The Band That Played On Read Free Page B

sailor reached out, took the bundle, and hesitated,” Hurd later wrote. “‘Throw it!’ cried a dozen persons. The sailor tossed the bundle to Chapin. With an acknowledging toot of the tug’s whistle, the little craft churned off.”
    The drama didn’t end there. The tugboat ploughed its way toward an empty dock at the end of 12th Street, but after disembarking, the World employees found their exit blocked by a boarded-up warehouse with no electric lighting. They had to smash their way into the darkened building and out on the other side to make it to the street. An elevated train took them to the stop closest to the New York World building at 53–63 Park Row. During the journey Chapin hurriedly marked up Hurd’s lengthy handwritten copy and added instructions to the typesetters. A reporter named “Gen” Whytock met him at the station and sprinted the half mile to the office with the script. By the time the Carpathia docked, an Extra edition of the Evening World was already on the street with a condensed version of the five-thousand-word story on the front page beneath the headline “ Titanic Boilers Blew Up, Breaking Her in Two after Striking Berg.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch also managed to run this story in an Extra that night, putting the full story on the cover the next day.

    Headline from the April 18th evening edition of the New York World.
    Thus it was Hurd’s story that first informed the world about the band playing on. In the Evening World he wrote: “The ship’s string band gathered in the saloon, near the end, and played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’” The fuller version published in the next day’s papers, and later syndicated by the Associated Press, read: “As the screams in the water multiplied, another sound was heard, strong and clear at first, then fainter in the distance. It was the melody of the hymn ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ played by the string orchestra in the dining saloon. Some of those on the water started to sing the words, but grew silent as they realized that for the men who played, the music was a sacrament soon to be consummated by death. The serene strains of the hymn and the frantic cries of the dying blended in a symphony of sorrow.”
    The Leeds Mercury , which would have been read by bandleader Wallace Hartley’s bereaved fiancée, Maria Robinson, contained a quote from Carlos Hurd in its April 20 edition. “To relate that as the last boats moved away the ship’s string band gathered in the saloon and played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ sounds like an attempt to give added colour to a scene which was in itself the climax of solemnity, but various passengers and survivors of the crew agree in declaring they heard this music.”
    Other accounts that confirmed Hurd’s report swiftly followed. Caroline Bonnell from Youngstown, Ohio, who’d been traveling with two aunts, an uncle, and a cousin, told a reporter from the United Press Agency that those closest to the ship when it sank heard the men singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” This story appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on April 19 and was picked up by other newspapers.

    By the twentieth of April, the story was widely accepted and was viewed as one of the most heartening acts of bravery in the whole tragedy. Southampton resident Ada Clarke was pushed onto a lifeboat by her husband, who chose to remain behind. “I shouldn’t have done it otherwise,” she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer . “Oh, they were brave and splendid, all the men. They died like brave men. At the last, all the men were kneeling and there floated out across the water the strains of ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’ I could hear it and saw the band men kneeling too.” Mrs. Caroline Brown of Belmont, Massachusetts, told the Worcester Evening Gazette : “The band played marching from deck to deck, and as the ship went under I could still hear the music. The musicians were up to their knees in water the last I saw