They hemmed the darkened troop-ships round with a great circle of search-lights, all thrown outward, that served the double purpose of illuminating the ocean for miles, and of blinding any who tried to approach. No human eye looking into that glare could have seen the transports, even if the night had not shrouded them. Still, these liners with their tens of thousands of men, were too precious to be protected only by this bright vigilance. From each transport there projected long steel booms, eleven to a side. These held out a half-ton net of steel grommets. Stretched fore and aft as taut as steam-capstans could haul it, this shirt of [Illustration: “He steered his craft, awash, from behind Fisher’s Island, at dawn.”] chain-mail hung far down into the sea to catch any torpedo that might come driving at the keel. There was more protection than that. It would be day soon, and then the submarines would be blind no longer. All around the area chosen for the transports to lie in, the fishing boats taken from the sea-islands were being towed by destroyers, to drop their nets. Their wooden buoys formed odd geometrical outlines on the sea. These thin things of meshed twine, made only to hold little, inoffensive fish, were suspended like submarine fences, north and south and east and west of the field of operations. That such trivial things should be of any avail against under-water craft with death in their heads, might well have seemed absurd to a landsman. They did not seem absurd to the Lieutenant who commanded United States submarine M-9, when he steered his craft, awash, out from behind Fisher’s Island Sound at dawn, and looked eastward through his glasses.[32] Ten miles away lay the transports, quite motionless, beautifully assembled as a target for him. At that distance their masts and funnels seemed huddled. He had a vivid picture in his mind, for an instant. It was a picture of fat, slow sheep crowding together with a wolf among them. _Woven Twine Versus Submarine M-9_ But between them and his wolf lay the net buoys, dotting all the surface, in and out as if they had been laid by some laboring artist to make a maze. The sea-wolf went slowly nearer. With its tanks full of water, it lay so far submerged that the sea washed the coaming around the manhole hatch. The Lieutenant was like a man wading breast-high in the ocean. It would be hard to see him from any distance. He studied the traceries of buoys. There were spaces between them, that betokened gaps in the fences. One might find a gap and go through. But to find a gap, the submarine must raise her periscope above water, and look around. But at each gap, sweeping incessantly to and fro, like galloping cavalry, were destroyers.[33] Could one dive and go through blind? The Lieutenant knew the limitations of his terrible little animal. Its kiss could draw a twenty thousand ton ship into the abyss, but the woven twine would laugh at it.