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?" she said. "Well, it leads through
that lead to the ship which you're sweepin' _with_. She makes her end
fast and you make yourn. Then you sweep together at whichever depth
you've agreed upon between you, by means of that arrangement there
which regulates the depth. They give you a glass sort o' thing for
keepin' your distance from the other ship, but _that's_ not wanted if
you know each other. Well, then, you sweep, as the sayin' is. There's
nothin' _in_ it. You sweep till this wire rope fouls the bloomin'
mines. Then you go on till they appear on the surface, so to say, and
then you explodes them by means of shootin' at 'em with that rifle in
the galley there. There's nothin' in sweepin' more than that."
"And if you hit a mine?" I asked.
"You go up--but you hadn't ought to hit em', if you're careful. The
thing is to get hold of the first mine all right, and then you go on
to the next, and so on, in a way o' speakin'."
"And you can fish, too, 'tween times," said a voice from the next
boat. A man leaned over and returned a borrowed mug. They talked about
fishing--notably that once they caught some red mullet, which the
"common sweeper" and his neighbour both agreed was "not natural in
those waters." As for mere sweeping, it bored them profoundly to talk
about it. I only learned later as part of the natural history of
mines, that if you rake the tri-nitro-toluol by hand out of a German
mine you develop eruptions and skin-poisoning. But on the authority of
two experts, there is nothing in sweeping. Nothing whatever!