Babes in the Sea

Through a smashing Atlantic gale 600 miles off the British coast ploughed the City of Benares one night last week, bound under convoy for Canada. Below decks 90 children evacuated from the heavily bombed slum sections of London were asleep in their bunks. Other passengers were playing bridge in the lounge, chatting in the ship's bar. It was just 10 o'clock.

With a shattering roar an explosion forward of the engine room threw the vessel violently on its beams, next minute a second torpedo crashed into the engine room. In an instant the whole ship was a hell of fire and water. Through the gaping holes in her sides, water poured into the ship, trapping scores of passengers, some of them wounded by the blast. In the darkness and storm it was almost impossible to launch lifeboats. She was listing farther every minute.

Terrified, many people jumped into the cold heaving sea, some holding babies in their arms. Lifeboats and rafts capsized. The numbed and the injured lost their precarious hold on the overturned boats, were swept away. Within half an hour of the attack the ship itself heeled over and disappeared, its captain standing at the stern, shouting: "Get into the boats and look after yourselves." Many went down with it, still more were sucked into the whirlpool. House-high waves twisted and filled the boats, swamped several. Rain and hail and wind tortured the survivors to unconsciousness and death.

Heroism joined hands with horror through the long night of waiting. One ten-year-old boy encouraged a dying nurse, cradling her head in his arms as he reassured her: "I can see boats, nurse. It won't be long now--everything will be all right." Piped a 13-year-old girl: "Don't worry, nurse. The British Navy won't let us down." A London publisher held a dead baby in his lap, pretended to feed it from its bottle to comfort the dying mother. Another Londoner tried to help by caring for the dead. "I said as much of the burial service as I could remember," he said, "before dropping them overboard...I burried 24 persons, men, women and children, during the 24 hours."

The chief adult escort for the children, onetime Headmistress Miss Margaret Elizabeth Day of Wycombe Abbey School, told a racking account of the disaster: "I was in my cabin when I heard an explosion. As I seized my coat and life belt, water was entering the cabin. I dashed to the children's quarters and found them still asleep. . . .An officer shouted to the children to hurry on deck, and we started, with the children behaving magnificently. . . .We clambered into a lifeboat but it had shipped much water and its rudder was gone. . . .The children were singing Roll Out the Barrel. As they came to the part that goes 'We'll have a barrel of fun,' the ship sank. . . .The darkness was terrifying. There was no disorder-- only the moaning and crying of the wounded. We were in water up to our hips. It was terribly cold. . . .When dawn came we sighted twelve lifeboats. . . . In our boat there were only one child, two escorts, and stewardess and two sailors alive."

Even more dramatic was the tale of twelve-year-old Elizabeth Mary Cummings: "When I got to the lifeboat muster station the boat was gone. It smashed as it struck the water with some men, women and children in it and I could see the people struggling in the water. . . . We got into another lifeboat, but there was a terrible crowd aboard. The sea was very stormy and waves were coming over our lifeboat, and I was certain that I would die. . . . Suddenly one big wave, and the lifeboat tumbled over. I never swam in my life but I had to swim that time. I got to a lifeboat which was upside down and clung to it. ... Finally we were picked up by another lifeboat. . . . About 24 hours after the ship sank we were rescued by one of the warships."

Cheerfully eleven-year-old Sonia Bech told of the hazardous hours on a tiny raft with her mother and nine-year-old brother Derek. Twice she had been washed off by the sea but both times she had been rescued. "When we laid down our heads," she said, "we were in the water. When we tried to sit up we were blown down again by the wind. . . . When we found the warship we all stood up and cheered and shouted for the good old British Navy. The Navy men helped us up a rope ladder --first an arm and then a leg--and I could not help thinking how funny it was. The sailors gave us rum to drink. It was horrible stuff, but I suppose it did us good." Already safe aboard the destroyer was the fourth member of the family, her four-year-old sister Barbara, who had been picked up from a lifeboat.

By the time the survivors had been returned to Britain the death roll had mounted to 83 of the 90 children and 210 of 316 adults, some of them refugees from German concentration camps. Among the dead were Rudolf Olden, onetime anti-Hitler editor of the Berliner Tageblatt; Dr. Gallinsky, new Charge d'Affaires of the Polish Embassy in Washington; Colonel James Baldwin-Webb, M. P., on a Red Cross mission to Canada.

Cried Geoffrey Shakespeare, Under Secretary for the Dominions and Chairman of the Evacuation Board: "This deed will shock the world."

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