The
wonder of it is that more men were not killed in keeping the seaways so
carefully swept, night and day, all the year round, for tens of
thousands of miles, during the fifty-one months of the war.
[Illustration: Minesweeper at work.]
Still more dangerous was the fishing for those vilest of devil-fish,
the German submarines. The fishermen "shot" enormous steel nets just
as you shoot a fishing net, letting them hang a bit slack so as to be
the more entangling. Then, just as you feel your rod quiver when a
fish takes your fly, so these anglers for Germans would feel the quiver
from a nosing submarine caught in the toils. Very few submarines ever
escaped; for the slack of the waving net was apt to foul the screw, and
there they were held till the last struggle ceased and the last man was
smothered inside.
The fishermen would sometimes have rescued their ruthless enemies if
they could have disentangled them in time. But this could rarely be
done; and the Germans met a just fate. One day a submarine came up
alongside a British trawler which was engaged in its regular fishing,
was quite unarmed, and had a crew of old men and young boys.
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