330 
BATTLE OF SANTIAGO. 
efficient service. Pluck is of very little use in the front rank. It is of very good 
second ratequality: itis a quality possessed by nearly every nationunderthesun,and 
therefore you may say it cancels itself all over the globe; but nearly everything 
hinges on administration. We now come to the subject which has been so ably dealt 
with ; £ Firing on an enemy and attacking with discrimination.’ I entirely agree 
with the lecturer. These people outside Santiago had weeks and weeks to think 
over a certain subject. If their Naval Intelligence Department was a good one 
they must have had plans of the Spanish ships, and they must have known 
exactly what each ship looked like, and must have known exactly what sort of 
tiring was most detrimental to the ships with which they would probably have to 
engage. Therefore I think they should have attacked with discrimination. The 
observations made by that very able officer Sir George Clarke in his letter, would 
lead one to suppose that it is impossible to attack with discrimination, and that 
naval gunners ought to be too thankful if they can hit a hay stack half a mile 
off. But those who have seen naval gunnery, especially naval gunnery of the 
present day, will find that it is fairly good taking it all round, and that they are 
not only too thankful to hit the ship at all, but with a fair amount of care and 
due preparation they should be able to hit the superstructure or somewhere near 
the belt, which is not I think “ a refinement too great to be hoped for.” Then 
if ships escape in broad daylight they give the blockading squadron an oppor¬ 
tunity of seeing the particular ships which are coming out towards them, and 
whatever induced Admiral Oervera with an unlimited command of pilots (who 
must have known every inch of the mouth of the harbour), to come out in broad 
daylight when he might have come out in the dark, passes my comprehension. 
I do not profess to be an up-to-date naval officer; but I have studied the 
American Civil war and blockading operations, and have given an immense 
amount of consideration to blockade work in theory. Did ever a merchant 
steamer, endeavouring to run the blockade in the 1861-64 war, wait until night 
was past in order to emerge from the harbour and run the chance of being 
thrashed outside by the United States cruisers ? On the contrary the darkest 
night, the most unfavourable conditions for observations from the outside, were 
invariably selected. But Cervera appears to have gone to the very opposite 
extreme, and because he had received orders to escape he seems to have thought 
he should escape exactly at the hour mentioned. Naturally military operations 
are generally better conducted in the day time. I believe it is a maxim in land 
warfare never to attack at night unless you have a very highly trained army and 
a small range of country to traverse. At sea it is exactly the opposite. Always 
come out of harbour at night if you know your harbour well enough. Had I— 
had that thing been put upon my shoulders, first of all I should have come out 
at night, and in the second place I should have said as the odds are very much 
against my escaping at all, I will try and make the best of it by sacrificing one 
ship to engage and letting the others go off in two opposite directions, leaving 
the Americans outside absolutely in the dark as to which ship had gone in 
one direction and which ship had gone in the other. They would not 
have been able to discrimate between the class of ship which had gone 
east and the class of ship which had gone west, and they would not be able to 
send special ships after special ships, but would have been in the dark as to 
which direction was the best to concentrate their force upon. As the lecturer 
said a few minutes ago it was a question of minutes in which this decision had 
to be taken, and the Admiral’s orders, mind you, had to be obtained: because 
ships cannot dash off east and west without an absolute order. Thus one wing 
might have escaped while the other wing might have been crushed ; but at any 
rate there might have been the escape of one or two ships. It seems to me it 
