s still building. We at that time
had none, although the extent of our sea coast and the great
multiplicity of practicable harbours make us more vulnerable than
any other nation.

CHAPTER X

SOME FEATURES OF AERIAL WARFARE

As devices to translate German hate for England into deeds of bloody
malignancy and cowardly murder the German aircraft have ranked
supreme. The ruthless submarine war has indeed done something toward
working off this peculiar passion, but it lacked the spectacular
qualities which German wrath demanded. As the war proceeded, and it
became apparent that the participation of Great Britain--at first
wholly unexpected by the Kaiser's advisers--was certain to defeat
the German aims, the authorities carefully inculcated in the minds
of the people the most malignant hatred for that power. As
Lissauer's famous hymn of hate had it--

French and Russians it matters not,
A blow for a blow, and a shot for a shot.
.................................
We have one foe and one alone--
England!

By way of at once gratifying this hatred and still further
stimulating it the German military authorities began early in the
war a series of air raids upon English towns. They were of more than
doubtful military value. They damaged no military or naval works.
They aroused the savage ire of the British people who saw their
children slain in schools and their wounded in hospitals by bombs
dropped from the sky and straightway rushed off to enlist against so
callous and barbaric a foe. But the raids served their political
purpose by making the German people believe that the British were
suffering all the horrors of war on their own soil, while the iron
line of trenches drawn across France by the German troops kept the
invader and war's agonies far from the soil of the Fatherland.

[Illustration: (C)International Film Service.

_The U. S. Aviation School at Mineola._]

The first German air raids were by Zeppelins on little English
seaside towns--Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Harwich. Except in so
far as they inflicted mutilation and death upon many non-combatants,
mostly women and children, and misery upon their relatives and
friends they were without effect. But early in 1915 began a
systematic series of raids upon London, which, by October of 1917,
had totalled thirty-four, with a toll of 865 persons killed, and
2500 wounded. It seems fair to say that for these raids there was
more plausible e