The rescue work required much thought. Bearing in mind the main object which had to be attained, it will be understood that all such questions as rescue work and retirement, however important from the point of view of humanity, must be relegated to a comparatively secondary consideration. One cannot wage war without "breaking eggs." He who attempts to do so will seldom accomplish anything worth while. The lives of men are, indeed, a precious responsibility on the shoulders of their leader, but his primary duty in action is to obtain the utmost value from his men rather than to adopt the negative attitude of merely preventing their lives from being lost. This does not signify that lives should be thrown away without a thought. Not one life should be sacrificed in the execution of superior order unless the order is absolutely essential to the success of the work in hand, or, putting it in another way, unless the life is given so that others may live. The leader, therefore, has a difficult problem to solve. How far is he justified in risking failure through the natural desire to preserve life? The armchair critic, who has never been faced with such responsibility, who can have no conception of the different situations which arise in war, may sneer at the leader who places too great a store on the lives of his subordinates, or may hurl accusations of callous indifference at the superior whose successful operation is accompanied by a long casualty list. But we can leave any such critic to his sneers and accusations, knowing, as we do, that he is {88} least dangerous to the community in war-time if he remains in his chair. Each blockship, as already stated, was to carry the minimum number of personnel which could bring success. But the minimum number was large. During the "final run" to their destinations they would require the engineering and stokehold parties, lookouts, guns' crews for self-defence, the navigation party conning and steering the ship, and complete spare navigation parties for taking over command in an emergency. These with a few others, such as signalmen, brought the total in each ship up to no less than fifty-three. In the case of the _Merrimac_ at Santiago, during the Spanish-American war, Lieutenant Hobson was accompanied by only about half a dozen men. At Port Arthur the Japanese blockships, at each of their attempts, also carried very small crews. But it must not be forgotten that all those attempts failed. Now, it was decided to give each blockship a large lifeboat and some life-saving rafts, and also to arrange for other craft to proceed to the rescue. The chances of recovering any of the personnel certainly appeared to be very remote, especially when one realised that the rescue would have to be effected practically underneath the enemy's guns, and even behind their trench defence system on the coast-line.