Two brothers reunited

Dead Wake by Erik Larson. The Last Crossing of the Lusitania is the subtitle. Page 304. I have read a handful of books about the Lusitania and this story always tugs my heartstrings. The scene is in the small town of Queensland in Ireland, where the survivors were brought ashore and whose presence overwhelmed the facilities.

Seaman Leslie Morton spent Friday night looking for his brother Cliff on the lists of survivors and in the hotels of Queenstown but found no trace. Early the next morning he sent a telegram to his father, “Am saved, looking for Cliff.” He went to one of the morgues. “Laid out in rows all the way down on both sides were sheeted and shrouded bodies,” he wrote, “and a large number of people in varying states of sorrow and distress were going from body to body, turning back the sheets to see if they could identify loved ones who had not yet been found.”

He worked his way along, lifting sheets. Just as he was about to pull yet one more, he saw the hand of another searcher reaching for the same sheet. He looked over, and saw his brother. Their reaction was deadpan.

“Hallo, Cliff, glad to see you,” Leslie said.

“Am I glad to see you too, Gert,” Cliff said. “I think we ought to have a drink on this!”

As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, “so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did.”

That night Leslie had his first-ever Guinness. “I cannot say that I thought much of it in those days, but it seemed a good thing in which to celebrate being alive, having got together again and being in Ireland.”