ch the larger, throwing inflammatory shells, and in addition they had
nests for riflemen on both the upper and the under side. Light as this
armament was in comparison with the smallest gunboat that ever sailed,
it was sufficient for them to outfight as well as outfly the German
monster airships. In action they flew to get behind or over the Germans:
they even dashed underneath, avoiding only passing immediately beneath
the magazine, and then as soon as they had crossed let fly with their
rear gun, and sent flares or oxygen shells into the antagonist's
gas-chambers.

It was not in their airships, but, as I have said, in their
flying-machines proper, that the strength of the Asiatics lay. Next
only to the Butteridge machine, these were certainly the most efficient
heavier-than-air fliers that had ever appeared. They were the invention
of a Japanese artist, and they differed in type extremely from the
box-kite quality of the German drachenflieger. They had curiously
curved, flexible side wings, more like BENT butterfly's wings than
anything else, and made of a substance like celluloid and of brightly
painted silk, and they had a long humming-bird tail. At the forward
corner of the wings were hooks, rather like the claws of a bat, by which
the machine could catch and hang and tear at the walls of an airship's
gas-chamber. The solitary rider sat between the wings above a transverse
explosive engine, an explosive engine that differed in no essential
particular from those in use in the light motor bicycles of the period.
Below was a single large wheel. The rider sat astride of a saddle, as in
the Butteridge machine, and he carried a large double-edged two-handed
sword, in addition to his explosive-bullet firing rifle.

3

One sets down these particulars and compares the points of the American
and German pattern of aeroplane and navigable, but none of these facts
were clearly known to any of those who fought in this monstrously
confused battle above the American great lakes.

Each side went into action against it knew not what, under novel
conditions and with apparatus that even without hostile attacks was
capable of producing the most disconcerting surprises. Schemes of
action, attempts at collective manoeuvring necessarily went to pieces
directly the fight began, just as they did in almost all the early
ironclad battles of the previous century. Each captain then had to fall
back upon individual action and his own devices