File:'The Track of the "Lusitania"' RMG PW1553.tiff

Signed by artist, lower right. A carefully composed view of the aftermath of the sinking of the passenger liner 'Lusitania', which was torpedoed by a U-boat off the Old Head of Kinsale, southern Ireland on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, while heading to Britain from New York with the loss of 1198 of those on board. On a calm evening sea a distant black pall of smoke hangs over where the ship exploded and went down in 18 minutes, with a trail of dead bodies, interspersed with a few survivors on wreckage and four ship's lifeboats picking them up, streaming in a drifting 'track' into the close foreground. The attack on an unarmed passenger vessel was regarded in Britain and the USA as an atrocity, as the drawing implies: the Germans claimed and celebrated it as legitimate based on their assertion that the ship was carrying military equipment and stores from America, which the British authorities denied. While the German claim was later shown to be technically correct (there was a quantity of ammunition on board), in terms of a proportionate reaction the sinking was politically counterproductive, not least given the number of neutral Americans killed. As an example of German 'frightfulness' the incident was used to great effect in bringing the USA into the war in 1917. The drawing was reproduced in colour in Wyllie's co-authored 'More Sea Fights of the Great War (1919) f. p. 48, with the printed title 'The Track of the "Lusitania"'. PAE0896, PAE2089 and PAE2100 are drawings by Wyllie of the 'Lusitania' herself. [PvdM 10/13]