mously. In the first of the show
the airman merely had to keep five thousand feet up and no Archie
could touch him. A French friend of mine told me the other day that
one of their anti-aircraft guns hit a flier at a height of fifteen
thousand feet. The gun was firing from an even greater distance
than that across country, too. The very fact that flying at
considerable height protected aircraft when scouting produced
scientific methods into the collection of information.

"The camera work that has been evolved in this war is little short
of wonderful. When it was realized that the planes could get photographs
from a height that was out of reach of the Archies of those days,
fighting one aeroplane with another came next. Fights in the air,
instead of being rare, became the daily routine. I doubt if any of
the planes that began the war game in 1914 were armed with rapid-fire
guns. The aviators carried automatic pistols or rifles. Some carried
ordinary service revolvers.

"With the introduction of the actual air fighting as a part of the
scheme of things, three distinct jobs were developed. First, the
reconnaissances, which the scouts had to make daily. Next, the
artillery observers, whose work it was to direct our gun-fire. Next,
the fighters, pure and simple. Another job was bombing, but we have
not had as much of that as of the other branches of the work.

"With the coming of the new element---the fighting planes, which
went out with the sole idea of individual combat---came the necessity
for swifter planes, for the man on the fastest machine has the great
advantage in the air. The latest development is along the line of
team-work in attack. So it goes on changing. I think the smaller,
speedier aeroplanes are becoming harder to manage, but we do things
now we never dreamed of doing a year ago. All of us can fly now as
we never thought before the war it would be possible to fly.

"Instead of rifles and pistols in the hands of the aviators every
plane now has at least one rapid-fire gun, and some have two and
even three. The position of the rapid-fire gun on an aeroplane has
a lot to do with the success or failure of a fight in the air. All
of you want to study that question carefully.

"But most fascinating of all to the new airman at the front is the
actual handling of the machines when fighting. There lies the greatest
progress of all. Construction has made big strides, but fliers have
made bi