The Fox's Walk by Annabel Davis-Goff Page A

side of the Waterford—Dunmore road. There was a telephone in the hall at Ballydavid, but the connections took time and were generally unsatisfactory. I never heard it used socially. The maids were afraid of it and ignored the ringing; even Grandmother, on the rare occasions she used the instrument, held it a little away from her ear and raised her voice to the loudest level consistent with ladylike behaviour.
    But there was another way that information arrived, a Gaelic form of bush telegraph. Sometimes this news was local; sometimes it came from as far away as Dublin; sometimes it was secret (secret in the sense that it was communicated gradually and by hints); sometimes it was what we would read in the newspaper the following day.
    The first rumor of a disaster—brought by a stableboy returning with a horse from the blacksmiths and not given much credence—came during the early evening. It was followed by others after I had been taken up to bed.
    The evening was still light and, aware of the excitement below, I could not sleep. Bridie, who had been turning down the old ladies’ beds, catching sight of me peeping around the door of my room, told me there had been a terrible shipwreck. The horrors of war had come closer to Ballydavid than any of us could have imagined. The
Lusitania
had sunk only seventy miles away, just out of sight of the Irish coast, torpedoed by a German submarine in the full sunshine we had seen over the sea on our way back from my unofficial visit to the Coughlans.
    The liner, flying the American flag (America was then still a neutral nation), sank in circumstances that should have made possible the survival of the greater part of her passengers and crew. She went down quickly, only eleven miles off the Old Head of Kinsale in three hundred feet of water. The sea was not so cold that those who survived the explosion need have died of exposure for several hours. There were enough lifeboats for everyone, but the angle at which the ship tilted prevented the launching of those on the starboard side, and several of the lifeboats that could be lowered were, in the panic, launched so ineptly that the passengers already in them were spilled into the water. Half those on board perished, the number proportionately equal between passengers and crew.
    Immediately after the explosion, fishing boats set out from Kinsale and, shortly afterward, larger boats were launched from Queenstown, some miles farther east. These boats at first rescued those clinging to wreckage and later carried back the bodies. The dead were laid out in lines on the quays; the resources for caring for the survivors were stretched far beyond the capacities of the small fishing villages such as Kinsale, or even Queenstown, the port adjacent to Cork, where transatlantic liners—although not the
Lusitania,
which was making for Liverpool—sometimes called. For weeks later, the tide would wash up bodies on the beaches and rocks along the coast.
    At the time of the shipwreck, horror and outrage at the tragedy prevented questions being asked, but not for long. When they were, too many were unsatisfactorily answered. The Admiralty had set out a procedure designed to minimize the danger from submarines: full speed ahead and a zigzag course. The captain of the
Lusitania
had taken a bearing on the Old Head of Kinsale and steered a direct course at a speed that did not employ all the boilers, in what was afterwards described as an economy measure. Unanswered, also, was the question of the second explosion. Most eyewitnesses described only one torpedo, and the inference was that something stored below deck had exploded when detonated by the torpedo. Since the
Lusitania
had been flying the neutral American flag, arms or weapons of war would have been contraband, and she would have forfeited the protection of her neutral status. If this had been the case, the German U-boat that had sunk her would, under the articles of war, have been,