d the scene of it move
higher and higher, prodded by an ever-growing capacity for climb and the
ever-growing menace of the anti-aircraft guns. The average air battle of
to-day begins at an altitude between 12,000 and 20,000 feet.

The conflict for mechanical superiority has had its ebb and flow, and
consequently of its proportional casualties; but the British have never
once been turned from their programme of observation. There have been
critical times, as for example when the Fokker scourge of late 1915 and
early 1916 laid low so many of the observation craft. But the Fokkers
were satisfactorily dealt with by the de Haviland and the F.E.8. pusher
scouts and the F.E. "battleplane," as the newspapers of the period
delighted to call it. Next the pendulum swung towards the British, who
kept the whip hand during the summer and autumn of last year. Even when
the Boche again made a bid for ascendancy with the Halberstadt, the
Roland, the improved L.V.G., and the modern Albatross scout, the Flying
Corps organisation kept the situation well in hand, though the supply of
faster machines was complicated by the claims of the R.N.A.S. squadrons
in England.

Throughout the Somme Push we were able to maintain that aerial
superiority without which a great offensive cannot succeed. This was
partly the result of good organisation and partly of the fighting
capabilities of the men who piloted the Sopwith, the Nieuport, the de
Haviland, the F.E., and other 1916 planes which were continually at
grips with the Hun. The German airmen, with their "travelling circuses"
of twelve to fifteen fast scouts, once more had an innings in the spring
of the current year, and the older types of British machine were hard
put to it to carry through their regular work. Then came the great day
when scores of our new machines, husbanded for the occasion, engaged the
enemy hell-for-leather at his own place in the air. An untiring
offensive was continued by our patrols, and the temporary supremacy
passed into British hands, where it very definitely remains, and where,
if the shadows of coming events and the silhouettes of coming machines
materialise, it is likely to remain.

Judged on a basis of losses, the unceasing struggle between aeroplane
and aeroplane would seem to have been fairly equal, though it must be
remembered that three-quarters of the fighting has had for its _milieu_
the atmosphere above enemy territory. Judged on a basis of the
maintenance