Willing hands hauled the half-frozen form on board and stanched the blood that still oozed from cuts on the face and neck. Blankets and hot-water bottles were soon forthcoming, and the battered remnant--for both a leg and thigh bone were broken--was placed as carefully as the lurching of the ship would allow in the aft-cabin bunk. Before this could be accomplished, however, a cry again rang out from the watch on the fo'c'sle head and yet another body was hauled aboard, but the shock or the cold had here taken its toll. The sea around was searched in vain for further survivors. A few planks, a signal locker, a broken life-raft and a meat-safe were all that was left of the trawler _Mayflower_, homeward bound from Iceland to Grimsby. A silence seemed to brood over the patrol boat as she slowly picked her way out of the mine-field. The crew went about their tasks without the usual jests and snatches of song, and the pudding, which but a few short hours before had seemed the most important event of the day, lay unheeded on the floor of the galley, where it had been thrown by the cook in the haste for hot water. In the failing light of the December afternoon the bow of the patrol boat was turned shorewards, and, with a rising sea curling up astern, she raced through the slate-grey water with her burden of living and dead. It was one of those moments which call for a rapid decision on a difficult point, when the order had to be given for the course to be laid for harbour, and the C.O., cold and miserably wet after seven hours on the bridge, wore an anxious look. He knew not which had the greater claim, the desperately wounded man in the cabin or other ships which might bear down on the mine-field during the long bitter night. It was a point on which the rules of war and the dictates of humanity clashed. Again the ship was turned into the rapidly darkening east, and all through that bitter night the field of death was guarded. Stiffened fingers flashed out the warning signal when black hulls loomed out of the darkness. Numbed limbs clung for dear life when green seas washed the tiny decks, and when dawn broke over the waste of tumbling sea the men on M.L.822 knew that Christmas Day, 1916, would live for ever in their memory. CHAPTER XVI THE DERELICT THERE are few things more heart-breaking than sea patrol, which forms the principal duty of anti-submarine fleets. Hours, days and even months may pass with nothing to relieve the monotony of grey sea and sky, with occasional glimpses of wave-tossed ships. There are, of course, intervening periods in harbour, when fierce gales howl overhead, and guard duty on rain-swept quaysides, or sentry-go in blinding snowstorms, comes almost as a relief from the sameness of winter days on northern seas.