That was when the world upended, the ship tipping back on its stern, dramatically, sitting itself down on its tail, beginning to collapse in on itself in so doing. Spectators would say the ship looked like a Japanese lantern, lighting up from within, showing off the ship’s aluminum framework even as it consumed itself.
Fortunately he’d been holding on to the stair rail, and now he was holding on with both hands, his ears filled with the sound of tables and chairs and other normally friendly objects making deadly nuisances of themselves to the passengers on A deck above, from which reverberated more screams, and the awful sound of human beings tumbling like so many dice.
Gritting his teeth, sucking in air not yet tainted by smoke, Charteris dangled there, the stairs above him taking quite the opposite tilt proper stairs could take. Dirty bedclothes, piled at the end of the hallway above, plummeted past him, spilling down as the dying dirigible did its topsy-turvy backstand, blankets and sheets fluttering like the wings of dying birds.
Pulling himself up and along, with only the railing to keep him from plunging to injury or death, he yanked himself upward, where he might help his friends.
Moments earlier, before the second explosion, with the knowledge that the ship was in flames-flames that had not yet reached them, though they could hear the fire’s deep deadly hissing, like a thousand stirred-up snakes-Leonhard Adelt, on the starboard side, had taken his wife by one arm and Hilda by the other.
“We have to get out through the windows!” he told them. “It’s our only chance!”
“It’s too high!” Gertrude said, eyes huge with horror.
“We’ll go lower, believe me! Wait a bit….”
They were at a distance of perhaps one hundred twenty feet now-the distance to the ground diminishing by the second, but not quickly enough to suit the two women, who looked terrified; and so was Leonhard, but he did his best not to betray that.
“I’ll go get some bed linen,” he told them confidently, “to soften our fall!”
But he didn’t go, because that was when the second explosion shook the ship like a naughty child, sending Adelt and Gertrude and Hilda and every other passenger on the starboard promenade tumbling backward, toward the bulkhead by the stair corridor, slamming into it, even as tables and chairs pitched forward, crashing down on them, barricading them in.
Their world almost upside down, Leonhard quickly acted to ascertain the condition of his little group. Thank God for this lightweight furniture! He brushed aside a chair, pulled a table off the two women, who were stunned but that seemed to be all, merely shaken, clothing torn, but no blood visible.
That could not be said for others around them. Elsewhere on this upended deck, George Hirschfeld was clinging to a bench, hanging down the deck’s steep incline, a bloody gash on his forehead, and Ed Douglas had slammed into a wall of the lounge, pinned behind a stack of tables and chairs, unconscious. In the corner, where the bulkhead met the slanting windows, Herman Doehner, father of the two boys, was similarly unconscious, head bloody from banging it on metal railings as he tumbled down the treacherous slide the deck had become; but his wife was awake and the two boys-very wide-eyed but not crying-were fussing over the papa.
And Moritz Feibusch lay unconscious, dying, his head cracked open against a metal railing, with forty-three unaddressed, unsigned postcards in his pocket, the rest still in the mailroom, waiting to be posted, waiting to burn.
The officers in the control gondola, in their forward position, were perhaps the last on the ship to know of the tragedy they were piloting.
Ernst Lehmann, observing in the gondola, had felt an odd tremor, rather like an ocean wave lapping onto shore.
“Is a rope broken?” he asked Captain Pruss.
“No,” Pruss said, unconcerned.
“I felt a heavy push, Captain….”
That was when someone on the ground yelled, “Run for your lives!”
And the rudder officer began to moan, “Oh, no, oh, no!”
Somewhere a fire bell was ringing, and a red glow was spreading on the ground, like a rosy rash.
The watch officer said, like a man sleepwalking, “I should get the logbook.”
Lehmann barked his first official order of the voyage: “Drop the water ballast!”
The second explosion came just then.
That one they heard, all of them, and it shook them, physically, and otherwise-but they could see or hear no flames, could smell no smoke, not yet. The captains of the Hindenburg stood helpless, impotent, the red reflection of unseen flames like a blush of embarrassment on their dazed faces.
On the portside deck, by the dining room, a chaos similar to that on the starboard had ensued. Fewer passengers on this side, though all of the stewards were over here, in part for the sake of distributing weight, but also for Kubis’s staff to put away dishes and such, including placing leftover sandwiches in the pantry dumbwaiter.
Margaret Mather had been leaning out an open window, chatting with one of the college boys, who was taking photographs with a Kodak, when mysterious sounds from the engines caused her to grasp his arm and look at him for reassurance.
The second explosion-the first had barely been noticed-rocked the ship and sent many of them, passengers and stewards alike, to their knees.
Chief Steward Kubis picked himself up, saying, “Everything will be all right!”
That was when the ship lurched, sitting back on its stern, and began crumpling into itself, and the sudden tilt took the floor out from under them, stewards and passengers toppling and tumbling, furniture cascading after them.
Lightweight Margaret Mather-wrapped up in a navy-and-white herringbone coat due to the cool rainy weather-was hurled twenty feet into the end bulkhead and soon was pinned against the projection of a window bench by a crush of German passengers. She thought she was suffocating, thought she might die from the weight pressing on her, but the passengers clambered to their feet and grabbed onto railings and window ledges, hanging there as the floor canted under them.
Relief flowed through her, and then the fire blew in.
Long tongues of flame, she thought, strangely detached and typically poetic, bright red and so very beautiful.
Though it was mere seconds, the trip up the back-tilted stairs seemed to take forever, and strained the formidable muscles of the well-toned author’s arms. Charteris had never been more glad that he had never allowed his sedentary calling to keep him from physical activity.
As he reached the top of the stairs, the floor under him seemed to right itself somewhat-the stern disintegrating in flame had allowed the bow to drop. Snatching up a blanket that had draped itself over the stair railing, he moved into the starboard promenade deck, where he came upon a picture of chaos, people and furniture scattered like so much discarded refuse. Some of the people were unconscious, perhaps even dead; others had made their way over and around the furniture and the fallen to get to the windows.
Leonhard and Gertrude were poised to jump, pausing to look back urgently at Hilda, who stood fear-frozen, hands covering her face. As Charteris neared them, fire swept into the room, right past them, not touching them, as if seeking the helpless unconscious and dying in the lounge. Flames jumped and danced and crackled, and the Adelts just jumped. Charteris swept Hilda up in the blanket, bundled her in his arms like a baby; she put up no resistance but her eyes were wild. The hissing of flames was at their back and the screams and yells around them were like dissonant notes standing out from a hellish symphony. He kissed her forehead, gave her a tight reassuring smile, and waited as long as he could, till the ship had lowered to about ten feet.
Then he dropped her, gently as possible, hoping the sandy ground below would greet her the same way.
Like Margaret Mather, Joseph Spah was on the portside, and the acrobat was climbing out a window, following two men who’d gone out before him and dropped to the ground too soon, crashing to earth, one hundred feet or more, bouncing as they hit, and now lay unconscious or dead, flaming linen and molten aluminum raining down on them.