October ii, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
13 
The Sower of Tares 
By Centurion 
E: 
lIGHT points starboard!" called the Lieutenant 
from the bridge. 
'Eight points starboard, sir " chanted the skipper 
'in antiphon from the wheclhouse as he glanced 
at the compass o\erh€ad. 
As our drifter changed her course, making a right turn, 
a pennant fluttered up the flag-staff at a signalling station 
on our port bow, paused interrogatively at the truck, 
descended, and then ran up to the truck again. It was th;* 
" Pass friend, all's well " of tho.se that go down to the 
sea in ships. The exchange of salutations was repeated at 
the guard-ship as we cleared the harbour-mouth and stood 
out to sea. The sun glinted on the brass-work of the six- 
pounder in our bows, the sea was smooth, and the telegrapli 
was set at full-speed ahead. Our mizzen-sail was furled 
and our masts bare, save for the spidery web of our "wireless "; 
nothing was to be heard except the faint throb of the triple 
expansion reciprocating engines in the bowels of the ship. 
Our craft had an ingenuous air, and but for one or two unob- 
trusive things might have been merely putting to sea for a 
quiet trawl among the herrings as she did in the old days 
before my Lords of the .Admiralty requisitioned her and made, 
her stout, smooth-faced skipper with the puckered eyes a 
warrant officer in the R.NW'.R. The flaws in the illusion 
were the presence of the six-pounder forward, certain extremely 
lethal ca-ses under the bulwarks aft, a wireless operator secreted 
in his dark room down below, and the fact that we all wore 
life-belts. Aiid in the wheel-house was a small armoury of 
lifles. 
StiU, it seemed extremely lik.!.a pleasure tiip, and I settled 
myself down on the bridge behind the " dodger" with a 
leisurely conviction that I had chosen the quietest way I could 
of speading a few days leave. Tlie crew moved softly about 
the deck stowing away gear : one of them peeled potatoes into 
a bucket outside the -galley, and my friend the Lieutenant 
went below to the chart-house to read some cryptic naval 
messages and glance at the Admiralty " monthly orders." 
The Admiralty can give points to the War Office in the matter 
of jieriodical literature ; you would never look' for a plot in 
an Army Council Instruction, but in the Admiralty Orders 
every order " t^lls a story." But if you ask' a naval 
l)atrol man on shore-leave, he will answer you like the needy 
knife-grinder " 'Story?' God bless you, sir, I've none to 
tell." The Admiralty does not love story-tellers. This is 
not a story. 
" Something ahead on the port bow, sir," shouted the 
lopk-out man for\vard. 
The Lieutenant, whose faculty of hearing, like his faculty 
of \ision, seems to Ix; abnormally developied, came rushing 
out of the chart-house, scaled the bridge ladder like a cat, 
and in two seconds was by my side. He pulled a pair of 
binoculars out of a pocket in the " dodger " and looked 
thiough them for a moment. Then he ran to the telegraph 
and put her at " slow." At the same moment one of the crew, 
without waiting for orders, handed him a rifle from the whecl- 
house. No one spoke a word. 
About a quarter of a mile ahead, a jxjint or two off our 
course, I saw a dark round object bobbing up aijd down 
like a cork. 
The Lieutenant got a " bead " on it. and I watched him 
intently. The next moment he lowered his rifle and laughed. 
" It's only a ship's tub," he said. " Like to have a shot at 
her?" he added as he pumped two cartridges at the vagabond. 
One shot fell just short, the other just over. I saw the skip- 
per's eye on me as the Lieutenant handed me the rifle, and 
feeling the reputation of the junior service was at stake I 
did not welcome the invitation. But luck was with me. 
"A bull's eye," said the Lieutenant approvingly. My 
reputation was saved. 
" It might have been a floating mine," the Lieutenant 
explained. " One never knows." 
" So that's why we're wearing these beastly cork-jackets " 
I said to myself. 1 began to understand the Admiralty 
instruction, that you must never slop to pick anything up. 
For, in these days, things arc not what they seem, and a 
tub, a life-buoy, a sleejwr, an upturned boat, all the ingenuous 
flotsam and jetsam of the sea may bt — and often are— merely 
a trap for the unwary. The Admiralty does not encourage 
souvenir-hunting. V\e only collect two things — mines and 
submarines. 
