Torpedoed!
A Nurse’s Graphic Personal Narrative of the Wanton Destruction of the Sussex
On a clear day with the sea a perfect mirror reflecting the blue sky, the French Channel Steamer Sussex left Folkstone harbor on its fateful trip for Dieppe, March 24, 1916. Among the passengers was an English nurse attached to a French hospital, who was returning to duty from a month’s leave of absence in England. The Sussex was a small but finely built, stout passenger boat, unarmed. She left harbor at 1.30 in the afternoon, and in a short time encountered in the Channel thousands of floating bags of a jettisoned cargo. A group of passengers, standing by the rail, began to discuss the possibilities of torpedoing. A British officer, who had braved dangers at Undros, laughed, saying that it was not submarine weather, the Germans being afraid to show themselves in a calm sea. Soon the others of the group strolled off leaving the nurse alone watching a Belgian officer exercising his dog on the deck. Presently they went away, and the nurse turned to look out at the sea and watch for a periscope.
What followed the nurse tells, as her personal experience, in an article published in Blackwood’s Magazine:
“It grew cold, and I was beginning to think of going back to my sheltered chair to roll myself up in my rug, when in a moment the whole earth and heaven seemed to explode in one head-splitting roar. In the thousandth part of a second my mind told me ‘Torpedoed—forward—on my right’—and then the sensation of falling, with my limbs spread-eagle, through space.
“When I came to myself again I was groping amid a tangle of broken wires with an agonizing pain in my back and the fiercest headache I had ever known. My hair was down, and plastered to my chin with blood that seemed to be coming from my mouth. There was more blood on my coat-sleeve. I was conscious that I was bleeding freely internally with every movement. My first definite thought was, ‘If only it is all a ghastly nightmare!’ But I remembered. My next thought was a passionately strong desire not to die by drowning—then. I crawled free of the wires that were coiled all about me and stood up.