ield of action, to set two vessels at one. The mere ascent of one
flying-ram from one side will assuredly slip the leashes of two on the
other, until the manoeuvring squadrons may be as thick as starlings in
October. They will wheel and mount, they will spread and close, there
will be elaborate manoeuvres for the advantage of the wind, there will
be sudden drops to the shelter of entrenched guns. The actual impact of
battle will be an affair of moments. They will be awful moments, but not
more terrible, not more exacting of manhood than the moments that will
come to men when there is--and it has not as yet happened on this
earth--equal fighting between properly manned and equipped ironclads at
sea. (And the well-bred young gentlemen of means who are privileged to
officer the British Army nowadays will be no more good at this sort of
thing than they are at controversial theology or electrical engineering
or anything else that demands a well-exercised brain.)...

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies,
the war must become a conflict between a seeing host and one that is
blind. The victor in that aerial struggle will tower with pitilessly
watchful eyes over his adversary, will concentrate his guns and all his
strength unobserved, will mark all his adversary's roads and
communications, and sweep them with sudden incredible disasters of shot
and shell. The moral effect of this predominance will be enormous. All
over the losing country, not simply at his frontier but everywhere, the
victor will soar. Everybody everywhere will be perpetually and
constantly looking up, with a sense of loss and insecurity, with a vague
stress of painful anticipations. By day the victor's aeroplanes will
sweep down upon the apparatus of all sorts in the adversary's rear, and
will drop explosives and incendiary matters upon them,[41] so that no
apparatus or camp or shelter will any longer be safe. At night his high
floating search-lights will go to and fro and discover and check every
desperate attempt to relieve or feed the exhausted marksmen of the
fighting line. The phase of tension will pass, that weakening opposition
will give, and the war from a state of mutual pressure and petty combat
will develop into the collapse of the defensive lines. A general advance
will occur under the aerial van, ironclad road fighting-machines may
perhaps play a considerable part in this, and the enemy's line of
marksmen will be dr