Nearer, My God, to Thee” being sung by the survivors as they drifted on the water, but it’s not clear whether they were singing along to the band or whether what the band had played had stayed with them.

It was a perfect media package—ordinariness to connect them with the common reader, bravery to act as an inspiration, and a piece of music that could become a signature tune for the whole event. Whenever there was a funeral, a memorial service, or a fund-raising event, “Nearer, My God, to Thee” would be played and the story of the band’s final stand automatically brought to mind.