The Lusitania
The Lusitania itself is the symbolic incarnation of one of the book’s most pressing themes: the hubris of the British. Cunard, which owned the ship, issued an unintentionally ironic statement of tragic proportions: "The truth is that the Lusitania is the safest boat on the sea. She is too fast for any submarine. No German war vessel can get her or near her." It was precisely this self-satisfaction with their own invincibility which contributed to one of the most famous naval disasters of the 20th century.
"Danger!" by Arthur Conan Doyle
The author describes those had not given into hubris and were actually capable of understanding the potentially devastating danger presented by the introduction of the submarine into naval warfare as “a few prescient souls.” One of the few of these prescient souls mentioned by name is the creator of Sherlock Holmes. More specifically, a short story Doyle had written during this same time frame titled “Danger!” is situated early on as the symbol of those warning cries in the wilderness.
Fog
A number of different pieces of the puzzle had to all fit together at precisely the right time and in the right place for the Lusitania disaster to happen. Remove any one of them and things might have turned out differently in a variety of ways. Overconfidence is the one the aspect most under control, but ignorance allowed that edge to slip right through. Fog is the symbol of the uncontainable. “The protective screen of fog” could keep the ship safe from submarines as long as it was thick; heavy fog was dangerous for navigation, but an ally against U-boats that absolutely needed to actually visually sight their target through a periscope. That nature at first assisted the Lusitania and then became complicit in dooming her makes fog as symbol of that which cannot be controlled.
Winston Churchill
Whether unfairly or not, the future Prime Minister of England then-head of the British Navy becomes the book’s symbol of the darker possibilities of conspiracy as one of the aspects contributing to the Lusitania’s demise. The Allies desperately hoped the U.S. would give up its neutrality and enter the war on their behalf and some evidence points rather strongly to a possible conspiracy of willingness to sacrifice the passenger ship for the greater purpose of using the tragedy as propaganda to finally convince America that she was not as far from danger as she might think.
German U-Boats
And, of course, the German unterseeboot—which would come to be known as U-Boats until Germany lost the war and the right to give the invention its name—is the symbol of progress in the name of destruction. The British failed to fully appreciate how submarines had already changed forever the rules of naval warfare. The solidity of belief by Cunard and the Captain of the Lusitania that the ship did not present a useful target for German vessels was rooted firmly in technology of the past. The submarine was still considered a symbol of the potential of the future. Only the Germans seemed to understand the future was already here and their U-boats were hardly just a symbolic threat.
