ising again, when
another aviator, called Thomas, who was rapidly planing down on an
Antoinette, crashed into him from above. He lay between life and death
for some weeks, and in his delirium talked incessantly of his work, and
of the War Office, and of what he hoped to do for it. His health had
been severely strained by the early work he had done in tropical
countries, where he had been employed in exploration and the
delimitation of boundaries; though he recovered from his accident and
flew again, he grew steadily worse, and died in Scotland on the 28th of
September 1913.

Along with Captain Fulton and Captain Dickson a third army aviator must
be mentioned--Lieutenant Lancelot Gibbs, who also learned to fly at
Chalons, and was present, on a Farman biplane, at the manoeuvres of
1910. At the Wolverhampton meeting, earlier in the same year, he had had
a slight accident which injured his spine, so that before very long he
had to give up flying. He had flown at many early meetings, and had
distinguished himself in duration flights. The dangers encountered by
these pioneers may be illustrated from the experiences of Lieutenant
Gibbs in Spain. He had arranged to give an exhibition of flying at
Durango, near Bilbao, in April 1910. The delivery of his machine, which
was sent from Paris by the Spanish railways, was delayed, and many hours
of work had to be spent on it before it could fly, so that the thirty
thousand people who had assembled were kept waiting for more than an
hour. They grew impatient, and when the machine was wheeled out of its
shed, so that they might see the work of preparing it, they crowded
round it and handled it roughly. It had to be taken back into the shed
again. Thereupon they began to throw stones, which disabled the mechanic
and broke the shed. One of them advanced to Lieutenant Gibbs with a
drawn knife and said that flying was an impossibility, there was no such
thing as aviation, and therefore they were going to knife him. The crowd
shouted 'Down with science, long live religion!' Lieutenant Gibbs saved
himself by his courage and calm, and was taken away by an escort, under
a heavy shower of stones, to the judge's house. Within half an hour the
shed, with all it contained, was burned to the ground.

These three soldiers, Captain Fulton, Captain Dickson, and Lieutenant
Gibbs, have earned their place in history as the first British military
aviators. Of the three Captain Fulton had most to do with S