me aboard, caught fast in the tackle. The
skipper (captain) ordered all hands into the boats, and then himself
cut it clear after a whole hour's work, during which one false touch or
even the slightest jolt would have blown his ship to smithereens. 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. The
Germans took all the fresh fish they wanted, sank the trawler, smashed
up her boats, and put the fishermen on the submarine's deck. Then they
slammed-to the hatch of the conning tower and sank very slowly, washing
the fishermen off. Then they rose again to laugh at them drowning. An
avenging destroyer came racing along and picked up the sole survivor.
But the German jokers, seeing it coming, had gone. No wonder the
seafaring British sometimes "saw red" to such a degree that they would
do anything to get in a blow! And sometimes they did get it in, when
the Germans least thought it was coming. When a skipper suddenly found
a German U-boat (_Unterseeboot_ or under-sea-boat) rising beside him,
just as his engine-room mechanic had come up with a hammer in his hand,
he called out, "look sharp and blind her!" Without a moment's
hesitation the mechanic jumped on her deck and smashed her periscope to
pieces, thus leaving her the blinded prey of gathering destroyers.

The Germans put their wits to work with hellish cunning. They w