ever at a stay. As soon as a machine was tried and proved,
and the faults of its engine corrected, so that it became comparatively
reliable, a faster German machine appeared. This had a depressing effect
on the pilot, who, though he had been well satisfied with his own
machine, could find no words too bad for it when a German machine left
him standing in the air. After a time a new British machine would
appear, and in its turn would outgo the German. In the meantime the
important thing was to maintain the spirit of the pilot. It was the
wisdom of General Trenchard to know that our success depended upon this.
In his own words, he sacrificed everything to morale. To think only of
dangers and drawbacks, to make much of the points in which the Germans
had attained a fleeting superiority, to lay stress on the imperfections
of our own equipment--all this, he knew, was to invite defeat. Just
before the battles of the Somme, in 1916, a lively agitation of these
matters was carried on by the newspaper press in England. Major Maurice
Baring, in his published diary, has recorded that the results of this
agitation were--not the hastening of one bolt, turnbuckle, or split-pin
(for the factories were fully at work), but a real danger of the spread
of alarm and despondency among the younger members of the Flying Corps
in France. More than any other man, General Trenchard averted this
danger. He put confidence into the pilots. He knew that if their hearts
were not light they would do worse than die; and he fostered in them, by
sympathy, the feelings which make for life and are life. Inferiority in
engines and machines could be remedied in time, inferiority in
resolution and confidence would have been irremediable.

Among the points which were early brought home by the experience of the
war to those who had control of the production of machines, one or two
deserve special mention. The absolute necessity for an efficient
fighting aeroplane was realized, it has been seen, within a month. The
enormous value of artillery observation and the immense superiority of
wireless telegraphy over all earlier and more rudimentary kinds of
signalling were soon demonstrated, and the call for machines fitted with
wireless became insistent. Some of the pilots and some of the equipment
of the wireless section which existed before mobilization had been used
to bring the squadrons of the expeditionary force up to war strength.
The section, though much emacia