Two of a series of five articles on " Hunting
German Submarines " by Mr. Alfred Noyes have appeared since our last issue. The Admiralty have granted Mr. Noyes special facilities for the task, and they are to be congratulated on their choice, for Mr. Noyes is not only an excellent narrator, but he is penetrated with a sense of the romance of the sea, and he writes in prose of the exploits of the "silent hand" of the submarine-hunters with the same zest that he showed in his poem on Drake. It is a wonderful and stirring record, too closely packed with thrilling incident to be dealt with in a paragraph ; but we may call special attention to the passage in which he describes the organization of the force, now over a hundred thousand strong, recruited from the longshore fishermen and trawler crews—" tough sea-dogs of all ages "—to cope with the submarine menace with nets and mines and guns " and a dozen mysteries which may not be mentioned." The only other point on which we can touch is the work done by this great auxiliary fleet in the salvage or actual saving of neutral ships— work that represents a good half of their care and is often attended with many perils.
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