rse, be crossed at all. You might as well try
to walk over armies of porcupines in your bare feet. Some minefields
were very big. One British field ran from the Orkneys right across to
Norway, to stop the German submarines from getting out round the north
of Scotland. The American Navy did magnificent work at this field, the
greater part of which was laid by American, not by British, vessels at
the latter end of 1917 and earlier part of 1918. Other minefields
blocked the Channel. But here the Germans once played a very clever
trick which might have cost the British dear. A British minefield had
been laid, some fifty feet deep, to catch submarines without being in
the way of vessels on the surface. Two days after it had been secretly
laid at night the _Nubian_, a British destroyer, had her bows blown off
on the very same spot. The German submarine mine-layers had crept in
by night and laid a shallow German minefield, exactly over the deep
British minefield, to catch those who were trying to catch them. That,
however, is not the end of the story. Just after the _Nubian_ had been
towed into Portsmouth with her bows blown off, the _Zulu_, a destroyer
of the same class, was towed in with her stern blown off. So perfectly
were both these vessels built that, when they had each been cut in
half, the good halves made an absolutely perfect new destroyer, which,
under her compound name of _Zubian_, did excellent work against the
Germans during the famous fights at Zeebrugge and Ostend.

A mine laid by a German submarine blew up the cruiser _Hampshire_ that
was taking Kitchener to Russia by way of the Orkneys on the 5th of
June, 1916. Kitchener was drowned and only twelve men, who floated in
on a raft, were saved. Submarines lurking about at night would
sometimes put mines right in the track of vessels. And sometimes swift
mine-laying ships on the surface would do even more deadly harm,
rolling a hundred mines off a little railway on deck. At other times
mines would be loosed from the shore or from ships at anchor, so as to
float in among vessels with the tide or down the current of a stream.
One of these was tried against the British in West Africa by a German
missionary. Others were sent against the French and British vessels in
the Dardanelles, sometimes blowing them up.

But the enemy never had it all his own way. British submarines did
wonderful work in spite of the mines. Commander Holbrook won the V.C.
by