We were out on an uncharted sea. So long as vye 
had kept in the channel swept by th6 min(?-sweepers in 
the grev dawn our charts were useful, once outside it those 
fharts were nhnnt ns helpful to \is as One of Taride's maos 
would be to a Divisional staff at the Front. Trenches, saps, 
dumps, listening-postS; " strong points," have altered the 
geography of the l-ront ; floating and anchored mines have 
confused the hydrography of the Channel. The soundings 
on our charts were more delusi\e than the roads and water- 
course? on a French ordnance-map of the Somme. But at 
the Front the R.E. can. and do. make new maps for old.whereas 
we had to grope in the dark making the best use we could of 
our senses. The earth is solid, stable and open to aerial 
reconnaissance and survey ; the sea is forexer shifting and 
inscrutable. We had our secret staft-map of the sea, and very 
useful it is for wireless work, but it t?Us us nothing of the tares 
sown in the deep, and the soundings on our charts reveal to 
us none of the shoal-water of the mine-fields. Once we leave 
the fair-way kept clear for the merchantmen, and make for 
our line of traffic patrols on point-duty, we are like a recon- 
noitring party that goes " over the top " at night. We are 
out on the No Man's Land of the sea. . 
We were lea\ing the fairway now. We had altered our 
course a few- points to the south, steamiftg in " line ahead " 
formation, a motor-launch following us, then another 
drifter, each keeping a distance of about half a mile apart. 
If we sighted a periscope to port or starboard we could 
suddenly put the helm over and bear down on it. Steering 
thus in a bad light, our drifter had once rammed the mast- 
truck of a sunken ship in mistake for a periscope and scraped 
her bottom badly, for she never misses a sporting chance. But 
our distance was also a defence formation. One does not 
march in column of fours when the enemy batteries have 
'got the range. And when you are cruising over No Man's 
Land of the sea you must proceed on the assumption that 
at any moment you will strike a mine, in which case it is 
just as well that Number One should go to the bottom on 
her own. We were Number One. 
But the naval patrol takes these things as a matter of course. 
• Down in the bowels of the ship in the crew's quarters, reached 
by a perpendicular iron-ladder opening at a hatchway about 
the size of a pin-cushion, two members of the crew slept like 
dormice in a blissful " fug." Next door, the wireless operator, 
with the receiver to his ear, was immured in his sound-proof 
box, calling spirits from over the vasty deep. Below the engine 
room hatch the engineer, with his eye on his pressure-gauges. 
was dreamily making a])ple-dimiplings out of cotton waste. 
If we scraped a mine they would all be drowned like rats in 
a hole- a mine always gets you amidships. The Skipper 
would probably go through the roof of the wheel-house, and 
the Lieutenant beside me on the bridge would execute a series 
of. graceful gambols in the air like a " flying pig " from a 
trench mortar. This had happened to one of the drifters 
in that patrol a! week before : they picked up one jitan, who 
will rtever goto sea again, and the others ars all "gone West." 
" They were good men— some of the best," said the 
Lieutenant. 
As I looked at the cloudless horizon and ''the smooth 
sea sparkling in the sun I reflected on the treachery of the 
illusion, and it occurred to me that of all the risks of active 
service, those endured by the " Auxiliaries " of the naval 
patrol were the most unpleasant. Personally, I prefer the 
trenches. But the Lieutenant would have none pf it. He 
said— and obviously thought— that his was a "cushy" 
place in comparison. I had heard a submarine commander 
to the same effect. Also my pilot in a Maurice L'arman. 
It's a curious fact that every arm of both services thinks 
the other arms take all the risks. \Miich is as it should be. 
The Lieutenant was an imperturbably cheerful person. 
,\ perpetual smile dimi)led the corners of his mouth and 
completed the illusion of precocious boyhood produced by 
his diminutive stature, his frank ingenuous countenance, 
laughing blue eyes, and kittenish agility. His face was 
tanned to the colour of newly-dressed leather, but when he 
removed his cap the tan was seen to terminate suddenly in a 
sharp horizontal line on his forehead, above which the infantile 
pink and white of his brow presented a contrast so startling 
as to suggest that he wore the false scalp of a low comedia]i. 
But the palms of his hands were as hard as a cobbler's, and 
his muscles like tempered steel. There were many deficiencies 
in his kit, and. seeing me glance at the toes f)f his feet which 
peeped out of his sea-boots, he gravely explained that as the 
water came in at the top, the holes at the toe were useful to let 
it outat the bottom! He was the only commissioned officer on 
board, and his repertoire was extensive-he was commander, 
gunnery lieutenant, signalling officer, and half a dozen other 
things "besides, and he carried hi his head all the secrets, 
which are niaiiv ;infl conmlirated. of the Admiralty codes 
