George Turner

“She saw at last that her strange son was fired by some purpose which he would carry out or die. Seeing that, she finally currendered--the first casualty of the Revolution in Virginia. In so far as she herself realized, the sacrifice was made for George Wahington, but subconsciously she made it for his cause--just as unaware and obeying by blind instinct the laws of her nature, she had made him to begin with out of stuff that had been in the wearving a thousand years.””

“Distinctively gentle he was, and trustworthy, and of special courtesy. His great physical strength was never used in combat, men remembered, except when needed for the defence of the weak. In the last hours, when his mind went roving over the past, he said to someone who stoody by: 'I thank god that in all my life I never struck a man in anger...Ishould have killed my antagonist and then his blood, at this awful moment, would have lain heavily on my soul....Idie at peace with all mankind.' (Referring to Augustine Washington, husband of Mary Ball and father of George Washington.)””

“The other notable dissenter was playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wittily and acerbically expressed his view that the whole Titanic story had been created in the press to fit a rigid formula, which he called “an explosion of outrageous romantic lying.” The band playing on deck was, according to Shaw, part of the preordained story. He didn’t deny that it happened but offered a different interpretation of events. Possibly, he suggested, the music produced complacency rather than courage and therefore was in part responsible for the high death toll. What he referred to as “the romantic demand” was that “Everybody must face death without a tremor, and the band, according to the Birkenhead precedent,3 must play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.””