dencies of ages condensed in the events of a few
crowded years. The flying machine, which at the end of the nineteenth
century was a toy, ten years later was added to the most valuable
resources of man, and ten years later again bid fair to alter the
conditions of his life on the surface of the earth. The war, though it
did not cause this great change, accelerated it enormously. War is
exacting, and it is difficult to think of any peaceful uses of aircraft
which do not find their counterpart in naval and military operations.
When General Townshend was besieged in Kut, there came to him by
aeroplane not only food (in quantities sadly insufficient for his
needs), but salt, saccharine, opium, drugs and surgical dressings,
mails, spare parts for wireless plant, money, and a millstone weighing
seventy pounds, which was dropped by means of a parachute. In the actual
operations of the war the uses of aircraft, and especially of the
aeroplane, were very rapidly extended and multiplied. The earliest and
most obvious use was reconnaissance. To the Commander-in-Chief a
detailed knowledge of the enemy's dispositions and movements is worth
more than an additional army corps; aeroplanes and balloons furnished
him with eyes in the air. As observation was the first purpose of
aircraft, so it remains the most important. During the war it was
developed in many directions. The corps machines operating on the
western front devoted themselves among other things to detecting enemy
batteries and to directing the fire of our own artillery. As soon as a
wireless installation for aeroplanes came into use, and the observer was
thus brought into close touch with his own gunners, this kind of
observation became deadly in its efficiency, and was the chief agent in
defeating the German scheme of victory by gun-power. When once a hostile
battery was located, and our guns, by the aid of observation from the
air, were ranged upon it, the fire of that battery was quickly silenced.
Other branches of observation, developed during the war, were
photography from the air and contact patrol. Complete photographic maps
of Hun-land, as the territory lying immediately behind the enemy lines
was everywhere called, were made from a mosaic of photographs, and were
continually renewed. No changes, however slight, in the surface of the
soil could escape the record of the camera when read by the aid of a
magnifying glass. Contact patrol, or reports by low-flying aeroplan