NATIONAL TRIBUTES 



ers was not confined to Great Britain only, nor to 

 the British Empire; it was not expressed only by 

 the King, himself a sailor, who so fully understood 

 what the sweepers' perils and privations were, and 

 b}- his subjects of even- rank and class ; it was a 

 universal admiration, and of all the peoples who 

 showed it none were more generously sympathetic 

 than the French and the Italians. And these 

 tributes were all the more significant because they 

 came from heads of great maritime countries, from 

 fighting men and statesmen who had intimate first- 

 hand knowledge of the conditions of the sweepers' 

 lives and deeds. 



The high honour of publishing names in Army 

 Orders was conferred upon gallant fishermen by the 

 French and Italian Governments ; of such distinc- 

 tions was the following, made known in a French 

 Arm}' Order almost to the day on the 112th anniver- 

 sary of the Battle of Trafalgar and the death of 

 Nelson :— " B. L. Coburn, R.N.R., fireman in the 

 British Navy, severely wounded in the course of an 

 exploration of a mine-field by the explosion of a 

 German mine; Richard Manning, 6926, D.A., deck- 

 hand in the British Navy, seriously wounded by an 

 explosion while engaged in mine-sweeping, who 

 gave proof of remarkable qualities of energy in the 

 course of continual operations of the kind." 



That was the text of the Army Order. It \ 

 brief, but full of the unique qualities of French ex- 

 pression. There was the " exploration " of a mine- 

 field — suggestive of a little world of extreme dang< 



I7'.» 



