mbers from some distant part of
the hold. It was repeated several times, and the sailors, without
waiting for orders, set hastily to work to find out the cause.

The hatches were carefully removed, but only floating timber could be
seen. Then the sound came again. This time it was unmistakable and
relieved the tension. A little grim laugh from the searchers was
followed by much poking about with a long piece of wood on the surface
of the flooded hold under the decking, and some minutes later a large
pile of timber floated into the light from the open hatchway, supporting
a big tortoiseshell cat, looking very wet and emaciated. "Ricky"--for
such is her name now--proved to be the only living thing on that
ill-fated ship.

The boarding party returned to the cabin and commenced the objectionable
task of extricating the dead body from the mass of wreckage. The work
proceeded slowly, for the heavy broken timbers pressed mercilessly on
the object beneath, and when at last it lay revealed in the dim lantern
light its ghastly appearance caused all to step back in horror. It was a
headless corpse!

CHAPTER XVII

MINED-IN

HOW many people realise that, with a single unimportant exception, there
was no part of the English or Scottish coast which was not mined-in at
least once by German submarines during 1914-1918? Harbour entrances,
often less than two miles from the shore, were repeatedly blocked by
lines of hostile mines, laid by U-C boats through their stern tubes, in
which they seldom carried less than fifteen to twenty of these deadly
weapons, without the vessels rising to the surface either when
approaching the coast, laying the mines or effecting their escape.

Many important waterways, such as the Straits of Dover, the mouth of the
Thames, the approaches to Liverpool, the Firth of Forth, Aberdeen,
Lowestoft and Portsmouth, were repeatedly chosen for this form of
submarine attack. At one base alone no less than 400 mines were
destroyed by the attached anti-submarine flotillas in one year, and
round the coasts of the United Kingdom an average of about 3000 of these
invisible weapons were located and destroyed annually.

What this meant to the 24,000,000 tons of mercantile shipping passing to
and fro through the danger zone _every month_ will be better realised
when it is stated that less than 400 merchant ships were blown up by
mines during the three years of intensive submarine warfare.

The losses among th