It was wicked murder. “Wicked murder!” said the wires, telling their tale to their fellow-citizens far away.
The men who were working the ships’ guns were from little villages, from pretty sea-shore hamlets like these themselves. They were not thinking of the habitations which were being blasted away. It was an operation of war. This was the chosen time, and this the chosen place, for the landing of the army that waited in the gloom of the sea for them to make the shore safe for it.
With their brooms of steel and fire, they simply were sweeping clear the floor on which that army was to set its foot.
Far in shore of the flame-torn cruisers, safe from any land-fire under the parabolas of the naval projectiles as if they were under a bombproof arch, certain little vessels had toiled up and down from the beginning. Slowly, for they dragged between them long wire cables that hung down to the sea-bottom, they moved back and forth along the beach, fishing.
The fish they were trying to catch were spherical and conical steel fish that bore little protuberances on their tops like the sprouting horns of a yearling kid.
A touch as soft as the touch of a lover’s hand could drive those little horns inward, to awaken a slumbering little devil of fulminate of mercury, whose sleep is so light that a mere tap will break it. And the fulminate’s explosion would detonate three hundred pounds of gun-cotton.
The submarine mine says to the big ships: “I am Death!” And they cannot answer it.
But there is an answer to the mine. It is the mine-sweeper that drags for them. The men on these mine-sweepers dedicate themselves to the tomb. Some must inevitably perish. They will find a mine with their keels instead of their groping drags; or they will grapple one too close; or their wire cable will clutch two mines and swing them together, so that the little horns touch--
But, if the mine-sweepers are permitted to work on, the mines may kill, and kill, and kill, yet in the end they will be gathered in.
There is an absolute answer to the mine-sweepers. It is to hammer them with rapid fire from the shore. These little vessels, dragging laboriously, present targets that scarcely move. No artillerist can miss them.