Another British submarine stole into the Sea of Marmora with a couple of land mines to blow up the railway near Constantinople. Lieutenant D'Oyley-Hughes then swam ashore, pushing a little raft to which the mines were lashed. He was quite alone, but armed with a bayonet ground like a razor and an automatic seven-shooter. He also carried a flash-light and whistle. He shouldered first one mine and then the other, each the weight of a big man, took them up the hill, and put them under a little brickwork bridge within a hundred and fifty yards of the Turkish sentries, who were talking round their fire. Though he muffled the fuse pistol it was heard by the Turks, who came running toward him, firing as hard as they could. He let them have his first clip of seven shots slap in the face and then raced a mile along the line, doubled back a bit down the cliff, and swam off toward the submarine. His whistle was not heard at first, as the submarine was in the next bay; and he had to swim a mile before he came across her backing out under fire from the Turks. But he slipped into her conning tower safely, and no one on the British side was hurt.
So great is the danger from mines, unless they are watched and tackled the whole time, that thousands of mine-sweeping vessels were always at work, manned by British fishermen who had been handling gigantic nets and mile-long steel hawsers (ropes) ever since they had gone afloat as boys. These North Sea fishermen, in whom the Viking blood runs strong, had always put in eleven months sea time every year of their lives. So storm and fog and clammy numbing cold had no terrors for them as they worked their "sweepers" to and fro, fishing for the deadly mines. Sometimes, for all their skill and care, a mine would foul their tackle and blow them to pieces. But usually they could "gentle" a mine to the surface and set it off by rifle shots at a safe distance. Sometimes, however, a hitch would happen and the mine would come close alongside. Once a mine actually came 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 wanted to surround Great Britain with a sea of death so full of mines and submarines that no ship could live. The mines were not placed at random, but where they would either kill their victims best or make them try another way where the lurking submarines could kill them. The sea-roads into great ports like London and Liverpool converge, just as railway tracks converge toward some great central junction. So submarines lying in wait near these crowded waters had a great advantage in the earlier part of the war, when people still believed that the Germans would not sink unarmed merchantmen on purpose, especially when women and children were known to be on board.
On the 7th of May, 1915, the Lusitania, from New York for Liverpool, was rounding the south of Ireland, when the starboard (right-hand) look-out in the crow's nest (away up the mast) called to his mate on the port side, "Good God, Frank, here's a torpedo!" The next minute it struck and exploded, fifteen feet under water, with a noise like the slamming of a big heavy door. Another minute and a second torpedo struck and exploded. Meanwhile the crew had dashed to their danger posts and begun duties for which they had been carefully drilled, though very few people ever thought the Germans would torpedo a passenger steamer known to be full of women and children, carrying many Americans, and completely unarmed. The ship at once took a list to starboard (tilt to the right) so that the deck soon became as steep as a railway embankment. This made it impossible to lower boats on the up side, as they would have swung inboard, slithered across the steeply sloping deck, and upset. The captain, cool and ready as British captains always are, gave his orders from the up end of the bridge, while the other officers were helping the passengers into the boats. The sea soon came lapping over the down side of the deck, and people began slipping into it. The full boats shoved off; but not half of them on the down side were clear before the gigantic ship, with an appalling plunge, sank head first. It all happened so quickly that many had not been able to get on deck before this final plunge. They must have been crushed by the hurtling of all loose gear when the ship stood on her bows going down, then smothered and drowned, if not smashed dead at the first. The captain stood on the bridge to the last, went down with the ship, came up again among the wreckage, and was saved after hours in the water. He will never forget the long, piercing wail of despair from hundreds of victims as the gallant ship went down.
This made it clear to all but those who did not want to understand that Germany was going to defy the laws of the sea, at least as far as she could without changing President Wilson's Government into an enemy. So things went on, getting worse and worse, for another two years. The British, French, and Italians had never prepared for a war like this. They were ready to fight submarines that fought their own men-of-war, as well as those that tried to sink transports carrying soldiers and arms to the many different fronts. But who would have thought that even the Germans would sink every merchantman without the least care for the lives of the crew? The rest of the world thought the days of pirates and cut-throats were over among all civilized nations. But the Germans did not. So the Allies, the British especially, built more and more destroyers to fight the German submarines. The Germans, of course, built more and more submarines; and so the fight went on, growing ever fiercer.