University of Virginia Library

BAND PLAYED ITS OWN DIRGE

The band had broken out in the strains of "Nearer, My God, to Thee," some minutes before Murdock lifted the revolver to his head, fired and toppled over on his face. Moody saw all this in a vision that filled his brain, while his ears drank in the tragic strain of the beautiful hymn that the band played as their own dirge, even to the moment when the waters sucked them down.

Wherever Murdock's eye swept the water in that instant, before he drew his revolver, it looked upon veritable seas of drowning men and women. From the decks there came to him the shrieks and groans of the caged and drowning, for whom all hope of escape was utterly vanished. He evidently never gave a thought to the possibility of saving himself, his mind freezing with the horrors he beheld and having room for just one central idea—swift extinction.

The strains of the hymn and the frantic cries of the dying blended in a symphony of sorrow.

Led by the green light, under the light of stars, the boats drew away, and the bow, then the quarter, then the stacks and last the stern of the marvel ship of a few days before passed beneath the waters. The great force of the ship's sinking was unaided by any violence of the elements, and the suction, not so great as had been feared, rocked but mildly the group of boats now a quarter of a mile distant from it.

Just before the Titanic disappeared from view men and women leaped from the stern. More than a hundred men, according to Colonel Gracie, jumped at the last. Gracie

was among the number and he and the second officer were of the very few who were saved.

As the vessel disappeared, the waves drowned the majestic

hymn which the musicians played as they went to their watery grave. The most authentic accounts agree that this hymn was not "Nearer, My God, to Thee," which it seems had been

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
CARPATHIA
The Cunard liner which brought the survivors of the Titanic to New York.

[Description: Drawing of the steamship Carpathia. ]

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
THE HERO WIRELESS OPERATOR OF THE TITANIC
Photograph of Harold Bride, one of the two wireless operators on board the Titanic, being carried ashore from the Steamship Carpathia by two ship's officers. Bride, one of the last men to leave the ship, jumped into the sea and floated around in the water until rescued. When taken into a life-boat his feet were badly frost-bitten and became wedged into the slats at the bottom of the lifeboat and were wrenched severely. Although suffering great pain, he helped the wireless operator of the Carpathia, Harold Thomas Catton, to send hundreds of wireless messages ashore.

[Description: Photograph of Harold Bride being helped off the Carpathia by two other men. ]

played shortly before, but "Autumn," which is found in the Episcopal hymnal and which fits appropriately the situation on the Titanic in the last moments of pain and darkness there. One line, "Hold me up in mighty waters," particularly may have suggested the hymn to some minister aboard the doomed vessel, who, it has been thought, thereupon asked the remaining passengers to join in singing the hymn, in a last service aboard the sinking ship, soon to be ended by death itself.

Following is the hymn:

It was a little lame schoolmaster, Tyrtaeus, who aroused the Spartans by his poetry and led them to victory against the foe.

It was the musicians of the band of the Titanic—poor men, paid a few dollars a week—who played the music to keep up the courage of the souls aboard the sinking ship.

"The way the band kept playing was a noble thing," says the wireless operator. "I heard it first while we were working the wireless, when there was a rag-time tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating, struggling in the icy water, it was still on deck, playing `Autumn.' How those brave fellows ever did it I cannot imagine."

Perhaps that music, made in the face of death, would not have satisfied the exacting critical sense. It may be that the chilled fingers faltered on the pistons of the cornet or at the valves of the French horn, that the time was irregular and that by an organ in a church, with a decorous congregation, the hymns they chose would have been better played and sung. But surely that music went up to God from the souls

of drowning men, and was not less acceptable than the song of songs no mortal ear may hear, the harps of the seraphs and the choiring cherubim. Under the sea the music-makers lie, still in their fingers clutching the broken and battered means of melody; but over the strident voice of warring winds and the sound of many waters there rises their chant eternally; and though the musicians lie hushed and cold at the sea's heart, their music is heard forevermore.