THE MINE-SWEEPERS.
“These ’ere trawlers” were also largely used for netting submarines. The nets used were made of steel and some of them were about a hundred miles long! They were run out from trawler to trawler so as to make a kind of open-work steel wall below the surface of the water. Each trawler carried a gun both fore and aft; and when a submarine was caught in the net it was raised to the surface and promptly dealt with by the expert naval gunners who had been allotted to each trawler or by an attendant destroyer or seaplane.
A well-known writer and poet tells a story which shows what dangers the submarine hunters were called upon to face:
“On a few occasions, the hunters have themselves been trapped. Three men, taken off a trawler by a submarine, endured an eighty hours’ nightmare under the sea that shattered the mind of one and left lasting traces on the other two. Again and again, revolvers were put to their heads and they were ordered, on pain of death, to tell all they knew of our naval plans.
“They saw a good deal of the life on a German submarine and noted that the German crew on this boat at any rate were very ‘jumpy,’ too jumpy even to take a square meal. They munched biscuits at odd moments at their stations.
“On the third morning they heard guns going overhead, and watched the Germans handing out shells to their own guns. Finally a torpedo was fired and they heard it take effect. Then they emerged into the red wash of dawn, and saw only the floating wreckage of the big ship that had been sunk; and amongst the wreckage a small boat. They were bundled into this; told they were free to go to England or Nineveh; and the submarine left them—three longshore fishermen, who had passed through the latest invention of the modern scientific devil, two who could still pull at the oars, but the other too crazy to steer.”[5]