his way, smirking widely and fulsomely congratulating himself on his own genius. At no time was McCrimmon's faith in his fellow-man very marked.
He passed within the for'ard screen door and navigated his unsteady way to the hatchway leading down to his mess-deck. Above this hatchway brightly burned a warning red lamp; this he incorrectly judged to be merely yet another of the brightly coloured spots which had been interfering with his vision for some little time. Swinging his leg over the coaming, McCrimmon started to descend the ladder with the careless aplomb of the born sailor; it was not until he recovered consciousness several hours later in the Sick Bay that he recollected that the ladder had been removed the previous day.
On the following day the ILARA left for operational duties. Three days later McCrimmon was well on the highroad to recovery and on the fourth he suffered a serious relapse.
About 7.00 am on the fourth morning, the ILARA intercepted and sunk a small German transport evacuating troops from Crete. McCrimmon had heard the news and had been not unaware of desultory gunfire. About 10.00 am he summoned the Sick Berth Attendant and lackadaisically asked for details. He was told that the trooper had been disabled by gunfire and, when emptied of troops, sunk by torpedo.
Insofar as it was possible for a complexion the colour of saddle-leather to match a snow-white pillow, McCrimmon's now did just this. Finding some difficulty with his breathing, he asked the SBA whether he knew which tubes had been used. The SBA did and informed him that the port ones were the ones in question. The SBA was now thoroughly alarmed, as he had it on the best authority that only dying men plucked the coverlet after the fashion his patient was now using.
Moaning slightly, McCrimmon mustered the last tattered shreds of the legendary McCrimmon courage and feebly enquired whether the torpedo which had done the deadly deed had issued from X, Y or Z. 'Ah! no, no, not X.' 'Yes — X.'
As the first wave of kindly oblivion swept over his shattered frame, McCrimmon momentarily and agonizingly relived those few moments of inspired cunning — now clearly seen for the maniacal folly that it was — when he had stowed the moonstones inside X torpedo tube. With the fleeting realization that 'jewel-studded Aegean' was no longer the empty phrase that it had been in Byron's time, McCrimmon lapsed into a stunned unconsciousness which caused the SBA to have no hesitation whatsoever in calling both medical officers at once.
Physically speaking, McCrimmon eventually made a complete recovery: mentally, he is scarred for life. More terrible still, internecine warfare has at last destroyed the historic solidarity of the Clan McCrimmon. I met McCrimmon the other day, striding briskly along Glasgow's Argyll Street, with an empty haversack over his shoulder — he had just been on a visit to his plumber uncle in the Broomielaw — and he told me sadly that, even after the lapse of years, his cousin was still looking for him.
They Sweep the Seas
It was still night when we cast off and nosed our way through the outer harbour, crammed with vessels of all sizes and nationalities, riding peacefully at anchor. Cold, grey rain was sluicing down mercilessly, spattering off our deck and churning the murky water to a light foam, and from the bridge, visibility scarcely extended beyond the trawler's bows. We felt, rather than saw, our way out to the open sea, barely making headway. We brushed along the side of a sister trawler, and farther on felt our hull scraping over an anchor cable, the black hulk of the ship's bows looming perilously near. Approaching the entrance, and feeling reasonably safe, we increased speed, and all but collided with a big Finnish freighter, which had worked with the tide across the harbour mouth; it was the word 'SUOMI', painted in six-foot high letters, gleaming whitely through the darkness, that gave us warning. Our skipper cursed fluently, spun the wheel to starboard, and we passed on. But we reached the sea without mishap.
In the harbour, it had been comparatively warm and sheltered, but a very different state of affairs existed beyond the headland. The trawler pitched wickedly in the long, heavy rollers coming in from the Atlantic, drenching itself in spray. Sometimes an exceptionally heavy sea foamed along fo'c'sle high, poured into the well, slid over the deck, and went gurgling through the scuppers; but this did not happen often. The wind was not strong, but possessed that biting quality which makes one raise one's coat collar and withdraw, hurriedly to the lee-side of the upper deck. There are few bleaker and more cheerless places than the west coast of Scotland in the early morning of a January day.
