THE SHIPS AND THE MEN

Now, imagine the acreage of several dock-basins crammed, gunwale to gunwale, with brown and umber and ochre and rust-red steam-trawlers, tugs, harbour-boats, and yachts once clean and respectable, now dirty and happy.  Throw in fish-steamers, surprise-packets of unknown lines and indescribable junks, sampans, lorchas, catamarans, and General Service stink-pontoons filled with indescribable apparatus, manned by men no dozen of whom seem to talk the same dialect or wear the same clothes.  The mustard-coloured jersey who is cleaning a six-pounder on a Hull boat clips his words between his teeth and would be happier in Gaelic.  The whitish singlet and grey trousers held up by what is obviously his soldier brother’s spare regimental belt is pure Lowestoft.  The complete blue-serge-and-soot suit passing a wire down a hatch is Glasgow as far as you can hear him, which is a fair distance, because he wants something done to the other end of the wire, and the flat-faced boy who should be attending to it hails from the remoter Hebrides, and is looking at a girl on the dock-edge.  The bow-legged man in the ulster and green-worsted comforter is a warm Grimsby skipper, worth several thousands.  He and his crew, who are mostly his own relations, keep themselves to themselves, and save their money.  The pirate with the red beard, barking over the rail at a friend with gold earrings, comes from Skye.  The friend is West Country.  The noticeably insignificant man with the soft and deprecating eye is skipper and part-owner of the big slashing Iceland trawler on which he droops like a flower.  She is built to almost Western Ocean lines, carries a little boat-deck aft with tremendous stanchions, has a nose cocked high against ice and sweeping seas, and resembles a hawk-moth at rest.  The small, sniffing man is reported to be a “holy terror at sea.”

HUNTERS AND FISHERS

The child in the Pullman-car uniform just going ashore is a wireless operator, aged nineteen.  He is attached to a flagship at least 120 feet long, under an admiral aged twenty-five, who was, till the other day, third mate of a North Atlantic tramp, but who now leads a squadron of six trawlers to hunt submarines.  The principle is simple enough.  Its application depends on circumstances and surroundings.  One class of German submarines meant for murder off the coasts may use a winding and rabbit-like track between shoals where the choice of water is limited.  Their career is rarely long, but, while it lasts, moderately exciting.  Others, told off for deep-sea assassinations, are attended to quite quietly and without any excitement at all.  Others, again, work the inside of the North Sea, making no distinction between neutrals and Allied ships.  These carry guns, and since their work keeps them a good deal on the surface, the Trawler Fleet, as we know, engages