ological charts from the Admiralty, so
that air stations and aircraft in the air should receive frequent
statements of the weather conditions, had been brought into working
order.

On the other hand, all these advances were experimental in character,
and no attempt had been made to equip the force completely for the needs
of war. In this matter there is perhaps something to be said on both
sides. Where munitions are improving every year, too soon is almost as
bad as too late. In fact, at the beginning of the war the Naval Air
Service had only two aeroplanes and one airship fitted with
machine-guns. Of the aeroplanes, one carried a Maxim gun, another a
Lewis gun, loaned to the Admiralty by Colonel Lucas, C.B., of Hobland
Hall, Yarmouth. No. 3 Airship (the _Astra-Torres_) was fitted with a
Hotchkiss gun. The offensive weapon carried by other machines was a
rifle. The various air stations were not liberally supplied with
munitions of war. The Isle of Grain had four Hales hand-grenades. Hendon
(the station for the defence of London) and Felixstowe had twelve each.
The other stations were supplied in a like proportion, except
Eastchurch, which had a hundred and fifty hand-grenades, forty-two rifle
grenades, twenty-six twenty-pound bombs, and a Maxim gun. When the war
broke out, a number of six-inch shells were fitted with tail vanes and
converted into bombs.

On the 1st of July 1914 the separate existence of the naval air force
was officially recognized. The Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps
became the Royal Naval Air Service, with a constitution of its own. The
naval flying school at Eastchurch and the naval air stations on the
coast, together with all aircraft employed for naval purposes, were
grouped under the administration of the Air Department of the Admiralty
and the Central Air Office. So, for a time, the national air force was
broken in two. The army and the navy had been willing enough to
co-operate, but the habits of life and thought of a soldier and a sailor
are incurably different. Moreover, the tasks of the two wings, as has
been said, were distinct, and neither wing was very well able to
appreciate the business of the other. The Naval Wing had not the
transport or equipment to operate at a distance from the sea, and, on
the other hand, was inclined to insist that all military aeroplanes,
when used for coast defence, should be placed under naval command. The
Military Wing was preoccupied with continental g