Any cursory examination of a German moored mine will show that there is a device fitted ostensibly to ensure the weapon becoming safe when it breaks adrift from its moorings and thus complying with The Hague Convention. For several months after the outbreak of war it puzzled many minesweeping officers and men why, with this device fitted, every German _floating_ or _drifting_ mine was dangerous. A few, relying on these weapons being safe when adrift, had endeavoured to salve one and had paid for the experiment with the lives of themselves and their comrades. This caused every mine, whether moored or adrift, to be regarded by seamen as dangerous, notwithstanding the oft-repeated assurances that German mines fulfilled all International requirements in this respect. Then a mine which had broken away from its moorings was successfully salved, in face of the great danger involved, and the truth came out. A device _was_ fitted to render it safe, but, with truly Hunnish ingenuity, the metal out of which an essential part of this appliance was made was quite unable to bear the strain imposed by its work, and, to make doubly sure, another part was half filed through. The result was that, instead of rendering the mine safe when torn from its moorings by rough seas, the essential parts broke and left the mine fully _alive_. Any discovery such as this--_only made at the great risk of salving a live mine_--could be easily explained away by German diplomacy as faulty workmanship in a particular weapon, reliance being placed on the fact that not many mines could be salved in this way without heavy loss of life; but numbers were recovered in spite of the dangers and extraordinary difficulties of such operations, and the guilt was for ever established in the minds of those who sail the seas. Little need be said here regarding the method of laying mines from surface ships like the _Wolfe_ and _Moewe_. The weapons were arranged to run along the decks on railway lines and roll off the stern, or through a large port-hole, into the sea as the vessel steamed along. With submarine mine-layers or U-C boats the method was, however, much more complicated and needs full description. Each vessel was fitted with large expulsion tubes in the stern and carried some eighteen to twenty mines. These weapons, although similar in their internal mechanism to the ordinary mine, were specially designed for expulsion from submerged tubes or chambers.