"Yes," I said; "but they've got boats. They'll just have to pull across the harbour under cover of your smoke screen"--the motor launches were detailed to lay the smoke screen inshore--"and the Destroyers will pick up the boats outside." Armitage nodded and puffed his enormous pipe. "That's all right as long as the wind holds. But supposing the wind shifts and blows the harbour clear of smoke?" I was silent. We all knew there was a possibility of such a thing happening, but that had been taken into consideration by the gallant lads who had volunteered for the job. "I saw the Admiral this morning," continued Armitage, "after talking it over with some of my boys. I told him six motor launches would volunteer to go inside the harbour and bring off the blockships' crews." I stared at him. "But..." I said, "have you seen the photographs of the place? There's a machine-gun about every two yards round the harbour, to say nothing of any destroyers there may be moored alongside the Mole. You'll get smothered with gunfire at point-blank range before the blockships are abandoned." "Oh!" he said, "I'm not making out it's a joy-ride. Thirty years ago I might have laughed at it. Remember," he said, pointing the stem of his pipe at me. "I'm not making a proposal that I'm not going to see through myself. I'm going to lead the boats in. But I feel that it would be wrong not to have a try at saving some of those gallant children's lives. Why," he went on, "I might have had a son there----" He broke off and was silent for a moment, puffing hard as if he were laying one of his own defensive smoke screens. "We're the R.N.V.R.," he said. "Remember that. We want to show the Navy what we're good for. The R.N.V.R.!" he repeated. "Lord! I could tell you tales of the old days. The _Buzzard_----" He laughed, a little hard laugh without any mirth in it. We were silent for a while after that. My brain was busy with this new development of the affair, and I was beginning to see all manner of heroic possibilities in the proposal. "When a man gets to my age," continued Armitage presently, "he sees things more clearly somehow--the things that matter and things that don't. You get down to bedrock. Money! I know something about that commodity, and just how much happiness you can buy with it." He made a little movement with an empty hand. "Hope makes for two-thirds of the happiness of life: hoping for something you believe God'll be good enough to give you--something you think you've lived clean enough to earn. Maybe you get it, maybe you don't. But you just go on hoping something, you know." He looked at me with patient, steadfast eyes. "I want to be of some use to somebody before my number goes up. And if I bring back to his lover some boy who might otherwise have been buried by a German funeral party, perhaps I shan't altogether have lived in vain. "'A little hope that when we die We reap our sowing, so--good-bye!"