oon developed into No. 9 Squadron of the Royal Flying
Corps. The attitude of the gunners may be well seen in an entry made in
the war diary of No. 3 Siege Battery, dated the 23rd of January
1915--'Airman' (Captain Cherry) 'reported for co-operation (lamp only,
alas!).'

The photography was a mere beginning. On the 15th of September
Lieutenant G. F. Pretyman took five photographs of the enemy positions;
these were developed later on the ground, and were the forerunners of
that immense photographic map of the western front in thousands of
sections, constantly renewed and corrected, which played so great a part
in the later stages of the war. Some other experiments had no later
history. Steel darts called 'flechettes', about five inches long and
three-eighths of an inch in diameter, were dropped over enemy
horse-lines and troops by No. 3 Squadron. A canister holding about 250
of these darts was fixed under the fuselage; by the pulling of a wire
the bottom of the tin was opened and the darts were released. To do any
harm these darts had to score a direct hit on some living object, so
that a whole canister of them was probably a less formidable weapon than
a bomb. Even on a battle-field life is sparsely distributed on the
ground.

There was hardly any fighting in the air during the battle of the Aisne,
and reconnaissance machines were not attacked by other aeroplanes. They
were fired at from the ground by anti-aircraft artillery. The
anti-aircraft guns got their name of 'Archies' from a light-hearted
British pilot, who when he was fired at in the air quoted a popular
music-hall refrain--'Archibald, certainly not!' The Germans used kite
balloons for observation. In the attempt to drop a bomb on one of these
Lieutenant G. W. Mapplebeck was attacked, on the 22nd of September, by a
German Albatross, and was wounded in the leg. He was the first of our
pilots to be wounded in the air from an enemy aeroplane--a long list it
was to be.

The Royal Flying Corps were few indeed in comparison with the air forces
opposed to them, but they were full of zeal and initiative. On the 19th
of September they received a valued compliment from the French General
Staff, who asked the British Commander-in-Chief to permit them to carry
out reconnaissances along the front of the Fifth French Army. This was
already being done, but Sir David Henderson promised to take measures to
make the reconnaissance more complete.

In the battle of the Aisne t