FISHERMEN IN WAR TIME 



Erance by which millions of fighting men and non- 

 combatants were conveyed in safety out and home. 

 Imagination— and even that elastic gift might not 

 succeed — could conjure up a picture of the frantic 

 and despairing efforts of the Germans to interfere 

 with and damage or destroy that vital lane ; but 

 nothing that the enemy could devise, nothing that 

 he did, nothing that at the summit of his devilry, 

 when he drew no distinction between hospital ship 

 and battleship, he attempted, had the least effect 

 upon the lane. His submarines slunk around, only 

 to be destroyed, captured or kept at an innocuous 

 distance ; and as for his mines, sown broadcast, with 

 no thought for friend or neutral, they were gathered 

 in to swell the reapers' harvest or were blown up or 

 sent to the bottom of the sea. 



In doing all this work in the Channel, with Dover 

 as the base, many acts were performed by drifters 

 and trawlers of which occasionally the public learned 

 something from official statements, and these fishers 

 had their share in the renown of the Dover Patrol. 



The exceptionally severe winter of I9i6-'i7 

 added greatly to the privations of the men who were 

 mine-sweeping, patrolling and fishing. So terrible 

 was the cold that German sailors who were killed in 

 the fight with the British during the early morning 

 of January 23 were encased in ice when the battered 

 destroyer V69 entered Ymuiden, and the bodies 

 had to be dug out with axes. An arm that was shot 

 away was found frozen in the rigging. These inci- 

 dents indicated the severity of the weather in which 



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