the heads of the men whose servants and helpers they are.

There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon. The air
service has its own advantages, its own trials, and its own marks of
distinction. Life in the service was lived at high pressure, and was
commonly short. Throughout the war our machines were continually at work
over enemy territory, but the pilots of the beginning of the war were
not crossing the lines at its close. A few were acting in administrative
posts; some had returned, disabled, to civil life; the rest have
passed, and their work has been carried on by generation after
generation of their successors. The air service still flourishes; its
health depends on a secret elixir of immortality, which enables a body
to repair its severest losses. The name of this elixir is tradition, and
the greatest of all the achievements of the air service is that in a
very few years, under the hammer of war, it has fashioned and welded its
tradition, and has made it sure. Critics who speak of what they have not
felt and do not know have sometimes blamed the air service because,
being young, it has not the decorum of age. The Latin poet said that it
is decorous to die for one's country; in that decorum the service is
perfectly instructed. But those who meet the members of a squadron in
their hours of ease, among gramophones and pictorial works of art
suggestive of luxury, forget that an actor in a tragedy, though he play
his part nobly on the stage, is not commonly tragic in the green-room.
If they desire intensity and gravity, let them follow the pilot out on
to the aerodrome, and watch his face in its hood, when the chocks are
pulled away, and he opens the throttle of the engine. No Greek sculpture
is finer in its rendering of life and purpose. To see him at his best
they would have to accompany him, through the storm of the anti-aircraft
guns, into those fields of air where every moment brings some new trial
of the quickness of his brain and the steadiness of his nerve. He is now
in the workshop where tradition is made, to be handed down as an
heirloom to the coming generations. It will not fail to reach them. The
Royal Air Force is strong in the kind of virtue that propagates itself
and attains to a life beyond a life. The tradition is safe.

CHAPTER I

THE CONQUEST OF THE AIR

We know next to nothing of man's greatest achievements. His written
history is the history of yesterday, and leaves