I've read a lot about the near by ships and the various reports of why they didn't show up during the Titanic's SOS calls, but I was curious what they would physically do if they arrived prior to sinking?
I assume a ship of that size would suck down small rescue ships if they were close enough. Was there a procedure in place for such a rescue?
Most likely any other ship would recover lifeboats from the sinking ship, empty them into its own decks then launch them again to recover more survivors. It could also use its own boats and crew to pick up survivors directly from the sinking ship or from the water. (In the particular case of Titanic, the increasing angle of the ship as the bow sank would make it difficult to recover and relaunch boats, but I'm speaking in the hypothetical.)
It wouldn't be pulled up next to the sinking ship directly; transferring passengers by something like a breeches buoy would likely be too time-consuming.
There wasn't anything like an international lifeboat drill at the time, but these would be standard procedures understood by a ship's crew.