them to shoot tigers and climb mountains. Indeed, the Englishman's
phlegm is a sort of leash holding in check a certain recklessness which
his seeming casualness conceals. After it had become almost a law that
no aviator should descend lower than twelve thousand feet, British
aviators on the Somme descended to three hundred, emptied their machine
guns into the enemy, and escaped the patter of rifle fire which the
surprised German soldiers had hardly begun before the plane at two miles
a minute or more was out of range.

When Lord Kitchener was inspecting an aerodrome in France in 1914 he
said: "One day you will be flying and evoluting in squadrons like the
navy;" and the aviators, then feeling their way step by step, smiled
doubtfully, convinced that "K" had an imagination. A few months later
the prophecy had come true and the types of planes had increased until
they were as numerous as the types of guns.

The swift falcon waiting fifteen thousand feet up for his prey to add
another to his list in the _communique_ is as distinct from the one in
which I crossed the channel as the destroyer is from the cruiser and
from some still bigger types as is the cruiser from a battleship. While
the enemy was being fought down, bombs were dropped not by pounds but by
tons on villages and billets, on ammunition dumps and rail-heads, adding
their destruction to that of the shells.

There was more value in mastery than in destruction or in freedom of
observation, for it affected the enemy's _morale_. A soldier likes to
see his own planes in the air and the enemy's being driven away. The
aerial influence on his psychology is enormous, for he can watch the
planes as he lies in a shell-crater with his machine gun or stands guard
in the trench; he has glimpses of passing wings overhead between the
bursts of shells. To know that his guns are not replying adequately and
that every time one of his planes appears it is driven to cover takes
the edge off initiative, courage and discipline, in the resentment that
he is handicapped.

German prisoners used to say on the Somme that their aviators were
"funks," though the Allied aviators knew that it was not their
opponents' lack of courage which was the principal fault, even if they
had lost _morale_ from being the under dog and lacked British and French
initiative, but numbers and material. It was resource against resource
again; a fight in the delicate business of the manufacture of the
fragi