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Updated: May 9, 2025
They will at least show our people what is known and what is not. I may say that a good many of these papers have come through me, and I need not add are thoroughly untrustworthy. It would brighten my declining years to see a German cruiser navigating the Solent according to the mine-field plans which I have furnished.
Admiral von Tirpitz wanted nothing so much as to draw the British fleet under the guns of Heligoland or into a mine-field and submarine trap. But Sir John Jellicoe refused the bait. When he had completed his precautions and his organization to meet new conditions, his fleet need not go into the open.
We got under way at daybreak and, picking our way as cautiously as a small boy who is trying to get out of the house at night without awakening his family, we crept warily through the vast mine-field which was laid across the entrance to the Dardanelles, past Sed-ul-Bahr, whose sandy beach is littered with the rusting skeletons of both Allied and Turkish warships and transports; past Kalid Bahr, where the high bluffs are dotted with the ruins of Turkish forts destroyed by the shell-fire of the British dreadnaughts on the other side of the peninsula and with the remains of other forts which were destroyed in the Crusaders' times; past Chanak, where the steep hill-slopes behind the town were white with British tents, and so into the safe waters of the Marmora Sea.
Naturally, his policy impregnated Russia with a strong anti-British feeling, and it was said that her activity in running up earthworks and apparently impregnable fortifications was in anticipation of Disraeli declaring war and ordering the fleet to bombard the Crimean ports; hence, too, in addition to the strong fortifications, torpedo mines were laid for miles along the seaboard, and every possible means and opportunity were taken to make it widely known that the Black Sea was one deadly mine-field.
The American proposal of a mine barrage across the entrance to the North Sea from Scotland to Norway at first met with slight approval abroad, so unprecedented was the problem of laying a mine-field 230 miles in length, from 15 to 30 miles in width, and extending at least 240 feet downward in waters the total depth of which was 400 or more feet.
Meanwhile the Lion was damaged by a shell and had to fall behind, and an hour and twenty minutes passed before Beatty could return to the scene of action; he found that his second in command had broken off the fight out of respect for the German mine-field, which seems, however, to have been still thirty or forty miles away.
Fritz says 'Not in these trousers, I don't think, and then they go home again, dodging 'tin fish' and raking up Fritz's 'warts' out of the Swept Channels. Talking of 'warts' reminds me of a yarn going round last time I was up it's a chestnut now, but you may not have heard it. One of the mine-layers nipped down in a fog and laid a mine-field off the mouth of the Ems.
The Russians have passed to and fro over our mine-field off Port Arthur, and have had full opportunity to learn that our mines are so harmless that they may be regarded as negligible, so, now, I propose to teach them a new lesson.
For many years after the World War blind economic selfishness in most countries, including our own, resulted in a destructive mine-field of trade restrictions which blocked the channels of commerce among nations. Indeed, this policy was one of the contributing causes of existing wars.
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