eneral Smuts speaking in
October, 1917, said that the British had, in the month previous,
dropped 207 tons of bombs behind the lines of the enemy. But the
targets were airdromes, military camps, arsenals and munitions
camps--not hospitals or kindergartens. The time had now come when
this purely military campaign no longer satisfied an enraged British
people who demanded the enforcement of the Mosaic law of an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth, against a people whom General Smuts
described as "an enemy who apparently recognizes no laws, human or
divine; who knows no pity or restraint, who sung Te Deums over the
sinking of the _Lusitania_, and to whom the maiming and slaughter of
women and children appear legitimate means of warfare."

And Premier Lloyd George, speaking to an audience of poor people in
one of the congested districts which had suffered sorely from the
aerial activities of the Hun, said:

"We will give it all back to them, and we will give it soon. We
shall bomb Germany with compound interest."

But whether undertaken as part of a general programme of
frightfulness or as reprisals for cruel and indefensible outrages
air raids upon defenceless towns, killing peaceable citizens in
their beds, and children in their kindergartens, are not incidents
to add glory to aviation. The mind turns with relief from such
examples of the cruel misuse of aircraft to the hosts of individual
instances in which the airman and his machine remind one of the
doughty Sir Knight and his charger in the most gallant days of
chivalry. There were hosts of such incidents--men who fought
gallantly and who always fought fair, men who hung about the
outskirts of an aerial battle waiting for some individual champion
of their own choosing to show himself and join in battle to death in
the high ranges of the sky. Some of these have been mentioned in
this book already. To discuss all who even as early as 1917 had made
their names memorable would require a volume in itself. A few may
well be mentioned below.

There, for example, was Captain Georges Guynemer, "King of the
French Aces." An "ace" is an aviator who has brought down five enemy
aircraft. Guynemer had fifty-three to his credit. Still a youth,
only twenty-three years of age at the time of his death, and only
flying for twenty-one months, he had lived out several life times in
the mad excitement of combat in mid-air. Within three weeks after
getting his aviator's license he h