first adventurer trusted himself to the sea on a crazy raft, the ships,
rather than the men, would be the heroes of that battle, and Nelson
himself would be overshadowed by the _Victory_. The men who fought the
war in the air have overcome more than their enemies; they, and those
who worked for them on the ground, have successfully grappled with
problem after problem in the perfecting of the art of flight. A whole
world of scientific devices, from the Pitot tube, which indicates the
speed of the machine through the air, to the Dreyer automatic oxygen
apparatus, which enables the pilot to breathe in the rarefied upper
reaches of the atmosphere and to travel far above the summit of high
mountain ranges, has become a part of daily usage. A machine is the
embodiment of human thought, and if it sometimes seems to be almost
alive, that is because it springs of live parents. The men of science,
who worked for humanity, must have an honour only less than the honour
paid to the men of action, who died for their country. These last, the
pilots and observers who are dead and gone, would not ask to be exalted
above other branches of the fighting services. Their pride was to serve
the army on the land and the navy on the sea. The men who march often
admire and extol the courage of the men who fly, and they are right; but
the men who fly, unless they are very thoughtless, know that the
heaviest burden of war, its squalor and its tediousness, is borne on the
devoted shoulders of the infantryman. All other arms, even ships of war
themselves, in many of their uses, are subservient to the infantry. Man
must live, and walk, and sleep on the surface of the earth, and there,
in the few feet of soil that have been fertilized by contact with the
air, he must grow his food. These are the permanent conditions, and they
give the infantry its supremacy in war. A country that is conquered must
be controlled and administered; a city that surrenders must be occupied.
Battles can be won in the air or on the sea, and the mark of victory is
this, that the patient infantry, military and civil, can then advance,
to organize peace. An immense sympathy for the sufferings of the
infantry, an immense admiration for their dogged perseverance in their
never-ending task, is felt by all those whose business it is to assist
them from the air. It would be an ill service to the men of the air
force, and a foolish ambition, to try to raise them in consideration
above