Falling back is a relative term; as I'm sure you have surmised, our captors would not allow us to abandon the battlefield even if the tides were extremely against us. Having a point to which we can fall back upon is to make use of support and defensive measures that point would provide. And the morale factor, as I mentioned.

If the tides are extremely against us, we unfortunately have few means to save ourselves. The barriers that protect these areas we are deployed to also keep us from escaping. Each of these drafts have been a kill-or-be-killed scenario, regardless of other objectives they may give us. They tend to make these objectives relevant to us by threatening those who are left in the village--if we were to fail, the village would drown or starve, to use examples of the last two drafts.