The early editions of those New York evening newspapers which Lanyard
purchased in Providence, when he changed trains there en route from New
Bedford to New York, carried multi-column and most picturesque accounts of
the _Assyrian_ disaster.
But the whole truth was in none.
Lanyard laid aside the last paper privately satisfied that, for no-doubt
praiseworthy reasons of its own, Washington had seen fit to dictate the
suppression of a number of extremely pertinent circumstances and facts
which could hardly have escaped governmental knowledge.
Already, one inferred, a sort of censorship was at work, an effective if
comparatively modest precursor to that noble volunteer committee which was
presently with touching spontaneity to fasten itself upon an astonished
Ship of State before it could gather enough way to escape such cirripede
attachments.
Presumably it was not thought wise to disconcert a great people, in the
complacence of its awakening to the fact that it was remotely at war with
the Hun, with information that a Boche submersible was, or of late had
been, operating in the neighbourhood of Nantucket.
Unanimously the sinking of the _Assyrian_ was ascribed to an internal
explosion of unknown origin. No paper hinted that German secret agents
might possibly have figured incogniti among her passengers. There was
mention neither of the flare which had burned on her after deck to make
the _Assyrian_ a conspicuous target in the night, nor of any of the other
untoward events which had led up to the explosion. Nothing whatever
was said of the shot fired at the submerging U-boat by a United States
torpedo-boat destroyer speeding to the rescue.
Still, the bare facts alone were sufficiently appalling. Reading what had
been permitted to gain publication, Lanyard experienced a qualm of horror
together with the thought that, even had he drowned as he had expected to
drown, such a fate had almost been preferable to participation in those
awful ten minutes precipitated by that pale messenger of death which had so
narrowly missed Lanyard himself as he rested on the bosom of the sea.
Within ten minutes after receiving her coup de grâce the _Assyrian_ had
gone under; barely that much time had been permitted a passenger list of
seventy-two and a personnel of nearly three hundred souls in which to rouse
from dreams of security and take to the lifeboats.
Thanks to the frenzied haste compelled by the swift settling of the ship,
more than one boat had been capsized. Others had been sunk--literally
driven under--by masses of humanity cascading into them from slanting
decks. Others, again, had never been launched at all.
The utmost efforts of the destroyer, fortuitously so near at hand, had
served to rescue but thirty-one passengers and one hundred and eighty of
the crew.
In the list of survivors Lanyard found these names:
Becker, Julius--New York
Brooke, Cecelia--London
Crane, Robert T.--New York
Dressier, Emil--Geneva
O'Reilly, Edmund--Detroit
Putnam, Bartlett--Philadelphia
Velasco, Arturo--Buenos Aires
Among the injured, Lieutenant Lionel Thackeray, D.S.O., was listed as
suffering from concussion of the brain, said to have been contracted
through a fall while attempting to aid the launching of a lifeboat.
In the long roster of the drowned these names appeared:
Bartholomew, Archer--London
Duchemin, André--Paris
Von Harden, Baron Gustav--Amsterdam
Osborne, Captain E. W.--London
Of all the officers, Mr. Sherry was a solitary survivor, fished out of the
sea after going down with his ship.