As the trawler went butting through the seas, in the chill grey of the breaking dawn, to its appointed station, the two officers on the bridge discussed the prospects of the coming sweep. Both agreed that it would be a trying day, that it would be as boring as ever, and that they would, as usual, encounter no mines. They disagreed, however, concerning the weather: the Lieutenant thought there was little chance of the wind dying down or the weather moderating; but the skipper was of the opinion that both would come to pass, although, probably, later in the day.
Neither the Lieutenant nor the skipper was a young man. The Lieutenant (RNR) wore three rows of ribbon, had been in the Dardanelles in the last war, and walked with a pronounced limp — a memento of Zeebrugge. He had retired ten years ago, but at the outbreak of war had left his comfortable, even luxurious, existence for the unknown perils and hardships of a minesweeper's existence. He did not do this as a favour to his country: he did it as his duty.
The Lieutenant, as has been said, was not a young man, but the skipper was at least ten years older. Half a century had passed since he first went down to the sea. He had swept mines in the war of 1914-18, but had considered himself, not unnaturally, too old for such an arduous task in this. Then one day, while trawling in the North Sea, he had been bombed and machine-gunned by a Heinkel. The bombs had missed, but the bullets had literally riddled one of his crew. That man was his son. And so he had changed his mind about being too old.
An hour after clearing the harbour mouth, we reached the beginning of our beat and cut the engines until the trawler had barely enough way to keep head on to the seas. We were awaiting the arrival of our companion sweeper, who made her appearance some ten minutes later, pitching heavily up on our starboard quarter, a vague shape in the dim half-light.
We drifted a light line astern and she altered her course to port, to pick it up. A wire was attached to this; we hauled it aboard our own trawler, attached the sweep wire to it, and paid it out astern again. At regular intervals, peculiarly shaped objects, professionally known as 'kites', were shackled to the hawser by two seamen, whose stoic features betrayed no signs of the extreme discomfort they must have been experiencing from their raw hands and stiff, cold-benumbed fingers. These 'kites' acted as weights upon the sweep wire, keeping it at the requisite distance beneath the surface of the water.
No landlubber or 'freshwater' man could have performed this task of paying out the sweep wire; it was an operation that demanded the very highest standards of seamanship. The co-ordination and sense of timing of the man at the wheel, the two 'shacklers', and, above all, the winch-driver, were marvellous to a degree. They worked as smoothly and as swiftly as the well-oiled, correlated cogs of an intricate machine.
Everything adjusted to his satisfaction, our Lieutenant signalled, by siren, to the other trawler that he was ready to commence his sweep. She acknowledged his signal, swept round to our starboard beam, and off we went, beating southwards. It was becoming rougher, and the Lieutenant, studiously avoiding the skipper's eye, was smiting with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was not often that the skipper's weather forecasts proved false, but this time, for once, he seemed to have slipped up.
We were broadside on to the seas now, one moment lifting over a sullen, spume-capped crest, the next sliding along a shallow trough, clouds of icy spray cascading inboard. The pitching had given place to a rather unpleasant rolling motion, the latter being a decided change for the worse. It was now that the genius — and genius it was — of the winch-driver asserted itself. His job it was to see that the sweep wire did not become too slack, which would have been bad enough, or become too taut, which might have resulted in tragedy. Sailors have, with good reason, a holy dread of overstrained hawsers. A snapped wire is a lethal weapon, and its power of destruction is rather terrifying; such a wire can slice off a man's head far more efficiently than the sharpest axe. But, judging from our winch-driver's nonchalance and the deceptively careless ease with which he manipulated the levers, one would have thought that no such unpleasant possibility had ever occurred to him.
On the bridge, the Lieutenant was poring over a minutely detailed Admiralty chart spread open before him. Also consulting it, but with a much lesser degree of concentration, was the skipper, who only did it that he might
