When the chiefs of our Navy wanted men and boats for mine-sweeping and for catching submarines they turned to our North Sea fishermen. They took great numbers of the fishing trawlers and their crews and set them to perform these very dangerous tasks. Some of them were sent far away to the Eastern Mediterranean on the same duty. Other trawlers were drawn from the West Coast fisheries, and the men of Devon share with the men of the Eastern counties the credit for much dangerous work well done. Two of these trawlers would set out side by side to “sweep” the sea in a part where mines were supposed to have been laid. A rope was attached to the vessels and when a mine was brought to the surface it was exploded by gunfire. The aeroplane was often of great use in work of this kind. It ought not to be necessary to insist on the dangerous character of this work. It required all the courage which might have won the V.C. and this was shown during every hour of the day and night. As a West Country skipper said one day, as he stood on the bridge of his trawler in the Eastern Mediterranean, “What would King Garge ’ave done without these ’ere trawlers?” What indeed? [Illustration: THE MINE-SWEEPERS.] “These ’ere trawlers” were also largely used for netting submarines. The nets used were made of steel and some of them were about a hundred miles long! They were run out from trawler to trawler so as to make a kind of open-work steel wall below the surface of the water. Each trawler carried a gun both fore and aft; and when a submarine was caught in the net it was raised to the surface and promptly dealt with by the expert naval gunners who had been allotted to each trawler or by an attendant destroyer or seaplane. A well-known writer and poet tells a story which shows what dangers the submarine hunters were called upon to face: “On a few occasions, the hunters have themselves been trapped. Three men, taken off a trawler by a submarine, endured an eighty hours’ nightmare under the sea that shattered the mind of one and left lasting traces on the other two. Again and again, revolvers were put to their heads and they were ordered, on pain of death, to tell all they knew of our naval plans. “They saw a good deal of the life on a German submarine and noted that the German crew on this boat at any rate were very ‘jumpy,’ too jumpy even to take a square meal. They munched biscuits at odd moments at their stations.