ried on lorries. Recruits for the motor transport should be
taught system in packing and unloading, and should be trained in march
discipline. All recruits should be drilled in the routine of pitching
and striking camp. All ranks should know something of field cookery. The
main lessons of the manoeuvres, the writer says, are first, that
subsidiary training in the business of soldiering is of enormous
importance; and, second, that responsibility must be regularly
distributed, and duties allotted, so that when the strain of war comes,
the whole burden shall not crush the few devoted officers who have been
eager to shoulder it in time of peace. The work of the pilots and
mechanics of the British air service, he remarks in conclusion, is
second to none; if only this work can be fitted into a solid framework
of systematic administration and sound military discipline, the British
Flying Corps will lead the world.

These are not the matters that a lover of romance looks for in a history
of the war in the air. But they are the essentials of success; without
them the brilliancy of individual courage is of no avail. War is a
tedious kind of scholarship. When Sir Henry Savile was Provost of Eton
in the reign of Elizabeth, and a young scholar was recommended to him
for a good wit, 'Out upon him,' he would say, 'I'll have nothing to do
with him; give me the plodding student. If I would look for wits, I
would go to Newgate; there be the wits.' It was by the energy and
forethought of the plodding student that the Flying Corps, when it took
the field with the little British Expeditionary Force, was enabled to
bear a part in saving the British army, and perhaps the civilization of
free men, from the blind onrush of the German tide.

The work of Major Brooke-Popham's squadron, during these years of
preparation, included a great diversity of experiment. With the progress
of flight it began to be realized that fighting in the air was, sooner
or later, inevitable, and in the winter of 1913 a series of experiments
was carried out at Hythe, by a single flight of No. 3 Squadron, under
Captain P. L. W. Herbert, to determine the most suitable kind of
machine-gun for use in aeroplanes. A large number of types were tested,
and the Lewis gun was at last chosen, with the proviso that it should go
through a series of tests on the ground. These took a long time, and it
was not till September 1914 that the first machines fitted with Lewis
guns reached