il the end of that year.
There is no question but that the quality of the British flying men
was what put them ahead of the Germans long before they were equal
mechanically. The French, too, are really great fliers. The Boches
try hard, and are certainly brave enough, but there is something in
the Boche makeup that makes him bound to be second-best to our lot.
I have heard lots of discussions on the subject, and I think those
who argue that the Boche lacks an element of sportsmanship just about
hit the weak point in his armor as regards flying.

"The flying game has been one long succession of discarding the
machines we thought best at one time. That applies to the Germans
as much as it does to us. One has to go back to the start to realize
how much flying has progressed. First, engine construction is another
thing to-day. They can make engines in England now, though they were
a long time getting to the point where they could do it. I believe
that most all the best motor factories in England have learned to turn
out good flying engines by now. It means a lot of difference to
produce a machine that can do sixty miles an hour and one that can do
two miles a minute. Yet at the start mighty few aeroplanes could beat
sixty miles an hour, and to-day I can show you plenty of planes right
here in this 'drome which can do one hundred and twenty. If a plane
cannot do two miles a minute nowadays it is pretty sure to meet
something in enemy hands that can do so. Why, before long one hundred
and twenty may be too slow.

"Then look at altitudes! When I first thought of flying, five thousand
feet up was big. That was not so very long ago. Before the war some
very specially built machines, no good for general work, had been
coaxed up to about fifteen thousand feet by some crack airman, who
had worked for hours to do it, but the best machine we had at the
'drome where I learned flying would only do six thousand, and no one
could get her up there under forty minutes. She was a fine machine,
too, as machines went in those days. To-day it is no exaggeration
to say that ten thousand feet above the earth is low to a flier.
Everyone goes to twenty thousand continually, and many of the biggest
fights take place from seventeen thousand to twenty thousand feet up.

"The character of the work we have to do has changed as much as
the machines have changed. First, anti-aircraft guns---'Archies,'
we call them---have improved enor