gger ones. Wait till you get up front and see."

CHAPTER V

JIMMY HILL STARTLES THE VETERANS

The Brighton boys lived every hour at that big base airdrome. Jimmy
Hill was sent up on his first practice flight on an English machine.
Joe Little got his chance at the end of a week. He was sent up one
morning in a late-type bombing machine, a huge three-seated biplane
with great spreading wings and a powerful engine. This was a most
formidable looking machine in which one passenger sat out in front
mounted in a sort of machine-gun turret. The big biplane was fast,
in spite of the heavy armament it carried, its three passengers and
its arrangement for carrying hundreds of pounds of bombs as well.

Harry Corwin was in the air at the same time on an artillery machine,
the car or fuselage of which projected far in front of the two planes.
There, well in front of the pilot, the observer sat in a turret with
a machine-gun. Machine-guns were also mounted on the wings, and a
second passenger rode in the tail with another rapid-fire gun.

As Bob Haines had been on a rather long flight that day on a Nieuport,
a fast French biplane, and his observer had told Bob of a new French
dreadnought machine carrying two machine gunners and five machine-guns,
the boys talked armament long into the night.

Every day they learned some new points. One afternoon a pilot from
the front line told of a captured German Albatros, which he spun yarns
about for an hour. A single-seater, armed with three machine-guns
which, being controlled by the motor, or engine, shot automatically
and at the same time through the propeller in front of the pilot, with
the highest speed of any aeroplane then evolved on the fighting front,
with a reputation of being able to climb to an altitude of fifteen
thousand feet in less than fifteen minutes---some said in so short a
time as ten minutes---the crack German machine had attracted much
attention.

"With that sort of thing against us," said Dicky Mann, "we have
certainly got to learn to fly."

The same thought may have come to their squadron commander that night,
for the next day saw the start of real post-graduate work in flying
for his command. The rule at the base airdrome had been to give
new units of well-trained flyers good all-round tests on various
types of machines. This involved straight flying for the most part,
and was done more with the idea of familiarizing the newcomers with
the ne