1
I saw rather more of the British than of the French aviators because of the vileness of the weather when I visited the latter.
It is quite impossible for me to institute comparisons between these two services.I should think that the British organisation I saw would be hard to beat, and that none but the French could hope to beat it.On the Western front the aviation has been screwed up to a very much higher level than on the Italian line.
In Italy it has not become, as it has in France, the decisive factor.The war on the Carso front in Italy--I say nothing of the mountain warfare, which is a thing in itself--is in fact still in the stage that I have called B.It is good warfare well waged, but not such an intensity of warfare.It has not, as one says of pianos and voices, the same compass.
This is true in spite of the fact that the Italians along of all the western powers have adopted a type of aeroplane larger and much more powerful than anything except the big Russian machines.
They are not at all suitable for any present purpose upon the Italian front, but at a later stage, when the German is retiring and Archibald no longer searches the air, they would be invaluable on the western front because of their enormous bomb or machine gun carrying capacity."But sufficient for the day is the swat thereof," as the British public schoolboy says, and no doubt we shall get them when we have sufficiently felt the need for them.The big Caproni machines which the Italians possess are of 300 h.p.and will presently be of 500h.p.One gets up a gangway into them was one gets into a yacht; they wave a main deck, a forward machine gun deck and an aft machine gun; one may walk about in them; in addition to guns and men they carry a very considerable weight of bombs beneath.They cannot of course beget up with the speed nor soar to the height of our smaller aeroplanes; it is as carriers in raids behind a force of fighting machines that they should find their use.
The British establishment I visited was a very refreshing and reassuring piece of practical organisation.The air force of Great Britain has had the good fortune to develop with considerable freedom from old army tradition; many of its officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth; Headquarters is a little shy of technical direction; and all this in a service that is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the good.
There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice, bad associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French.Our problem with our army is not to create intelligence, there is an abundance of it, but to release it from a dreary social and official pressure.The air service ransacks the army for men with technical training and sees that it gets them, there is a real keenness upon the work, and the men in these great mobile hangars talk shop readily and clearly.
I have already mentioned and the newspapers have told abundantly of the pluck, daring, and admirable work of our aviators; what is still untellable in any detail is the energy and ability of the constructive and repairing branch upon whose efficiency their feats depend.Perhaps the most interesting thing I saw in connection with the air work was the hospital for damaged machines and the dump to which those hopelessly injured are taken, in order that they may be disarticulated and all that is sound in them used for reconstruction.How excellently this work is being done may be judged from the fact that our offensive in July started with a certain number of aeroplanes, a number that would have seemed fantastic in a story a year before the war began.These aeroplanes were in constant action; they fought, they were shot down, they had their share of accidents.Not only did the repair department make good every loss, but after three weeks of the offensive the army was fighting with fifty more machines than at the outset.One goes through a vast Rembrandtesque shed opening upon a great sunny field, in whose cool shadows rest a number of interesting patients; captured and slightly damaged German machines, machines of our own with scars of battle upon them, one or two cases of bad landing.The star case came over from Peronne.It had come in two days ago.
I examined this machine and I will tell the state it was in, but I perceive that what I have to tell will read not like a sober statement of truth but like strained and silly lying.The machine had had a direct hit from an Archibald shell.The propeller had been clean blown away; so had the machine gun and all its fittings.The engines had been stripped naked and a good deal bent about.The timber stay over the aviator had been broken, so that it is marvellous the wings of the machine did not just up at once like the wings of a butterfly.The solitary aviator had been wounded in the face.He had then come down in a long glide into the British lines, and made a tolerable landing....
2
One consequence of the growing importance of the aeroplane in warfare is the development of a new military art, the art of camouflage.Camouflage is humbugging disguise, it is making things--and especially in this connection, military things--seem not what they are, but something peaceful and rural, something harmless and quite uninteresting to aeroplane observers.It is the art of making big guns look like haystacks and tents like level patches of field.
