"All night the mechanician and I were tossed on the sea without a chance of attracting anyone, as our rockets had given out. The cold was unbearable, and both of us were very seasick.
"Dawn came, and there did not even then seem much more chance of our being rescued than at night time. You could not imagine anything lonelier than a seaplane on the bosom of the North Sea when you are without food or drink. The rocking of the light craft would have made a good sailor keel over with seasickness. The happy moment, however, did come. We were spotted by a mine-sweeper, and she raced to the rescue. Our mangled machine was hoisted on the kite crane of the little vessel. We had been thirty-six hours without food and water, and most of the time bumped about on the sea.
"That would seem to be about enough for the evil genius to perform, eh? But we were doomed to have another surprise in store. I went to bed in a room in a little hotel, and had hardly closed my eyes when there was a great explosion; the whole place seemed about to fall down. I put on an overcoat, and tore outside to discover that those blamed destroyers which I had seen earlier were bombarding the place where I went to sleep. A lucky shot demolished the building next to the one in which I was in bed; then I went back to bed, too tired to care what else happened."
IV. SWEEPING THE SEAS FOR MINES
There are days when a mine-sweeper captain, who is continually running the gauntlet of death, reckons that he has been fortunate. Usually this is when he just escapes being blown to bits with his vessel or sees what can happen to a steamship when it strikes one of the enemy mines planted at random in the North Sea. There are days when he goes out and sees nothing worth while. However, despite the great danger, unseen and unheard until all is over, these mine-sweeper men guide their vessels out daybreak after daybreak, with the same old carefree air, to perform their allotted task in this war.
Many of these men were fishermen, who looked as if they had slipped out of funny stories in their thick jerseys and sou'-westers; now they are part and parcel of the British Navy, proud of the blue uniform and brass buttons and—when they have them—of the wavy gold bands on their sleeves. There are others who were officers and so forth in the mercantile marine in pre-war days. They have sailed the seas from John o' Groats to Tokio: and to them New York is merely a jaunt.
One of the latter, who was a passenger-vessel officer, attracted a deal of attention at an East English port by his indefatigable labour and fearlessness in his risky job, until he was rewarded for more than two years of grinning at death by the Distinguished Service Cross.
He knows Broadway well, can tell you where he likes best to get his hair cut, and where he considers they put up the best cocktail. One day I was permitted to take a trip with this captain-lieutenant—and get back. Mine-sweeping has been written about by persons from Kipling down, so I will just tell you the story as I then saw it.