maged German machines, machines of our own with scars of
battle upon them, one or two cases of bad landing. The star case came
over from Peronne. It had come in two days ago.

I examined this machine and I will tell the state it was in, but I
perceive that what I have to tell will read not like a sober statement
of truth but like strained and silly lying. The machine had had a direct
hit from an Archibald shell. The propeller had been clean blown away; so
had the machine gun and all its fittings. The engines had been stripped
naked and a good deal bent about. The timber stay over the aviator had
been broken, so that it is marvellous the wings of the machine did not
just up at once like the wings of a butterfly. The solitary aviator had
been wounded in the face. He had then come down in a long glide into the
British lines, and made a tolerable landing....

2

One consequence of the growing importance of the aeroplane in warfare is
the development of a new military art, the art of camouflage. Camouflage
is humbugging disguise, it is making things--and especially in this
connection, military things--seem not what they are, but something
peaceful and rural, something harmless and quite uninteresting to
aeroplane observers. It is the art of making big guns look like
haystacks and tents like level patches of field.

Also it includes the art of making attractive models of guns, camps,
trenches and the like that are not bona-fide guns, camps, or trenches at
all, so that the aeroplane bomb-dropper and the aeroplane observer may
waste his time and energies and the enemy gunfire be misdirected.
In Italy I saw dummy guns so made as to deceive the very elect at a
distance of a few thousand feet. The camouflage of concealment aims
either at invisibility or imitation; I have seen a supply train look
like a row of cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops of sham
palings running along the back of the engine and creepers painted up
its sides. But that was a flight of the imagination; the commonest
camouflage is merely to conceal. Trees are brought up and planted
near the object to be hidden, it is painted in the same tones as its
background, it is covered with an awning painted to look like grass or
earth. I suppose it is only a matter of development before a dummy cow
or so is put up to chew the cud on the awning.

But camouflage or no camouflage, the bulk of both the French and British
forces in the new won ground of t