nce. Lord Kitchener has many titles to the gratitude of his
country, none of them stronger than this, that he recognized the
immensity of the war. The day after the four squadrons took their
departure for France he sent for Lieutenant-Colonel Brancker in the War
Office, explained to him his policy for the creation of the New Army,
and told him that a large number of new squadrons would be required to
equip that army.

The position was serious. Farnborough was now the only station occupied
by the Royal Flying Corps; it had an assemblage of half-trained and
inefficient pilots, and a collection of inferior aeroplanes, discarded
as useless by the squadrons which had gone overseas. The Central Flying
School itself had been heavily depleted. There was a grave shortage of
mechanics. But the officers in charge were not to be disheartened; and
they had one advantage, without which the most complete material
preparation would have been of no avail--they had the nation behind
them. The invasion of Belgium by German troops during the first few
weeks of war, and the ordered cruelties inflicted by those troops on a
helpless population, set England on fire; never since the old war with
Spain had the fervour of national indignation reached so white a heat.
Except the unfit and the eccentric, it might almost be said, there were
no civilians left; the nation made the war its own, and miracles of
recruiting and training became the order of every day.

The Directorate of Military Aeronautics took the bull by the horns;
without Treasury sanction, on their own initiative, they began to enlist
civilian mechanics at the rates authorized for the Army Service Corps,
up to 10_s._ a day. In a very few days they had got together eleven
hundred good men, trained mechanics, who eventually became the main
support of the squadrons which were created during the next two years.
They also enlisted some civilian pilots. It was their intention to grade
these pilots as non-commissioned officers, but the Admiralty meantime
decided to give commissions to all pilots recruited from the civil
population, which decision forced the hand of the military. Thus, in the
first few days of the war, the question of the rank of pilots was
settled at a blow, and it was not until much later in the war that
non-commissioned officers were again employed as pilots.

A definite scheme for the steady recruitment of expert mechanics, so
many a month, at peace rates of pay, was t