Sea Warfare | Page 3

of fishing-fleets and fire into the brown of them. When the war was young this gave splendidly "frightful" results, but for some reason or other the game is not as popular as it used to be.
Lastly, there are German submarines who perish by ways so curious and inexplicable that one could almost credit the whispered idea (it must come from the Scotch skippers) that the ghosts of the women they drowned pilot them to destruction. But what form these shadows take--whether of "The Lusitania Ladies," or humbler stewardesses and hospital nurses--and what lights or sounds the thing fancies it sees or hears before it is blotted out, no man will ever know. The main fact is that the work is being done. Whether it was necessary or politic to re-awaken by violence every sporting instinct of a sea-going people is a question which the enemy may have to consider later on.
Dawn off the Foreland--the young flood making Jumbled and short and steep-- Black in the hollows and bright where it's breaking-- Awkward water to sweep. "Mines reported in the fairway, "Warn all traffic and detain. "'Sent up Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."
Noon off the Foreland--the first ebb making Lumpy and strong in the bight. Boom after boom, and the golf-hut shaking And the jackdaws wild with fright! "Mines located in the fairway, "Boats now working up the chain, "Sweepers--Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock and Golden Gain."
Dusk off the Foreland--the last light going And the traffic crowding through, And five damned trawlers with their syreens blowing Heading the whole review! "Sweep completed in the fairway. "No more mines remain. "'Sent back Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."

THE AUXILIARIES
II
The Trawlers seem to look on mines as more or less fairplay. But with the torpedo it is otherwise. A Yarmouth man lay on his hatch, his gear neatly stowed away below, and told me that another Yarmouth boat had "gone up," with all hands except one. "'Twas a submarine. Not a mine," said he. "They never gave our boys no chance. Na! She was a Yarmouth boat--we knew 'em all. They never gave the boys no chance." He was a submarine hunter, and he illustrated by means of matches placed at various angles how the blindfold business is conducted. "And then," he ended, "there's always what he'll do. You've got to think that out for yourself--while you're working above him--same as if 'twas fish." I should not care to be hunted for the life in shallow waters by a man who knows every bank and pothole of them, even if I had not killed his friends the week before. Being nearly all fishermen they discuss their work in terms of fish, and put in their leisure fishing overside, when they sometimes pull up ghastly souvenirs. But they all want guns. Those who have three-pounders clamour for sixes; sixes for twelves; and the twelve-pound aristocracy dream of four-inchers on anti-aircraft mountings for the benefit of roving Zeppelins. They will all get them in time, and I fancy it will be long ere they give them up. One West Country mate announced that "a gun is a handy thing to have aboard--always." "But in peacetime?" I said. "Wouldn't it be in the way?"
"We'm used to 'em now," was the smiling answer. "Niver go to sea again without a gun--I wouldn't--if I had my way. It keeps all hands pleased-like."
They talk about men in the Army who will never willingly go back to civil life. What of the fishermen who have tasted something sharper than salt water--and what of the young third and fourth mates who have held independent commands for nine months past? One of them said to me quite irrelevantly: "I used to be the animal that got up the trunks for the women on baggage-days in the old Bodiam Castle," and he mimicked their requests for "the large brown box," or "the black dress basket," as a freed soul might scoff at his old life in the flesh.
"A COMMON SWEEPER"
My sponsor and chaperon in this Elizabethan world of eighteenth-century seamen was an A.B. who had gone down in the Landrail, assisted at the Heligoland fight, seen the Blücher sink and the bombs dropped on our boats when we tried to save the drowning ("Whereby," as he said, "those Germans died gottstrafin' their own country because we didn't wait to be strafed"), and has now found more peaceful days in an Office ashore. He led me across many decks from craft to craft to study the various appliances that they specialise in. Almost our last was what a North Country trawler called a "common sweeper," that is to say, a mine-sweeper. She was at tea in her shirt-sleeves, and she protested loudly that there was "nothing in sweeping." "'See that wire rope?"