s, at a time when rapid development was essential if we were to hold
the air, the two most important officers, who had nursed the Flying
Corps from its infancy, were called away to more urgent service. General
Henderson still held his directorship of military aviation. If he
thought the war likely to be short, he was not alone in that belief.
Major Burke's squadron, when they left their quarters at Montrose,
fastened up the doors of their rooms with sealing-wax and tape, and
affixed written instructions that nothing was to be disturbed during
their absence. Meantime, the duties of the directorate and of the home
command of the Flying Corps had to be carried on, at high pressure, in
the face of enormous difficulties. The practical work of the directorate
was undertaken by the little group of staff officers who were familiar
with it, and especially by Major W. S. Brancker, who, on the outbreak of
war, was appointed an Assistant Director of Military Aeronautics, and
soon after became Deputy Director. The command of the Military Wing at
Farnborough was given to Major Hugh Montague Trenchard, and the Royal
Flying Corps had found its destined Chief.

'We should be modest for a modest man,' Charles Lamb somewhere remarks,
'as he is for himself.' But this is no personal question. What is said
of General Trenchard is said of the Flying Corps. The power which Nature
made his own, and which attends him like his shadow, is the power given
him by his singleness of purpose and his faith in the men whom he
commands. He has never called on them to do anything that he would not
do himself, if he were not very unfortunately condemned, as he once told
the pilots of a squadron, to go about in a Rolls-Royce car and to sit in
a comfortable chair. He has never thought any deed of sacrifice and
devotion too great for their powers. His faith in them was justified.
Speaking, in 1918, to a squadron of the Independent Force, newly brought
to the neighbourhood of Nancy for the bombing of the munition factories
of Germany, he reminded them that if sending them all at once across the
lines, never to return, would shorten the war by a week, it would be his
duty to send them. The pilots listened to him with pride. He had their
confidence, as they had his. 'Don't cramp the pilots into never
talking,' is one of his advices to commanders, and the system whereby
the pilots and observers, returning dazed and exhausted from a raid or a
fight in the air, were