nd a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army
planes, soaring to higher altitudes.

The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with
the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird
at rest, after its engines stopped, and, a dead thing, was lifted on
board its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.

On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious,
one-time popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it
for its mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades
where people had lounged during the voyage and bombs in place of
deck-quoits and dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course,
one was shown the different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators
exhibit them with the pride of a collector showing his porcelains.
Every time they seem to me to have grown larger and more
diabolical. Where will aerial progress end? Will the next war be fought
by forces that dive and fly like fishes and birds?

"I'd like to drop that hundred-pounder on to a Zeppelin!" said one of
the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it.
And Fritz, the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man's
wings above the water.

Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet
to another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An
aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel
much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic ripple
and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes have
located him they tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it is known
that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight of and seen
again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and the hunters,
keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here and there on
the look out for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes altogether. It is
a tireless game of hide and seek, like gunnery at the front. Naval
ingenuity has invented no end of methods, and no end of
experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval secrets, these.
Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to avoid.

Very thin is the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its
machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or a
large charge of explosives to dent the skin beyond repair. It being in
the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hu