It was a brutal age, ministered to by hard-fisted men, and we had put
it a hundred decent years behind us when--it all comes back again!
To-day there are no prisons for the crews of merchantmen, but they
can go to the bottom by mine and torpedo even more quickly than their
ancestors were run into Le Havre. The submarine takes the place of the
privateer; the Line, as in the old wars, is occupied, bombarding and
blockading, elsewhere, but the sea-borne traffic must continue, and
that is being looked after by the lineal descendants of the crews of
the long extinct cutters and sloops and gun-brigs. The hour struck,
and they reappeared, to the tune of fifty thousand odd men in more
than two thousand ships, of which I have seen a few hundred. Words of
command may have changed a little, the tools are certainly more
complex, but the spirit of the new crews who come to the old job is
utterly unchanged. It is the same fierce, hard-living, heavy-handed,
very cunning service out of which the Navy as we know it to-day was
born. It is called indifferently the Trawler and Auxiliary Fleet. It
is chiefly composed of fishermen, but it takes in every one who may
have maritime tastes--from retired admirals to the sons of the
sea-cook. It exists for the benefit of the traffic and the annoyance
of the enemy. Its doings are recorded by flags stuck into charts; its
casualties are buried in obscure corners of the newspapers. The Grand
Fleet knows it slightly; the restless light cruisers who chaperon it
from the background are more intimate; the destroyers working off
unlighted coasts over unmarked shoals come, as you might say, in
direct contact with it; the submarine alternately praises and--since
one periscope is very like another--curses its activities; but the
steady procession of traffic in home waters, liner and tramp, six
every sixty minutes, blesses it altogether.
Since this most Christian war includes laying mines in the fairways of
traffic, and since these mines may be laid at any time by German
submarines especially built for the work, or by neutral ships, all
fairways must be swept continuously day and night. When a nest of
mines is reported, traffic must be hung up or deviated till it is
cleared out. When traffic comes up Channel it must be examined for
contraband and other things; and the examining tugs lie out in a blaze
of lights to remind ships of this. Months ago, when the war was young,
the tugs did not know what to look for specially. Now they do. All
this mine-searching and reporting and sweeping, _plus_ the direction
and examination of the traffic, _plus_ the laying of our own
ever-shifting mine-fields, is part of the Trawler Fleet's work,
because the Navy-as-we-knew-it is busy elsewhere. And there is always
the enemy submarine with a price on her head, whom the Trawler Fleet
hunts and traps with zeal and joy. Add to this, that there are boats,
fishing for real fish, to be protected in their work at sea or chased
off dangerous areas whither, because they are strictly forbidden to
go, they naturally repair, and you will begin to get some idea of what
the Trawler and Auxiliary Fleet does.